In part a paean to a lost era of the great public intellectual, in part an act of public therapy, Chris Lehmann’s Rich People Things is a savage look at contemporary class privilege and its often unwitting apologists. Rich People Things began as an identically-named weekly column that Lehmann wrote for The Awl; in book form it interrogates those features in our common life that obscure the reality of deep class divisions — some intuitive, such as Ayn Rand and the free market, others less so, such as The New York Times and Malcolm Gladwell.

Lehmann is a long time editor at Bookforum and contributor to Harper’s, Raritan, and In These Times. He has also worked for mainstream outlets such as Newsday and, until very recently, Yahoo News. I spoke with him about the beleaguered status of social criticism, the ethics of covering the Republican primaries, and writing in the shadows of the 20th century’s leading public intellectuals

In Rich People Things, you hint at an academic background. Can you elaborate on this?

I went to the University of Rochester in the History graduate program and studied with Christopher Lasch. Rochester was a weird place, at least under Lasch, because it was ill-suited to anyone to actually work in the academy. Lasch did history as a kind of social criticism and pitched it to a general readership, and it turns out that this is a poor model for things like getting tenure. In my class, last I heard anyway, only one of the 16 people who came through has a tenure-track PhD position.

Writers who have spent a lot of time in academia often talk about having to unlearn bad writing habits, such as a tendency to use jargon, when writing for a more general audience. Was this the case for you?

I’m unusual, in that going to graduate school made me a better writer. Lasch urged people to write for a general readership and also is a kind of an obsessive person when it came to writing. He promulgated his own style manual that has since been published as a book called Plain Style, which is really good. [In the program] you would hand these seminar papers in and he would give you a typewritten critique that encompassed everything from dangling clauses and modifiers to ideas and it would be almost as long as the paper itself.

Was it this particular approach to historical writing that attracted you to the program in the first place?

Yeah, it was a program that focused a lot on cultural history and intellectual history, which I was interested in. I came to Lasch initially as a reader. When I read The Culture of Narcissism it changed the way I viewed the world, and I wanted to do work like that.

What sort of tradition do you see yourself working in? Are you following in the footsteps of writers like C. Wright Mills, who saw it as their mission to challenge the power structures in America? Or are there others who you find particularly inspiring?

Historians scorn sociology as a rule, but Mills is a good writer. He belongs to a beleaguered tradition, but in a perfect world you’re supposed to have an independent intellectual perch from which to critique cultural institutions, political developments, events.

But Lasch is another obvious figure, along with Barbara Ehrenreich, whose work I have always admired. Murray Kempton is a great old journalist who I edited briefly when I was at Newsday. I think that there is a long tradition within journalism, specifically, of intellectually engaged writing, but for whatever reason the market for journalism has fragmented in a really strange way — from pressures from online sources, as well as profit pressures and the collapse of longer form outlets. At many of my day jobs I’ve been regarded as a bookish freak because I continue to edit Bookforum alongside other responsibilities; I would get a tidal wave of review copies coming in.

In my world I’m living the dream, but — and I don’t say this in any invidious way — some of my colleagues view that as bizarre. “Why would a person be surrounded by books, and not be tweeting?” So, yeah, I hope that I’ve carried on a tradition that goes back to whomever; Murray Kempton, or A.J. Liebling — not that I would ever equate myself to their stature.

You go after a few sacred cows, like The New York Times. Have people reacted strongly to certain chapters in the book?

The Constitution is this revered document, so that is probably the chapter that I got the most flack about. This is another thing that is a legacy of studying with Christopher Lasch — when I first visited Rochester to consider going there, we were talking about his career and he said, “At some point I really discovered that it is a lot of fun to scandalize people.” That has always stayed with me. It’s true.

That is an odd sensibility for a historian.

It is. As I say, Rochester was an outlier, and God bless it. The idea is like the old Formalist mantra of “making the familiar look unfamiliar.” It still mystifies me that people don’t look at Steve Forbes and Alan Greenspan and collapse into laughter. Obviously, they are idols with clay feet.

In Rich People Things, you describe your work as a “roving one-hit methodology.” Can you say more about how you approached the book and the column?

I sort of randomly fell into writing what was designated a column by my editors. They were just trying to continue to get work out of me for no pay. But it so happened that I wrote it in that first flush of trying to sort out the wake of the financial meltdown, so I never lacked for material. I feel like I wrote the column and ultimately the book because I was trying to figure out in my own head what I wasn’t getting from journalism or from book accounts.

There is this sense, and it continues to be a mystery to me, of how we tolerate extreme inequalities, even now with the debate over Mitt Romney’s role at Bain Capital. There is this reverence for people in the paper economy who have destroyed a lot of jobs, and yet they are regarded as creators of wealth. How does that all fit together? What’s the ideology? It is this sort of bastardized Ayn Rand dogma combined with this idea that people who manipulate financial relationships are initiates to some secret doctrine that can’t be criticized. That is just — talking about C. Wright Mills and others — entirely counter to every instinct I have. I wound up criticizing them because other people weren’t.

So it’s one-hit in the sense that I would have to write a column every Sunday. I would have to sit down and open the New York Times’ Business section, Money Magazine, Fortune, or Forbes — which, God knows, is just a treasure trove.

That’s funny, because all those social critics in the ’50s and ’60s used to write for Fortune.

I know, writers like James Agee and Dwight McDonald. That is itself an interesting moment, where you have sort of self-styled anarchists basically running an influential financial monthly. We are living in the detritus of that world. Those kinds of figures are now severely compartmentalized from each other.

Given the kind of mystification that characterizes most of these publications you just mentioned, I wonder if you think there is a responsible way to cover the Republican primaries? It seems like the very grammar of that race is meant to paper over the issues that you write about.

Essentially, until I quit my day job at Yahoo News, that was a big part of my responsibilities. It’s interesting that stuff like Romney’s role at Bain Capital gets shoehorned into story lines like: “did Gingrich’s Super PAC documentary about Romney score any effective points?” There are calls to “truth squad” and “fact check” the video — and those are worthy journalistic endeavors on their own terms — but there is a larger picture being lost here, which is that Mitt Romney is running very deliberately and obsessively on the idea that his experience in the private sector proves he can repair the broken American economy. There isn’t any — at least not that I’ve seen — non-interested (i.e. non-Gingrich) efforts to size up whether Bain Capital, in that sense, created or sacrificed more jobs.

Also, the question that never gets asked is, “What kind of jobs are these?” ”Are they union jobs?” “Are they skill jobs?” Because the coverage is all personality-driven — caught up in the horse race and all other journalistic clichés — you don’t really focus on the intended end-users, which are American workers. And for American workers — to talk about a lost age — unions no longer play a meaningful role in our politics beyond being a revenue stream for the Democratic Party, so no one is held accountable in any meaningful way. Obviously, the Republicans aren’t ever going to give a shit about anything except raising money, but that’s fine, right? There should be someone or some presence out there saying that even if you are creating jobs, how secure are they and what kind of living do they provide?

One issue mentioned in the book, which you’ve just brought up again, is that there are often glaring questions that go unasked by many journalists. How do you explain this particular pathology of the media class?

I mentioned A.J. Liebling before, and I think he’s a very good example. He made a handsome living at The New Yorker, but he was still living hand-to-mouth because of being saddled with a marriage that was a profound drain on his resources. Yet, in his career as a media critic at the New Yorker he would point out things like, “Publishers are bad actors. They destroy newspapers, they destroy jobs.” Now journalism has become professionalized in a way that a figure like Liebling isn’t really possible. Instead of A.J. Liebling, we have David Brooks and others who are on TV and have separate six-figure contracts to be the television personalities who are driving the policy debate. We have a professionalized class that is very different from the sort of journalism that, for my money, does explain longer-term trends beyond the horse race. So I think it’s a class question.

I also think it’s about the fragmentation that I was talking about earlier, where people just feel like they are continually having to feed this digital beast. Often, journalists just register whatever talking points the campaign puts in front of you. For people who are on the trail, it’s a miserable life. You are being fed information from campaigns and you are not really able to get outside of that bubble if you are tracking a candidate. I often wonder, what is the point of campaign journalism? It’s not clear to me.

In a past interview, you described the original “Rich People Things” column as a form of public therapy. Are you still able to practice this, or have you sought out new strategies?

I’ve had to recalibrate in that I don’t do The Awl column anymore. I do a column for In These Times that often addresses the same subjects and, mysteriously, pays pretty well. But I still definitely try in my writing to work through the things that agitate me and make sense of them. That’s what I hope the next book will be.

Speaking of Romney and such things, I had a cover story in Harper’s a few months back which talked about Mormonism and economics, two of my long-standing obsessions. That was therapeutic, in the sense of me finally attempting to understand the way in which Romney’s free market convictions reflect a deeper religious sensibility, which I think is a big missing piece. American capitalism right now is a set of folk beliefs. You have to understand that they don’t come from rational sources. They come from deeply held convictions that we are going to be — as individual congregants or believers — transported into an earthly paradise of wealth, or what increasingly amounts to the same thing. The account of the rapture in Left Behind and other books are very much a continuation of the consumer culture.

Rich People Things is a very funny book, and you even got some nice words from John Hodgman on the back cover. Did humor naturally lend itself to the material, or was it something that you self-consciously tried to work into these pieces?

Especially when you are not getting paid for your writing, you want to have fun doing it. And I do believe in that H.L. Mencken expression, “the politics of the horselaugh.” When you are describing things that are absurd, you laugh to keep from crying, in a certain way. But I think that beyond my subjective pleasure, it’s important reaching a readership, and humor is a good way to do this. Whatever they may teach at the academy, it is not a sin to want to entertain your reader.

Since Rich People Things was first published, we have seen the growth of the Occupy movement. I’m wondering if it gives you hope that some of the broader issues you write about are gaining a critical purchase on the public imagination? Does it also address the problem of political language that you refer to at the end of Rich People Things?

I do think there is much more awareness. It is very encouraging, and I want to see more. The Occupy movement was smart in not formulating an explicit program, as I’ve said in other interviews. Once you issue a list of demands in the dominant media-political discourse you then get pigeonholed as an interest group. Then it becomes a question of “what do the Occupy people want?” And “will they be satisfied by x?” You saw that even in the media headlines of the Obama birther movement — which was insane — but after the White House released Obama’s long form birth certificate, which in evidentiary ways should close all arguments, the media came back and said, “Will this satisfy the birthers?” That’s not the question. Who the fuck cares? These people are crazy. But that is how everything is kept boxed in, in the way our media culture describes our politics. But when the media asks “will interest group x get what it wants?” The Occupy movement says, “We’re not really an interest group, and we don’t necessarily know what we want yet. We’re just drawing attention to a big problem that no one else was talking about.” It’s a good starting point.

Obviously, the challenge going forward is to figure out what they want, and I do think it is a movement that will at some point need leaders. But who knows? In the jargon of past Left movements, you could say that there will be organic intellectuals that will emerge as people build out these problem areas.

How were you able to balance your work at Bookforum with your work at Yahoo News?

Bookforum is a great operation. I feel very fortunate, in the media culture that we have been describing, that I get to edit and assign long form book reviews and essays.

During my day job I would tell myself that Yahoo has the biggest readership of any news source online, and let’s just say that Bookforum doesn’t. I felt in my brain that the two jobs weirdly complimented each other. I could reach this vast readership at Yahoo, and then do more intellectually-engaging stuff at Bookforum, and stay sane.

In Rich People Things you cover a wide range of topics, from more venerable institutions to reality TV. Did you see a logic emerging for the kinds of subjects you wrote about after doing the column and then putting the book together?

The book is different from The Awl column, in that it’s largely new material. I didn’t have a very deliberate sequence of chapters in mind, but I knew that I’d be writing about serious institutions, like the Supreme Court or the Constitution, alongside more frivolous stuff, like reality TV or Steve Forbes. I deliberately kept myself from partitioning these off from each other, because I wanted the tone to be more conversational. Why wouldn’t you talk about the Supreme Court in one chapter and then Malcolm Gladwell in the next? To me, it makes sense. I felt like I wanted the book to be its own thing, but have the feel of the column.

I’m wondering if the topics covered in Rich People Things are discussed most in places like New York and Washington, where many of these institutions are located.

Oh no, it’s certainly not meant to be that. I come from the Midwest, and think of my sensibility as being rooted there, though it is obviously different from someone like Chuck Grassley. But there is a strong progressive tradition in the heartland.

A good friend of mine, Catherine Tumber, just wrote a great book about small cities and economic revival strategies involving green technologies. There are large swaths of this country that have been consigned to the dustbin and have been trying to recover. They know that the paper economy has done them no favors and they have to create different kinds of economic solutions and institutions that are more responsive. Those are the conversations that are interesting to me and will bubble up, much like the Occupy movement, into something — I don’t know what.

Was American populism the topic of your unwritten dissertation?

I’ve always been interested in populism, but my dissertation was going to be on religion and the professional innovation of evangelism in the 20th century — which, weirdly, I think is what my next book will take up, in part.

Our core beliefs about economic life are not rational; I believe they have religious content that demands some scrutiny. The history of reform in the early American republic is a history of revivalism. You can argue that the civil rights movement, too, lies in the revivalism of the black church. It’s very interesting that revivalism has gone completely — well, not completely, because it’s obviously involved in the conservative wing of the culture wars — but the tradition of Protestant reform is largely dead. To me, it’s an interesting story — how that has happened and why. Even though there are religious features to the way we think about economic life, there is no sense that these realms should have anything to do with each other.

You’re in a band called The Charm Offensive. Is this another side of your work as a social critic?

I was very much influenced by punk rock and politically-minded bands like the Minutemen. My lead guitarist used to be in Ian MacKaye’s first band, Teen Idol. I like Fugazi, but I’m not of the D.C. hardcore scene, by any means. My stuff is more poppy.

It is the only coherent ambition I ever formed in my young adulthood that has stayed with me. Though becoming a rock star never panned out, I keep going at it. But I write a lot of break-up songs, so it’s not economic.

[University of Virginia Press; 2012]

Many recent philosophical debates about the locus of human agency have turned on very large issues: for instance, does secularism free up the possibility to be the true authors of our lives, or does the disappearance of religion render our actions more or less meaningless (in any rich sense)?

Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelley’s All Things Shining and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age give a broad diagnosis of this condition and venture two competing answers. Has the reign of the commodity, refined by technology, turned us into bundles of manufactured desires seeking fulfillment? Or should we embrace the new opportunities technology affords us in a “post-human” age? Both sides of this debate significantly broaden the more technical question of how we understand the actions of others and ourselves, adding to it a complicating historical component, giving the question an added gravity.

In two recent books Robert Pippin has offered a compelling and unique contribution to this philosophical project through the seemingly modest path of examining two genres that flourished in mid-20th century American film: the Western and film noir. “Westerns,” Pippin writes in Fatalism in American Film Noir, “adopt a mythic style of narration appropriate to founding narratives, presenting us with questions about the possibility of law, often the question of the psychological possibility of allegiance to law, in prelaw situations.” Noirs on the other hand “concern something like ‘the other side’ of the mythological coin, human life under conditions of corrupt or decaying or incompetent law, the postlaw world of disillusionment one might say.”

That these genres tracked one another (mixing for example in the character of Holly Martins, a writer of Westerns, in Carol Reed’s noir classic The Third Man) is an interesting topic for another discussion, but Pippin is very clear that his focus is on the philosophical question of agency. He writes that “in the best noirs we are presented not merely with a form of life shadowed, as a matter of historical fact, by a growing, shared, heightened sense of fatalism and alienation, but what we see is, in effect, a partially worked out picture of what it would be to live in such a world.”

The notion of agency that Pippin wants to trouble through his “cinematic philosophy” is what he calls the “reflective model.” In this model, our actions are “inwardly directed,” which is to say that when we act it is on the basis of a process of reflection and control, during which “we more or less know what we are about” (to borrow a representative stylistic flourish from analytic philosophy). Variants of the reflective model that run through the Western cannon include Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche, and many of our intuitions about self-knowledge or how we determine moral responsibility will line up with this view of agency. We are not likely to broaden our appeals to fate anytime soon, nor are we going to malign a model of deliberative planning.

Yet Pippin is quite convincing in arguing that the characters we meet in film noirs, and the kinds of actions that we witness them performing, are not well served by the reflective model of agency. In a typical noir we get people acting without a clear sense of “what they are about.” Major characters initiate sequences that end in their own deaths, act contrary to basic facts that characters may or may not know about, or are surrounded by a field of unreliable agents (such as the notorious femme fatale).

This is interesting not because it confirms the post-WWII historical moment of American fatalism or gives more firepower to a psychoanalytic reading of film noir (already one of the more common forms of criticism when issues of agency are being discussed). Rather, in the three core chapters of the book — discussing the role of personal history in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, the “intentional fool” in Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai, and the atmosphere of mass-deception in consumer societies in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street — Pippin demonstrates the significant blind spots that mar popular conceptions of agency and begins to develop a vocabulary to fill in these gaps.

The goal is clearly normative at some level: “No theory of agency that does not acknowledge this historical variability [of the relationship between intention and responsibility] from the outset seems to me to have much credibility.” Given our recent history, an attempt to develop a theory of agency that probes behaviors like risk-taking and gambling is a welcome philosophical exercise.

Fatalism in American Film Noir is enjoyable on a number of levels. Pippin is justified in calling it a piece of cinematic philosophy (as opposed to philosophy of cinema) because it uses the grammar of these films to do some original philosophical work on their own terms. Some might be skeptical about turning the philosophical exploration of agency over to popular films, but why are these scenarios necessarily worse than the beloved thought experiments that usually underwrite the reflective model? Furthermore, Pippin avoids the reductionist tendencies of much cultural criticism (of the cultural studies sort), or the kind of psychoanalytic read that these films often get. It is true that he is highly associative at times, and the parenthetical statements pile up as the work goes on. But this is mostly a way to capture the complexity of the notoriously complicated plotlines of noirs, as well as a way to capture insights from the films without slowing down the analysis that is reliant to some extent on the unique philosophical work that cinema can do.

Film noir is an interesting genre. Pippin relates the story of how it got its name: French critics were surprised by the noticeably dark turn that American films had taken after the two countries reestablished contact post-WWII, and compared the films to the French série noire crime novels. The influence of these films in France was worked through by both critics and filmmakers, leading to the masterful post-war policiers of Jean-Pierre Melville and eventually inspiring the Nouvelle Vague. Film noir is also interesting for the forms of life that it puts on display, a strange admixture of contemptible and compelling qualities residing in a single character. I find them appealing for reasons that are often very difficult to pin down.

Terse philosophical debates about the nature of agency can be significantly less interesting, so it is to Pippin’s great credit that he can enliven topics like whether action is best described by a voluntarist or a compatibalist framework. He ends the book invoking Bernard Williams’ claim that “in important ways, we are, in our ethical situation more like human beings in antiquity than any Western people have been in the meantime.” By this Williams was referring to our declining faith in the core precepts of post-enlightenment humanism and a growing acknowledgment of our tragic limitations. If this is the case, then Pippin is putting forward what in his mind is an appropriate “modern aesthetic” capable of a similar kind of illumination that we get from returning to the tragic poets.

This is a bold proposal, but to my mind a welcome contribution to the broad discussions about human agency that we should be having today.

Alberto Toscano is active on many fronts: he’s a lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London; a writer of books such as Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea and The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuality between Kant and Deleuze; the translator of the French philosopher Alain Badiou; editor of the journal Historical Materialism; and occasional contributor to The Guardian and several journals of art and cultural criticism. His forthcoming book Cartographies of the Absolute, co-written with Jeff Kinkle, promises to be a significant contribution to the analysis of contemporary movements in capitalism. Toscano took time to discuss the motivation behind his recent work, the stakes of protests over the direction of higher education, and the liberation that comes with thinking past la pensée 68.

Michael Schapira: What are you up to in the new book and how did the partnership with Jeff Kinkle come about? Were you approached by the people at Zero Books, or did it seem like a natural home for book?

Alberto Toscano: The aim of the book is to provide a critical survey and a series of reflections on the proliferation of works in the visual arts, film and literature which seek — more or less explicitly — to tackle the representation of contemporary capitalism. More than a certain political turn in the arts, which has received copious if uneven commentary, we want to think about those works which try to “totalise” our current conditions, to thematize those facets of social existence which are particularly symptomatic of the trends and tensions in today’s political economy: financial markets, logistical complexes, commodity chains, and so on. The project can be thought of as a kind of stock-taking, a quarter of a century on, of Fredric Jameson’s proposal regarding an aesthetic that would respond to “the desire called cognitive mapping.” This is a desire for figurations of a system of compulsion and constraint that is ordinarily “invisible,”, yet all the more consequential and anxiety-inducing for all that. The collaboration with Jeff grew out of discussions about conspiracy theory as ‘the poor man’s cognitive mapping’ — another formulation of Jameson — in the context of his doctoral work on the current relevance of the work of Guy Debord.

We ended up collaborating on an article about The Wire,, detailing how much of its draw derived from the way in which it put the question of representing capital on the agenda — in particular in terms of the blockages that bar the way to understanding and challenging structures of violence and dispossession. The leitmotiv of “following the money” in the show testifies to this. If we reflect on the figure of the detective, Lester Freamon, we can see both the show’s sensitivity to webs of seemingly abstract, invisible and impersonal constraint, as well as all the problems involved in displacing the desire for cognitive mapping onto the subject of the police (an all too familiar tendency). On the basis of that piece, published online in Dossier, we decided that it would be good to pursue an ampler project, getting to grips with the common drives and shared impasses that we detected in a wide variety of works and domains of cultural production — from the recent novels of DeLillo and Gibson to the photography of manufactured landscapes, from artistic practices of cartography to narratives of urban crisis and dispossession.

Along the way we produced, for the journal Film Quarterly, a critical survey of cinematic responses to the ongoing economic crisis which rehearses some of the book’s approaches. The existence of the Zero imprint was one of the stimuli behind the project, as we knew it allowed for a shorter format, complete authorial freedom, and reflected a commitment to theoretical interventions that needn’t make concessions either to academic formats or to condescending “popularisation.” I’ve known the editors at Zero, especially Mark Fisher, for some time, so it was natural to approach them.

Cartographies of the Absolute is also the title of a blog. The relationship between the blog and the book is becoming a more complex one, as evidenced for example by Lars Iyer‘s novels or even Zero Books’ biggest seller, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, which grew out of writings on his K Punk blog. What kinds of advantages do you see to tightening this relationship verses a more traditional approach to writing a book like Fanaticism?  

For us, the blog is really just an episodic notebook where to collect images, quotes and passing observations that may, or may not, make it into the book. I haven’t checked but I doubt it is read by many people at all, and we haven’t really done anything to publicise it. So it’s an entirely different entity than K-Punk. In that sense, it hasn’t personally affected how I go about writing, and the differences between Cartographies and Fanaticism are differences of theme and register, not medium: the difference between writing a kind of genealogy of the contemporary entanglements of politics and religion versus co-writing an essay on art, aesthetics, and capital.

Fanaticism was the history of a familiar concept, or at least the causes to which it was put in service of. Cartographies of the Absolute suggests something different, namely the generation of some new concepts to help us navigate a set of pressing contemporary questions. Why the turn towards cartography, which generates a less immediate set of associations than fanaticism?

The title — which we lifted from a characteristic spatialisation of Hegel in the preface to Jameson’s Geopolitical Aesthetic— is there to signal the peculiar conundrum, or even paradox, of talking about the representation of capital, rather than ultimately to assert the significance of cartography as a practice or metaphor (in a Heideggerian pastiche we could say that the essence of cartography is not cartographic…). If, by way of a risky homology, we treat capital as a kind of absolute, then it is something which, though it continuously calls for mapping, is fundamentally inimical to being contained and comprehended in a single overview. A contradictory totality, shifting in time and uneven in space, defies being embraced in a vision, or indeed known by a subject. This is why desire and failure are such recurring themes when one broaches the question of figuring a social and historical whole. That said, it is perfectly possible to make judgments — epistemic, aesthetic, political — distinguishing bad maps from good. Mystifying or kitsch totalisation — like the ones offered by the trend for melodramas of globalised finitude (from Babel to Mammoth, titles that are themselves indicative….) — can be set apart from the kind of dialectical optics, from Eisenstein to Allan Sekula, that folds formal and political reflection on problems of representation into its own representational practice.

You’ve been very involved in university politics at a number of levels, so I want to ask a few related questions. You are one of a number of thinkers who have attempted to theorize student protests, the conditions of academic labor in the wake of both austerity measures and the dominance of a managerial ethos in higher education, and the status of the humanities in the university. What are some of your major takeaways from the closure of the Middlesex philosophy department and the uptick in student protests in December of 2010? How have these events been a spur for your thinking more generally?

I would qualify “very involved.”. I take part in branch activities of my union, participate in strikes, have spoken at some anti-cuts conferences — but this is nothing more than what hundreds of other lecturers, staff and students do, and certainly much less than what key organisers of the anti-austerity movement have been doing. My kind of activity should be a basic minimum. I find the widespread tendency for people to refer to themselves as activists just because they go to demonstrations and join pickets to be a little unsavoury. As you say, I have tried to contribute to a collective reflection on how the mutation of the university is connected to shifts in the framing of work, and what this may entail for political action. These are occasional reflections though — there are many people out there, and some of them very sharp, who have devoted much more of their time and writing to these questions.

The Middlesex closure was a further indication of the brazen mediocrity and cavalier anti-intellectualism that defines much university management today. The failure of the international campaign against the closure (which made it all the way to BBC World…) signalled that — in the absence of concerted action at a local and national level (sadly lacking in this case) — questions of intellectual worth and “the idea of the university” are entirely powerless in most cases to interfere with instrumental managerial rationality, all the more so as the government rolls out “reforms” aimed at formatting the whole sector in terms of (brutally indebted) student-customers and service-providers (lecturers and staff) under enduring threat of precarity or redundancy.

In terms of a spur to thinking, I suppose it’s made me conscious of the enormous gap between speculative discussions of political subjectivity and the like, on the one hand, and the maddening passivity and disorganisation of comparatively privileged people, on the other. For all of the inspiring dimensions of the student response and some of the union organising against austerity, it remains dangerously insufficient at present to counter the ongoing degradation of what we are instructed to call “the student experience.” Divide et impera — by audit culture, competition, job threats, etc. — is still a very effective inhibitor against action. The glum note here is also an effect of the rolling out of the new debt regime, the repression of student protests and the ebb in resistance, but it’s perfectly possible that we’ll see a new, and different, “uptick.” I think that the student strikes in Quebec (and the ongoing mobilisations in Chile, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere) hold quite a few lessons in this regard.

There seem to be two key fronts in UK higher education politics. The first, reflected mostly in the student protests, is the defense of higher education as a public good. The second, reflected mainly in faculty politics, is the resistance to what Mark Fisher has called the “market Stalinism” of university bureaucracies (e.g. the RAE and REF). Do you see these as two different issues, or have you seen strong alliances between students and faculty (especially on the resistance to managerialism)?

This is a moment which is in many regards one of ebb and fragmentation, hopefully of a temporary sort, in the wake of the enactment of the marketizing measures that had instigated the initial protests, so it is difficult to speak of “strong alliances” or indeed “fronts,” which is not to say that there haven’t been hopeful developments over the past couple of years, or moments of oppositional convergence worth prolonging (instances of serious faculty support for occupations, or solidarity occupations by students in conjunction with faculty strikes). At long last, my union (the University and Colleges Union) has begun to take steps against the managerial and marketing instruments — like the REF or, more significantly in my view, the National Student Survey — which, in these times of imposed austerity, are being used as disciplinary devices against staff, and as sops to students who are being enjoined to fully assume their status as (dissatisfied) customers.

To the extent that these “market-Stalinist” practices, to employ Fisher’s wry formulation, serve to erode residual conceptions of the public or the common, to mould and frame the student-faculty relation in commoditised terms, and, above all, to engineer a further exclusionary, competitive stratification of the sector, these are indeed two closely related dimension of the mutations in UK academia. But it is crucial not to underestimate the extent to which they are mechanisms which entangle and integrate the very people who may oppose them. A student in thousands of pounds of debt is all too likely to engage with their lecturers as service-providers, in the absence of countervailing tendencies. A lecturer may object to the REF in principle but then realise that continued receipt of a wage, or a certain status in their department or profession, depends on their previous positive scores in these and other such audits. So we continue to measure ourselves for their cuts until (and some gestures of the union, like the proposed boycott of the NSS go in this direction) we can establish collective platforms of action. The strength of these mechanisms lies not just in the alluring simulacra of choice and individual achievement, but in the fact that once in place, it takes formidable energy to reform or abolish them.

This spring you were in the US giving some talks. Based on your conversations, do you see any key differences and overlaps between the politics of higher education in the US and the UK? For example, students in both countries have used the strategy of occupation, but are there interesting differences in strategy that you have noticed?

In both, and across other societies, too, the universities are caught up in a broader impasse — which is attaining quantitatively staggering proportions, with student debt in the US around $1 trillion — affecting the reproduction of social relations under conditions of continued capital accumulation. The asset-stripping, marketisation and financialisation of health and education, and of public services more broadly, are a clear and present marker of this.

So, though more “advanced” and differently configured (culturally and economically) than England (the Scottish situation is quite different), the experience of “generation debt”features considerable similarities. England may have a residual attachment to universities as a public good, but this shouldn’t lead to the misconception that English universities are public while the ones in the US are private: English universities are charities of different kinds, not state institutions as in much of Europe, and some of the most intense struggles in the US, as in California, have been in a system of state education.

That said, there are enough critical convergences in England, the US and beyond (Chile, Canada, etc.), as to make this quite a singular moment in terms of student politics at a world scale — one that is much more intensely tied to the material conditions of social reproduction than previous moments, where the analogies in objects and forms of struggle are based on responding to remarkably homogenous strategies by many ruling classes across the globe. This might make it possible to think of the relation between objective predicaments and strategies in a different mode from the romanticism that has often been attached to student movements (or, vice versa, without their dismissal as merely “cultural” or “psychological” in kind).

Warwick University has produced a new generation of theorists (yourself, Nina Power, Mark Fisher) who have been able to reach a broad audience, whether through blogging, public speaking, or writing in a variety of media outlets. What was it about this particular philosophy department that shaped the kinds of thinkers who came out of it?

I would be quite wary of generalising to some kind of “Warwick moment” or “Warwick generation.” While I can’t gauge its shaping influence — the work that I did there as a doctoral student, which ended up as my first book, is pretty distant from my current preoccupations — I think what proved a real stimulus was the presence of a community of graduate students sharing a passion for theoretical work and a polemical dissatisfaction with the nostrums of “Continental Philosophy,” often under the guise of a quite speculative reference to philosophical materialism. What I now find very distant in that scene — the neglect or even disdain for history, political economy, social science (despite or because of an attachment to Deleuze and Guattari’s sui generis endorsement of Marx) — was I suppose also a precondition of what made it intellectually exciting and challenging: a kind of collective isolation, which for instance made possible interminable reading groups, which sometimes would degenerate into shouting matches about Spinoza’s infinite modes, or what have you. The experience of producing the journal Pli was very important too, as an autonomous space in which to try to shape the direction in which we thought the discipline should go (it was in the context of Pli that I started translating Badiou).

On the topic of Warwick, I’ve been told by a graduate to ask about Nick Land. Where does he fit into this picture?

He’d left by the time I arrived, so despite having been privy to numerous tales of his time there — humorous, horrified, hagiographic — I can’t really say, except to note that I suppose for a number of people who went on to do work with little connection to his own, he signalled some kind of break-out from the pieties of Anglophone “Continental Philosophy,” and the idea that theory could be a domain of experimentation rather than repetition. From my peripheral acquaintance with his writings they seem to share in the pitfalls of a kind of enthusiastic anti-humanism, which calls for the obliteration of the phenomenological subject, but nevertheless wants to be there to enjoy it. The rhetoric of intensity is in the end rather stultifying, and it also seems to rely on the dubious postulate that one could experience the deterritorialising force of capital, and that, to again pastiche Heidegger, the essence of capitalism is not capitalist. Alas, stripping Capitalism and Schizophrenia of its residual (and admittedly inconsistent) humanism — which seems to me to have been one of Land’s hobbyhorses — risks ending up with a kind of poetry of creative destruction, and with the attendant discovery that capital is in the final analysis profoundly, if destructively, prosaic. (Incidentally, there’s a droll vantage on Land’s time at Warwick in an old article by the music critic Simon Reynolds on the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit..

It may not be a majority of people in humanities departments, but in general it seems like British academics are more receptive today to French theorists like Alain Badiou, Henri Lefebvre, or even Jacques Derrida. Am I right in having this impression? And if so, what do you think has brought about this change?

The reception of French philosophers and theorists in the British academy has a long history, some of it entangled with the much more substantial academic — and to some extent para-academic — fate of that peculiar beast which is “French Theory” in the US (on which one can usefully consult François Cusset’s eponymous volume. It is a tale which, however marginal, is rich in conflicts and ambiguities, from the enduring effects of an empiricist or analytical suspicion for the literary and rhetorical character of speculative efforts from across the channel, to the way in which Marxism and a French “post-structuralism” were pitted against one another in the humanities and social sciences — without forgetting the ways in which Edmund Burke’s protestations against revolutionary Parisian abstractions continue to resonate with a certain strain of British anti-intellectualism.

Conversely, one could explore the often staggering neglect of much Anglo-American social theory and history in France, where the likes of Harvey and Jameson are only being translated now. A number of episodes and “affairs” punctuate this fraught relation — take EP Thompson’s polemic against Althusser in The Poverty of Theory (with its repercussions on the theoretical rifts in the British left), or the polemic around Derrida’s honorary degree at Cambridge University. While the work of some British-based writers, academic publishing (journals and series dedicated to Deleuze, Baudrillard, etc., in a weird kind of cottage industry.), or art-world discussions may give one the impression that French philosophy has a wide reception, I think this would need to be seriously qualified, since a vast swathe of established philosophy and the social science departments and outlets in Britain are still pretty hostile (or indifferent) to this kind of work.

In a phenomenon that partly replicates the US, it is also true that the reception is often in disciplinarily “eccentric” venues – while a PhD on Wittgenstein or Davidson can probably be undertaken in most UK philosophy departments, less than a handful would take on one on Badiou or Derrida. But I think it is also time to take one’s distance from such shaky shorthand constructions as “French theory” or “French thought”: the long wave of la pensée 68 is drawing to a close, and though some of it remains a resource and an inspiration, I think we can also move beyond the repetitious attachment to debates and formulations whose moment passed some years back (this can also allow us partially to disaggregate the reception of someone like Lefebvre, linked to the fortunate crystallisation of Marxist geography in areas of Anglophone academia, to the vicissitudes of ‘Continental Philosophy’, or the more political impulses behind Badiou’s recent fame).

[Other Press; 2012]

Tr. from German by Michael Hofmann

We’re Flying, an excellent new collection of short stories by the Swiss writer Peter Stamm, is the author’s eighth book to appear in English. As with Stamm’s previous works, it is the poet and essayist Michael Hofmann who handles the translation, a task I imagine to be both more complex and more straightforward than Hofmann’s other translation projects (Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Thomas Bernhard). This is because Stamm is one of the leading new voices from Europe, but his sharp and unadorned prose is very different from what we might usually expect from contemporary European fiction. There are no winding sentences, no high modernist conceits, no long disquisitions on Nietzsche or Nicholas of Cusa, and little trace of the towering figures of Central European fiction (Kafka, Heinrich Von Kleist, Robert Walser). Stylistically the stories are closer to an American writer like Raymond Carver.

Yet in the subtle unfolding of psychological dramas both grand and everyday, and in the way tradition weighs on the present, Stamm does bring the gravity we (or at least I) associate with serious modern European fiction. It is both a testament to Stamm’s use of the short story medium and Hofmann’s capacities as a translator that these two elements — the psychological drama of everyday life and broad philosophical themes of the European tradition — are seamlessly held together.

The protagonists of We’re Flying represent a pretty wide swath of contemporary Swiss society. The collection includes two standout stories concerning village priests whose faith is stretched in different directions. In “Children of God” Michael, deeply suspicious of the many “Communist” village folk shrinking the ranks of his congregation and undermining the conditions of belief, learns of an alleged immaculate conception by a waitress named Mandy. At first Michael is skeptical, but soon he is convinced that Mandy is telling the truth and develops a kind of love for her.

Michael’s new devotion is a compromised and highly idiosyncratic version of faith (some would call it sinful), but one that surprisingly establishes a shared space for Communists and believers to participate in Mandy’s pregnancy. This is not a cheap reinsertion of something transcendent into our thoroughly secularized world to show a community ultimately based in Judeo-Christian belief. Indeed, in “Holy Sacrament” a priest reaches the opposite conclusion after stepping up to the pulpit and realizing that not a single person has shown up to Communion.

Like many of the stories in We’re Flying, the truth or falsity of what people believe is not the issue in these two stories, nor is there a tidy, moralistic conclusion. Stamm is much more interested in showing what it looks like when people take an action to try to break out of their malaise. Sometimes this brings them some clarity, but this is more often than not a temporary condition, and they are simply graduating to some new state of perplexity.

Most of the stories in We’re Flying depict more quotidian anxieties than a crisis of faith. In “Sweet Dreams” (which appeared in the New Yorker), a young woman is trying to adjust to “adult life” after moving in with her boyfriend. Small decisions like buying a corkscrew become magnified and she begins to see threats all around to her fledgling attempts to build a home.

In “Seven Sleepers,” an austere farmer named Alfons agrees to turn over some of his land for a rock concert. He becomes interested in one of the organizers, a teacher named Lydia. “She was no beauty, she was small and stoutish, her hair was cut very short, and she had bad acne on her face. But she had a nice way with her, and her voice was beautiful and warm.” Lydia ends up at Alfons’s house, and we see how little space he has left in his life for meaningful human connection. In both stories Stamm is able to sketch out the limits of these people’s worlds, or we see what happens when the world starts to press in on them in certain ways. Alfons’s struggle to work against his isolationist habits in small gestures like lending Lydia a dry t-shirt is riveting drama.

Another strength of the collection is the inclusion of stories of people in indeterminate conditions, looking back at their foreclosed futures as artists, explorers, naturalists, or romantics. “The Hurt” ends in an apocalyptic flourish when the narrator realizes that a life deferred for his childhood love has dead-ended with his beloved working at a bar with a “good vibe” and involved with a ski bum named Elio. There is little space to carry their commitments through to the end, but like a good Beckett character these people must go on nonetheless.

It is difficult not to find yourself in many of these stories (it helps that Stamm splits the narrators pretty evenly across genders and social positions . . . save minorities, but this is a reflection of the fairly homogenous Swiss locales in which the stories are set).  A lot of labor clearly went into the crafting of We’re Flying — economy is a difficult skill these days. The result is an effortless accumulation of small gestures that furnish the spaces in which the understanding of ourselves and others becomes possible, albeit in a fleeting manner.

In Four New Messages Joshua Cohen set out to write “a series of fables about life online.” The resulting stories span a wide geographical and narrative terrain, from the drug-fueled parties of Princeton to the fabular origins of Slavic literature. The opening story, “Emission,” was awarded a Pushcart Prize and even inspired a short film. The collection builds upon a growing body of work (Witz, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto) that has generated comparisons to Wallace, Pynchon (Cohen as erudite and often funny American writer of postwar period) and Bernard Malamud (Cohen as erudite Jewish-American writer of the postwar period).

I sat down with Cohen in his New York City apartment to discuss the process of writing about the internet, his formative years as a journalist in Eastern Europe, and the deep familial roots of his writing habits.

Michael Schapira: You recently taught for the first time in a creative writing program, but in “The College Borough” none of the students are counseled to become writers. Was the story written before this experience, or was this advice based on some previous experiences in college writing courses?

Joshua Cohen: I wrote it while teaching. I’d be depressed if any of my students recognized themselves in it, in a one to one correspondence, say, but at the same time to spare them how I felt would be disingenuous. It can be a wasting thing, teaching writing, especially when I’m not allowed to teach reading or literature alongside it.

Because you don’t have the necessary academic credentials?

Because I don’t have the PhD. Then again, there are how many people loitering within ten blocks of here with a PhD in literature, more accredited to teach it than I am? But there was literally no way for me to teach literature. Faculty, even students, would complain that I was encroaching on other people’s territory.

Was dealing with administration the most shocking part of it? I’ve been reading about the rise of these stultifying bureaucracies and they’d be unrecognizable both to those who left the university 50 years ago and those who left 10 years ago.

No, the worst part was realizing the autophagy involved. The idea is that you get an MFA in order to teach the MFA — it’s the only way you’re going to support yourself. That, to me, is insane. You launch yourself with the publication of a book, or of journalism, but these become anomalies in a career that began in the university and will end in the university. This seems to be the goal of many MFA students, and in their defense this is because they’ve been told repeatedly just how few possibilities there are outside academe — though it has to be said, these tellings are true, and they should be true.

Did you find a similar thing with journalism, where people would come in with a certain expectation of being able to lead a kind of lifestyle and then becoming disillusioned? Both journalism and universities call for a buy-in that has become more tenuous in their current forms.

The journalism experience [as a reporter in Central and Eastern Europe] made me, against all odds, a crypto-Reaganite — I’m joking, but the truth is, my politics have become zero-sum — the politics of an emergency. In journalism, you have to produce. You can be in an MFA program for x number of terms and you’ll be passed through — “your thesis” (AKA “your book”) will be passed, no matter what. But to slack on a deadline will elicit the ultimate market response. There’s no coddling in that regard. That was useful for me as a writer.

Many people ask you about your writing habits, or are interested in the fact that you produce a lot of things. Is this just a habit that you built up freelancing?

Maybe. The healthy psychological answer — or the completely unhealthy — would be to point to the fear conditioned from having to support myself as a journalist from the age of 20. But that type of fear might also be genetic. My father works compulsively, my uncle works obsessively, and my grandfather basically lived at his dock. My aunt once made a documentary about my grandfather — actually it’s in the collection at MoMA — called Joe and Maxi. He plays this wonderfully telling scene where it’s very late at night and his children are keeping him awake. “Gotta go to sleep, gotta wake up,” he says, like he’s interested in the shortest possible interval of unconsciousness. For better or worse, I’ve inherited that.

What kind of stories were you reporting on during your time in Europe? Did you have an extensive background in Central and Eastern European history before going over?

A certain amount. However much you can learn from reading books and taking European history classes. But no one was teaching recent Soviet or Eastern Bloc history on the undergraduate level when I was in college [1998-2001].

Recent as in post fall of the wall?

I don’t know how many classes are offered today about the period of the ’60s and ’70s, after the Hungarian revolution and the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. I have the sense that most European history educations end with the War — I certainly grew up in a house that gave me enough of an education about the Second War — so filling the gap between that and the Wall was largely literature, a wall of books, the best of which had been published in samizdat.

I was reporting on events of Jewish interest. I spoke Hebrew, which didn’t help, because everybody spoke English. My German got better. I picked up some Czech, some Slovak, Polish, but none of these were prerequisites, none were qualifications. I think my only qualifications were that I was willing to work for very little money, and to take very long unheated trains in winter.

This was the time when a lot of foreign correspondents were being fired or bought out in favor of local writers who used to be fixers, translators, guides, but had developed their English proficiency enough to report. You’d be reading more Polish bylines in American newspapers. But my English was native and, again, I was willing to work for a local salary, piss and crap through holes.

And it was enough to support yourself?

Barely. I had to take on a lot of other freelance work, and was drinking too much too.

What were the Russian or Central European figures that attracted you? The comparisons I always see with you are to Pynchon and Wallace, two postwar American figures. But you spent a lot of time writing in Europe. When I think about European fiction I think about these towering Central European writers like Kafka, Von Kleist, or Thomas Mann.

Pynchon was important to me in my late teens and early twenties, just like all the writers of that generation were — they’re shocking to read for the first time, I think for anyone. But it wasn’t the same for Wallace. It’s enough with Wallace. The comparison is cheap. If he hadn’t hanged himself no one would be saying that my books are related to his in any certain way. I understand the pressures of journalism and having to TK a characterization or whatever, but Infinite Jest came out in 1996. I was 15, 16 years old. I certainly didn’t read it then. I didn’t know the writers of the ’80s that that he was rebelling against — the Raymond Carvers and Ann Beatties — so his work didn’t seem to me like a rebellion — not Infinite Jest, and certainly not the essays, which always seemed, by contrast, too limited, too controlled. He also hated irony, but the irony he hated was a televisual irony, whereas the irony I was interested in was a tradition of humor that predates the sitcom.

It was always, for me, Jewish writers. I grew up in an observant home. I went to a school where we had Torah class, we had Nach, Talmud, Gemara. Books were the secularizing force. Kafka was important, sure, but the most important would be the Russians. All the Russians. I know he’s not Eastern, but Bernhard was a revelation; Sebald too. All throughout I read these Central and Eastern European writers as cohorts of the Israeli writers I loved, and of Roth and Bellow too.

When you read someone like Sebald you recognize that this is very serious writing, and I tend to associate it with a certain kind of high European literature. It’s very serious, it’s very engaged with ideas, history, very interested in a kind of territory that I can’t help but romanticize. 

Sure, but there’s a major generational break between the Hermann Brochs, or the Robert Musils, or the Manns of the world, and people like Hrabal and Kiš who wrote very short, very funny. It’s not just a chronological or even a cultural shift — rather a shift in the entire history of the book. From doorstops to crowbars, say. When it comes to the Russians I’ve always loved Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but I also love these smaller books by Nabokov like Glory, which is more important to me than Anna Karenina and War and Peace combined.

Is Nabokov a bridge figure between these two eras?

I don’t know if he’s a bridge. If you’re hoping to link the large novel of Central Europe and the large novel of postwar America I think Thomas Mann’s a much brighter prospect. He’s writing like it’s the late 19th century, but it’s the middle 20th. He’s working at such a Spenglerian point of decay that he’s aware of all the effects of which fiction is, or was, capable, and I think it’s that awareness of those effects that translated to America.

Forget the books that everyone reads. Think of the Joseph cycle, a thousand-page retelling of the Bible. It’s essentially a nonfiction pastiche where he’s pointing at every little symbol with this long, hairy finger saying, “consider this — this is a symbol.” It’s almost like he’s inventing the theory for his own book, and, as in critical theory, considering things so closely that they dissolve.

There are URLs in the back of Four Messages, one for every story. Are you working from these links as an image of sorts, out of which you construct the narrative?

No, everything with the exception of the last link came after. The last link is to a site that’s basically the IMDB.com of porn, and it leads to a page for a guy whose production company I worked for, doing translations, when I lived abroad. He’s the model for “the friend,” in “Sent.” But the entire conception of the book was to write a set of exemplary tales about the internet. A set of cautionary tales hearkening back to the oldest literature, which is an inscription or proscription saying, “stop!” or “don’t do this!” I had the idea that it’d be interesting to write a series of fables, but not necessarily in a fabular style, about life online. I wanted to show people whose lives had been changed, even ruined, either by the actual technology, or by these ideas of replication and dissemination.

You left to work in Europe immediately after graduating college. College comes up quite a bit in Four Messages, but doesn’t come off in a very positive light. In “Emission” it’s not a place of culture, but rather a market for this cocaine dealer. Was your experience with college negative, to the point where you don’t romanticize it as a refuge of culture and learning?

My experience of all education has been traumatic, more or less. Maybe it was that I always disliked authority and teachers, or the rigidity of school. Also, I like the idea of the cusp — I didn’t want to begin my stories on a Wednesday. We don’t really have that many rights of passage or clear demarcations of ascent to maturity in America. College struck me as one of them, as really the great rite of passage for two, three, maybe even four generations of Americans now. It’s a formal break from which characters can form themselves, in a Bildungsroman way.

Europe is a different figure that crops up in two of the stories. Again, it’s not romanticized in ways that if often can be. People seem go there either to escape something or to start something after dead-ending in the U.S. When you went to Europe after college, was it a place to go out into the world to form yourself in this Bildungsroman way, or was there some other motivation?

I didn’t know what my purpose was for going there, beyond that it seemed like reporting from there was a more interesting job than anything I could scrounge up in New York. But certainly there was an element of wanting to see where a lot of my relatives had lived, to see if there were any remnants of how they’d lived.

Thinking about it now, I’d say that another idea was to find the sources of my culture. People from all over America come to New York because there’s theater and such and it all seems more intellectual and artistic than anywhere else. You can go hear a concert or visit a gallery, which I certainly did as a child. But for me it seemed like all of my cultural products, you could say, came from another time, and certainly another place.

In another sense it was like going to Israel for the first time. It was like going to a place where the language I spoke in school was the language people were speaking on the street, but because it was a language that had a street, there were words the rabbis didn’t teach me. I had to relearn. You go to the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, and it’s totally foreign. Then you meet this one Palestinian sitting by the Dung Gate who sits there every day and spits sunflower seeds. That’s where he sits — which is probably the most valid historical justification for anyone being anywhere ever — he is there everyday. He abides.

Sure, you want to see how this history lives forward and changes in the present. I had sort of the opposite experience during my trip to Israel. At a certain point, say when I was 12, my family became concerned about my secular upbringing and we went over to Israel for me to get Bar Mitzvahed. I learned my portion phonetically, we rented a Torah from a Torah rental place, hiked up Mount Masada, and I had the ceremony in a little temple space that was also rented. I think the idea was that once I was up there surrounded by this history I would feel a connection with Judaism and its history, but, strangely, none of this occurred.

Sure, that reconnection is what the Ministry of Tourism wants. But I think it’s actually not that strange. It would be much stranger to feel a connection. What can you have, or feel, in common with a Bar Kochba — with a gang of total zealots out on the top of a mountain, starving themselves, martyring themselves and their families only so as not to die by the swords of the Romans? To develop that sort of sentimentality across the centuries is crazy.

But I also think that if you’re given this from birth, as opposed to the age of 12, there’s a bit more digging you have to do to get to truth.

Is Four Messages a signal that you are moving away from writing in way that is self-consciously intervening in the tradition of Jewish fiction?

I don’t think I’m moving away from it. I just think there’s a certain recovery of soul that has to come after writing an 800-page book.

For me, Jewishly — I’m not sure what there is to say. I’d like for there to be something to say, and I’d like to have something to say only because I feel it would be tragic for the culture in which I was born and raised to have stagnated due to a genocide; for all of its traditions to be put out on Polish ice.

I say this as someone who doesn’t really believe that any of the American importations to Jewish tradition are that interesting, or intellectually sophisticated, or emotionally viable. But it’s less a crisis that I have less to say than that the religion or culture has less to say nowadays.

Discourse surrounding the effects of the internet is another one that is currently wanting. We interviewed Miles Klee, recently, and he was unconvinced that anyone had learned how to write the internet well (he seemed to be thinking about novelists). His standard was a “form that takes the style of skipping around web pages back and forth, refreshing, not even finishing the thing you’re on.” So the standard seems to be either the obsessive, schizophrenic, or distracted experience of being online. These are qualities of attention that are affected by internet use. Do you think this is the key thing to get right in trying to write the internet? 

But that description can also be applied to the surrealist techniques of the 1920s or the writing of William S. Burroughs. Texts that repeat, hop, skip, jump around, are like the cut-ups that Burroughs did with Brion Gyson. Still, I think that type of discontinuity better characterizes what it’s like to read the internet, or surrealism, not to write “it” — writing can’t be done in that way.

If someone were to look at your internet history for the past week, you’d be diagnosed as a schizophrenic. You’d be looking at your email, you’d be looking at porn, you’d be refreshing some social networking thing, you’d be searching up a recipe or restaurant, then a map to some monument in another nonsensical country. What you’re missing is the flesh that ties it all together, the mind that binds, which is to say, psychology — whatever it is that’s responsible for whatever we attend or hearken to, as Heidegger would say.

You have to admit, we haven’t all become schizophrenics. We’ve changed, but not that much. So when it comes to writing about the human, which, to me, is what all of literature must be about, the idea is to provide connectivity.

This gets into the question of experience. Historically, when you’re reading a novel you’re vicariously experiencing someone else’s life. You come to understand why characters made certain decisions, you follow them through a certain time, and come to identify with them. The experience of using the internet is similar — it represents a doubling. You can hide your identity, you can secrete yourself under multiple avatars, you can lurk, you can troll. Writing about the internet is essentially giving the reader a vicarious experience of a vicarious experience. The metafiction is built-in, because your characters are already living vicariously, and now your reader is going to start living vicariously through them. To understand this was to be freed.

So once you figured that out it didn’t become something that you had to think about too much — for example, that the ubiquitous experience of the internet would put some formal constraints on a writer.

Not at all. One of my only worries was not to use any words that would read as dated in ten years, in five. But I don’t know how long this book deserves to live, or how long any book will live. But then there’s also some planned obsolescence, or this awareness of a capacity for obsolescence, in the prose: “Sent” begins as a folktale, before all the sophistications of “fiction.” There’s this folktale and then you go through the history of “Russia.” There’s a little 19th-century Romanticism, a little Pushkin quote. The Revolution. A hint of Socialist Realism, a taste of the (old-fashioned) Modern. What I’m saying is, my book is nothing original. There have been many, many, iterations of narrative change.

In an interview you did with Blake Butler you said that narrative and plot came before the choice of language. Was that still the case in these stories, where the process of writing is certainly on display? Or does something like tone precede story?

The story is the language. The hope is to make them or find them as inseparable. If you can locate a difference between a story and the language it’s told in, something is wrong. The language has to come not from, but with or as the story. I can’t write about Russia without some Russianness in the prose. Forget proper nouns; just the feeling of it. A birch limb dripping dew — that is something a Russian might see, something a Russian might even hear.

And now you’re working on a non-fiction book about attention. Which makes sense, given what we’ve been discussing. 

The book about attention is essentially a book about distraction, and its thesis is that attention doesn’t exist.

Science has tried to define an attention system, analogous to your digestive system, nervous, or circulatory systems. This system would incorporate the workings of your visual cortex, your auditory cortex, your parietal lobes — though I don’t understand why this is limited to neural and physiological processes because my ashtray, my cigarettes, and my lighter here also seem to be included in this system — the stimuli might be colluding, too.

But it’s not as if the philosophers are more trustworthy. Last century’s basic question — “is attention a function or state?” — is fundamentally flawed. If it’s a function, we’ll attempt to interpret whatever new work the neuroscientists come up with. But if it’s a state, what does that mean? “Attention” seems to me very much like an artificially created resource, created only to introduce an artificial scarcity, as a means of social control. Our lack of it is a nightmare borne of our experiencing today’s ultimate attentive apparatus: surveillance.

So there is a broader social political commentary that is built into this.

The book is written in these very short “attention-deficit” chapters — “broader social political commentary” reflected even in short form.

A friend of mine wanted me to ask if you ever worried about burning out, given the amount of writing that you have done and continue to do.

When people ask that question, I’m never quite sure what world they’re living in, or what world they’d rather be living in. We’re reading in a time when to write your first novel you go and get a degree. You work on this book along with a dozen other writers, in a class. Everyone gives “input,” like in a communist Writers’ Union. The verb would be “massaging”: breaking the book down to mediocrity, a medium-size mediocrity, before making use of the connections you’ve made inside your department to get an agent, to get an editor, to get the thing published, to get the thing reviewed (forget “sold” — always forget “sold”).

But what’s next? You’re not going to get a degree every time you write a book. The writer who taught you is not going to come to your house and hold your hand, guide your writing hand, through your “sophomore effort.” The result is a system of debuts. A debut, followed by tenure — congrats. The truth is, if you consider the history of literature, there’s rarely been such calculation. Such gaming of career. To presume that everything I make is a cultural artifact that requires a certain space to be demarcated around it for its public presentation, that it needs to be presented in a certain way at a certain time to a certain group, to assure maximum impact — that’s a way too conscious way of living. At least it is for me.

“In every day’s newspaper there are stories about the two subjects I have brought together in this book, the disgrace of the Organized System of semimonopolies, government, advertisers, etc., and the disaffection of the growing generation.” So begins Growing Up Absurd, Paul Goodman’s massively influential 1960 report on “the problems of youth in the Organized Society.” Polemics often don’t age gracefully, and there are certainly some aspects of Growing Up Absurd that we should be happy to leave in the mid 20th century, but on the whole the book remains remarkably prescient on the issues facing young people today. The faults of the Organized System were laid bare by the youth-driven Occupy Movement, Arab Spring, and the massive student protests in Chile and Quebec.

Paul Goodman’s work is getting a welcome second appraisal, beginning with the 2011 documentary Paul Goodman Changed My Life and continuing with the republication of Growing Up Absurd by the New York Review of Books after 50 years of being out of print. To mark this occasion I spoke to Casey Nelson Blake, professor of History and American Studies at Columbia University, who wrote a wonderful introduction to the new edition.

Blake is the perfect candidate to place Goodman’s work in a broader historical and intellectual context. And to add to that a perspective on how the youth of today will receive the book, we asked Michael Fisher to write about his experience with Growing Up Absurd. Fisher is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Rochester and wrote the introduction to the new edition of Paul Goodman’s New Reformation: Notes of A Neolithic Conservative. In his short essay he takes up the fate of Goodman’s radical question “socialization to what?”

Blake and I discussed the experience of reading Growing Up Absurd in the wake of the 1960s, Goodman’s stylistic successes and failures, and the continuing importance that 20th century theories exercise on the civic imagination.

Michael Schapira: To begin, what was your initial experience with the book? When did you first read it and what kind of impact did it have?

Casey Nelson Blake: I can’t remember exactly when I first read the book. I believe it was late in my teenage years, when I was either in high school or just starting college. I certainly didn’t read the book when it was first published; I was only 4 years old at the time. And it definitely wasn’t assigned in any of my courses, so I either came across it in a bookstore or sought it out because I’d heard of it. This would have been in the early 1970s, shortly after Goodman died, unbeknownst to me.

I’ve been trying to think about why the book had the impact that it did on me at that particular moment, which was of course a very different moment than the U.S. of 1960. I’ve often thought of the early ’70s in terms of an observation that Joe Strummer had about his generation, which is, I guess, my generation as well. He had the sense of having almost by accident come across a battlefield immediately after the end of a war. The ground was strewn with corpses, but the armies had retreated.

I think that for those of us who came of age in the early 1970s there was a sense that the conflicts of the 1960s had subsided, though not disappeared altogether, as is commonly believed. But they had subsided or taken new forms. What was left in their wake for many Americans of different political persuasions was a profound sense of cultural and, more importantly, moral dislocation. I certainly felt that powerfully as a young person.

Would you call it “dislocation” or was it almost a form of exhaustion after a burst of activity (political, utopian, cultural, etc.)?

It may have felt more like exhaustion to the people who had lived through the 1960s as adults. As a precocious child growing up in New York I gobbled up everything I could pick up about what was going on in the streets in the late 1960s. I also joined several major antiwar demonstrations in the city as a young teenager. But obviously I wasn’t a participant in the same way as those people just a little bit older than me.

The point I’m trying to make about reading the book in the 1970s is that I think it spoke to me, as someone growing up at a rather different time, as a work of cultural criticism. And more importantly it was a book written by a moralist, or someone who wrote explicitly in that mode. I don’t think I picked up one way or another on the political arguments in the book, but rather responded to those aspects of Growing Up Absurd that differed from the political criticism that I was already starting to read. The emphasis on “faith,” “vocation,” “community,” or even “patriotism” — words Goodman capitalized throughout the text. He devoted individual chapters to these ideas. This aspect of the book struck me as quite original. It spoke to my own sense that these were important issues, and I believe in retrospect that I and many other people at the time were hoping to re-endow those words with meaning. So in that regard the book spoke quite powerfully to me even at a very different moment than the time of its publication.

I would say a couple of other things about the way I read the book as a very young man. I was attracted to the argument in the book that, even in the 1950s, cultural radicals like the Beats and white-collar executives (company men or “organization men”), were actually brothers under the skin. They both shared a cynical belief that role-playing and reputation were all that mattered. I already had the sense as a teenager that a lot of the so-called “counterculture” of the 1960s was quickly being absorbed by the upper middle classes. Much of the counterculture, in fact, re-energized American consumerism at a critical moment, so I saw Goodman as quite prescient in this regard.

The other thing I would say is that I just liked Goodman’s prose style — or rather his prose style at his best. He also wrote some awful sentences. I’m sure Growing Up Absurd appealed to me because of its directness. I was reading a lot of George Orwell at the time, and of course admired him. Soon thereafter I was reading people like E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Christopher Lasch — who likewise wrote in a direct prose style that had something in common with Goodman’s way of writing.

You mentioned that Goodman’s voice was a new, fresh voice for you. Were you reading the great works of mid-century sociology like C. Wright Mills, William H. Whyte, or John Kenneth Galbraith? Was he being put into conversation with these voices?

Well, I personally did not read those people until shortly after reading Goodman. I may have read Mills at roughly the same time, but I don’t think I had read Whyte and Galbraith. But certainly in his day Goodman was entering into a public conversation that was deeply informed by these earlier or contemporary works of social criticism.

Was part of this due to a healthy publishing apparatus in New York that existed at the time? Or one that at least allowed someone to conduct themselves as a public intellectual?

Goodman wrote for Dwight MacDonald’s Politics journal in the 1940s, but most of his output was in very obscure anarchist publications when he was first getting started. These pieces probably reached 100 people at most. Growing Up Absurd was serialized, or at least three chapters of it were, in Commentary magazine. Norman Podhoretz had just assumed the editorship, and at that time he wanted Commentary to take a political direction somewhat to the left of Partisan Review and even The New Republic. It’s hard to believe now, but he was drawn to Goodman as an unorthodox radical.

I should also say that Goodman was an important contributor to Liberation magazine in the late 1950s and early ’60s. That magazine was in some respects the successor to Dwight MacDonald’s Politics in its anarcho-pascifism.

You read the book in the early ’70s as a teenager. I actually just read it for the first time and I’m in my late 20s. I’m interested in how different generations who still feel affinity to the youth, or feel themselves as youth, read this book. The reason I ask is because a lot of the conditions that Goodman is talking about don’t seem to have changed tremendously. There is still a lot of skepticism about what we might call the Organized System if we are talking about conventional politics, corporations, advertisers, the entertainment industry, etc. The kind of disaffection Goodman describes still seems to be there.

It’s only to be expected that different generations are going to read the book in different ways. I remember teaching the book when I was at Reed College in the late 1980s. Even then, even at Reed, people felt that it was a book to some extent from another era. Of course the now quite shocking argument that the problems that Goodman was exploring in that book were irrelevant to the experiences of women was an issue for us to talk about in a way that it wouldn’t have been for students in the early 1960s. On the other hand, many Reed students — as you might expect — were drawn to the Beats. His critical but to some extent appreciative take on the Beats was something they found compelling and wanted to grapple with.

As to how your generation and even younger people read the book today, obviously I can’t speak for all of you. I think there are aspects of the book that are extremely relevant today, perhaps to some extent more so than when it was first published. The cultural, moral, and spiritual lament that one finds in the book seems to me still to speak to the yearnings of the young people who I encounter, including my daughters and their friends.

However, the critique of the Organized System that provides the historical and sociological background for the cultural criticism in the book may no longer be applicable to the political economy and social conditions of our time.

I’d be very curious to know how college students read the book now. One aspect of the book that I find a little less compelling is that it seems like a lot of young people, even those engaged in mass protest, aren’t necessarily refusing the system in total. They just seem to want some more effective buy-in because they are saddled with debt and there are fewer quality jobs out there. This doesn’t seem to have the critical and disaffected aspect that Goodman was speaking to.

This would be speculative, because you haven’t taught the book recently, but maybe you could say something about how the basic economic reality that young people are facing today would make them read that aspect of the book a little differently, as opposed to those living in a post WWII social compact situation.

This is an overstatement, but there are times when one reads some of the early documents of the New Left (and we could certainly include Growing Up Absurd under that rubric) and have the sense that the worst thing that could happen to a young person was to have a job for life that came with good wages and good benefits, in a corporation, for example. It’s not the nightmare that young people live with today. On the other hand I do think there is a good deal of disaffection with the Organized System, if it can still be called that. The issue of finding meaningful work remains an elusive goal for young people, and for the not so young as well.

I must say that what might be called the digitization of culture and the digitization of personal life that the young in particular have experienced in the last decade reintroduces all the issues that Goodman was wrestling with. He spoke about a culture that was overly concerned with appearances and the scramble for reputation as the sum total of human aspiration. In that regard, even as the political economy that young people are facing is quite different than what their predecessors faced a half century ago, many of the cultural issues that Goodman articulated I think are still very much alive.

Goodman and other authors generated a vocabulary of this period that helped people make sense of their situation. Examples of this abound in Growing Up Absurd, like “the early reigned” vs. “the early fatalistic.” Part of this had to do with mass-market paperbacks that flourished mid-century. You sound an optimistic note at the end of your introduction that maybe many figures will emerge “out of the wreckage of the academy and traditional journalism” that can provide this kind of vocabulary. But is what is occurring on the web different from having a figure like Goodman, who people can talk about and confidently assume that others had read?

The first thing I would say, by way of preface, is that in fact many commentators in the mid and late 1950s believed that the so-called paperback revolution flooded people with cultural products and intellectual choices that had not been available to previous generations. It was making the great works of modern literature and philosophy available to a wider and wider public, but as a result there was even then a kind of diffuse quality to intellectual culture. In retrospect it seems like there was a more focused intellectual culture than that what we are familiar with now, but in fact many of the worries that you articulated were part of the discussion back then.

I think, for example, of Lionel Trilling, who very shrewdly identified the paperback revolution and the expansion of higher education — particularly public higher education — as transformative forces in American culture. He did so in the context of the famous Partisan Review “Our Country and Our Culture” symposium. Several years later in his essay on teaching modern literature he dreaded that his undergraduates approached works of modern literature and philosophy with a kind of blasé attitude. For him these were works that turned the world upside down, that should have kept people up at night in a state of dread about living in a godless universe. In other words, we already heard those concerns a half a century ago.

Having said all of that, I think that you are right that what we are witnessing now is different — in terms of the quality of intellectual culture at a time when everything seems available. Everything is available, but perhaps what is available seems to matter less. Of course the way in which people talk about information as opposed to knowledge, never mind wisdom, is quite revealing. The seemingly effortless distribution of cultural products — not only literary and intellectual works, but music, film, and everything else — seems not necessarily to result in greater knowledge of the world or of self-knowledge, for that matter.

I had a similar experience to Trilling this summer. I was teaching a course on bioethics to 13- to 15-year-olds; for the most part they were able to engage with issues that were quite abstract to them (euthanasia, abortion, eugenics), but during any given breaks they were on their cell phones playing these incredibly inane games. This prompted my TA and me to give a stand-alone lecture on nihilism and bring up the issue of where they might find meaning in this culture.

It’s easy to condescend to students. I’m sometimes guilty of it; I’m not saying you are —

I’m sure I am, in this case.

But it’s easy to believe that what is going on on their cell phones is all that matters to them. I think many young people are trying to find some lessons about how to grow up, and how to grow up into a meaningful adult life. Our culture does a terrible job of giving young people examples of how their predecessors have done that. I’m certainly not, as a professor, going to offer my own life as an example. But it does seem to me that we as a culture owe that to young people and have failed miserably in that regard.

For Goodman a lot of these resources would come from history. In the introduction you note not only Goodman’s “unique synthesis of anarchist utopianism and unabashed cultural conservatism,” but also his unconventional method of making “a list of unaccomplished or lost causes and accumulate[ing] them as a program for action.” In fact, the last chapter lists “missed and compromised revolutions” like Garden Cities, Class Struggle, Democracy, Compulsory Education, and the Enlightenment. In this respect, do you see Goodman as pointing towards something similar to Tony Judt’s impassioned plea for a renewed commitment to social democracy (another idea from the past that is compromised or has never, for a set of complicated reasons, come to full fruition)?

The first thing that I would say is that Goodman had important differences with the social democratic position. Although he shared with social democrats a belief in a solidaristic culture that defended certain human relationships and values against the encroachment of market forces, and for that matter defended those relationships and values against military or imperial imperatives. This is a position that most social democrats also embraced in the early and middle years of the 20th century.

I think that he differed very significantly from social democrats in his skepticism about the State and his anarchist or communitarian emphasis on local initiatives, on face-to-face democracy. I’m not saying that that approach to political or social change is necessarily effective on its own, or superior to the social democratic tradition, but it differs in important ways from that tradition. It seems to me that those people who bemoan the demise of the New Deal social compact in the United States, or the social compact that the Social Democratic and Christian Democratic parties hammered out in Western Europe after the war, are in some respects speaking a different language than Goodman’s. It may be precisely because Goodman had less invested in the state — to put it mildly — that he might resonate more with young people who don’t feel that the liberal democratic tradition that so shaped their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences is as relevant to their experiences today.

Moving away from Goodman for a moment, are you in California working on your project on the politics of public art?

I’ve been working for a while on a project that has been taking different forms, but I now see as an exploration of American modernism and the civic imagination. It’s a project that includes art history and particular public art installations and objects, but embeds that history in an intellectual history of cultural criticism and aesthetics.

I should add that many people have responded to my essay on Goodman by encouraging me to write a short book on the Goodman brothers — Paul and Percival Goodman. Percival was an architect and urbanist. He and Paul collaborated on the book Communitas, which was a kind of utopian or anarchist work in urban planning. I may well go ahead with that.

I know his brother designed a lot of synagogues. Have you ever seen any of them?

I know I saw the synagogue he designed in Rochester, NY, and have driven by others. I’m not sure I’ve been inside others, however, though I’ve spent some time with his plans and photographs for certain synagogues. Percival was a very important figure in the history of synagogue design in the post-war period. He was at exactly the right place at the right time, as middle and upper-class American Jews were moving out of cities and into the suburbs. They needed new spaces for worship and congregational life, broadly conceived. He joined a modernist architectural idiom, to a modernist reworking of traditional Jewish iconography, in a way that was quite popular at the time.

The connection between him and Paul in terms of synagogue design (Paul actually wrote on this issue on his own) may have to do with the concern that both of them had with what they saw as the formlessness of post-war American society, its lack of meaningful space. That is to say, spaces that were meaning-full — laden with moral meaning. I believe Percival imagined the synagogues that he was designing in some way as responding to that absence.

What kind of public art are you looking at?

A lot of the public art that I have been looking at in the past has been government sponsored public art; in particular public art sponsored in the postwar period by the NEA or the General Services Commission, which has a 1% for art program that commissions public art, whether inside or outside government buildings. I’ve been interested in what I have called the “Liberal Modernist” project in public art, which began in the late 50s or early 60s and then entered into a serious crisis in the late 70s and early 80s, culminating in the great debate over Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc in New York City, which was dismantled at the end of the 1980s.

I now want to put those debates in a larger context, and in particular bring to the fore an argument that was always there in my studies of the post-war period. That has to do with what I see as the vitality and present relevance of a civic aesthetic that was grounded in large part in pragmatism and which one sees in all various forms in the 20th century, for example in the architecture of Louis Kahn, or in some respects in the Happenings movement. Allan Kaprow, the most important artist and theorist of the Happenings movement, read Dewey closely. I also see it very much in the work of the Iranian-born sculptor and architect Siah Armahani, who has been an important figure in the American public art movement over the last 25 years.

This reanimation of the progressive spirit (Dewey, etc.) comes up on Growing Up Absurd as well. His lament is that progressivism got taken over by what he called “managers.” Are you engaged in a similar project to reanimate or reestablish a more vital connection with this tradition?

I guess that would be one way of describing what I’ve been involved with now for some time. In fact my earlier work on the Bourne-Mumford group of cultural critics at the start of the 20th century was motivated by a similar impulse.

I ask because I’m at Teachers College [at Columbia], so the legacy of John Dewey is very strong. But I take Goodman’s critique at face value and can see very clearly what it looks like when progressive ideas get into the hands of managers or people with other motivations.

I am not as up on this literature as I should be. I am familiar with the theoretical literature and practical efforts associated with the civic engagement movement in American higher education, which I see in some respects as carrying on the Deweyan tradition. I have myself done such work within the context of Columbia’s American Studies Center, where I have launched a civic engagement program that involves partnerships with community-based organizations.

In the case of K-12 education I think the great struggle at the moment is between advocates of so-called “educational reform” that emphasize teaching to the test above all else, as against those people who have a more expansive vision of what education is about. That is the great struggle of the day as I see it. It’s very clear what side Goodman would be on if he were around, and it’s also very clear what side Dewey would be on.

Did you ever read The Empire City, which Goodman saw as a contribution to thinking about schooling?

I have, like many people, found The Empire City almost completely unreadable. Goodman considered it his great achievement and thought it one of the great novels of the 20th century. It doesn’t work for me as literature. Goodman took Don Quixote as his model and inspiration for the book. To be honest, I’d rather read Don Quixote.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, some of the most effective networks of aid came from the remnants of Occupy Wall Street. According to Jodi Dean, this is one of many examples that the radical Left should embrace as evidence of a new kind of politics. In The Communist Horizon, a handsome little addition to Verso’s Pocket Communism series, Dean works out what this might look like in reference to the history and living practice of Communism. In addition to teaching political theory at Hobart & William Smith College, Dean has been a consistently insightful voice on the Left in influential books such as Blog Theory and Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, as well as on her blog I Cite.

I spoke with Jodi Dean on Election Day in New Haven, Connecticut, where she was delivering a lecture on communicative capitalism. We discussed the function communism still plays in our political discourse, the importance of moving past remnants of Cold War ideology, and recent attempts to overcome “Left Melancholia.” 

Michael Schapira: We’re speaking on Election Day, concluding what you called on your blog a “bloated, hell storm of an election.”During the Republican primary and running through the general election you would hear people from the Right accuse Obama of being a Communist, Marxist, or Socialist, and pushing his ideological agenda on the American people. The Left would disavow these charges, saying how he is not any of these. Do you see anything revealed in the Right’s continued willingness to use the word Communist, verses the Left’s hesitation to claim any relationship to this word?

Jodi Dean: In short, the Left has been cowardly. The Left has let itself be completely defeated and beaten by not holding on to its own best achievements. It pushes away from these ideas and doctrines that have given it strength for 150 years – Socialism, Communism, Marxism, letting some of the facts of history incapacitate it.

The Right on the other hand takes its defeats and uses them to strengthen itself. It assumes that the Left does the same, but we just hide the fact that we are Marxists. It uses this to bring folks out by saying “you’re a Marxist,” knowing that the Left will retreat from it. On that one scale you see the difference in how the Right learns from and embraces its failures and the Left wallows in them in this pathetic way.

Additionally the Right knows that words matter, knows that there is a strength there, and I think the Left is sometimes afraid of strength, or afraid of what happens when the people have power.

But that’s also changing. We seem to be in a process where the Left is waking up. It’s been a long time since there has been a vocal Communist, Marxist, or Socialist Left. There have been individuals who have been Leftist obviously, but one significant change is that the Foucauldian/Deleuzian position doesn’t have legs anymore. People are tired of that. It doesn’t seem to address the primary problems facing the world.

This seems to relate to what you write in the book about the party. You write that “the power of the return of communism stands or falls on its capacity to inspire large-scale organized collective struggle toward a goal,” and to this end you are against calls to work exclusively outside of a party structure. Slavoj Zizek has been pointing to Syriza in Greece as an example of what this might look like (a coalition of the radical Left). Do you think Syriza is a good example of a renewed embrace of the party structure on the Left?

My discussion of the party in the book is really abstract, and for a couple of reasons. First, I want to encourage Leftists who have been influenced by Deleuze, Hart and Negri, identity politics, and all this swarmy stuff to think more seriously about tighter organizational structures. So that’s the first addressee, this general Left feeling of dispersion as a good thing. I want the Left to think, no, maybe it’s not a good thing, and maybe we need to think in terms of tighter structures like the party.

The next part is to think that maybe one way to do this and make it more attractive is to rethink what it is that a party does, what’s the point of a party. A typical critique of the Leninist party is that “oh it knows everything and tries to put itself at the vanguard of a linear theory of history, that it’s the one group that knows the truth.” Well, that’s actually historically wrong, it’s a parody and a ridiculous way to think about the party. So what I try and do in the book is to use [Georg] Lukács to think about the party as this overlap of two lacks. There is a kind of non-knowledge on the part of the party, and a non-knowledge on the part of the people. But these are held together in the commitment to a collective process, a collective moving forward. So it’s an effort to just try and rethink how one might even imagine a party.

To me that’s the theoretical part that matters. If we begin to ask whether it is necessarily a revolutionary party, or a reformist party, these questions are coming too quickly when in fact what we need to do is think about how we even understand organization.

And perhaps thinking in terms of the party imposes a certain scale on our imagination.

We can think of a party structure as something that scales much more easily. Occupy had a problem with scale.  Encampments couldn’t get much bigger than they were; they get dirty, hard to maintain.

But getting back to your question, I think Syriza is tremendously exciting. I was in Greece three days after the election in June and was excited to talk to a number of people. One of the things I was struck by was how similar their discussions were to ours in Occupy, wondering what they were supposed to do – so they also had a kind of non-knowledge that they were very explicit about.

But they still had shown great strength and grown. What I like about Syriza is that it is a coalition structure within a party form. That seems really smart. This is something I am currently working on. If I’m thinking of the Party as this overlapping of two lacks, what forms, what organizational structures would fit with this? What would be the advantage of Syriza’s form, and in what circumstances? In the US we have a different thing going on. They can do a coalition of the radical Left there because they have a parliamentary system. We’ve got this horrible two party system that makes it difficult for smaller parties to grow. There are only 7 states that allow fusion voting – this is where candidates can run on the ticket of more than one party, so for example in New York Obama ran as a Democrat, but also on the Working Families Party.What that does is allow small parties to grow and build a base. This might even open up some funding, but it differs from state to state. But if this occurs in only 7 states, it’s hard to imagine there being enough parties to make up a Syriza style coalition.

That said, why not try and get all the 2000 member Socialist and Communist parties to try and form a tighter coalition, and why not try to work with Greens, why not try to build something better?

I was recently at a talk where the speaker suggested that communism could serve as a word to replace corrupted forms of democracy, so long as you forgot its history. This got a laugh from the audience. In the book you want to reengage this history not as a catalogue of failures, but as “the force of an absence” that can give some content to our collective strivings – and you do this partly by challenging the very narrative that the speaker was invoking (“communism-Soviet Union-Stalinism-Collapse”), and partly by showing how this narrative has as much to say about our inability to think clearly about the historical construction of capitalism. What have you found to be the most effective approach to challenging this common narrative – reworking the history of communism, or pointing to contemporary movements and struggles that self-consciously identify as communist?

I don’t think those are separate. They are linked in part by the same impulse.

My argument about history is that folks, particularly Leftists, who say “oh no, only those who disavow our history can possibly return to communism,” those are the ones who don’t know history. Those are the ones who say there is only one uniform history that is completely determinate. They eliminate all the multiple arguments, debates, tendencies, the multiple voices that were silent, the role communism played in postcolonial struggles, etc. They also negate the really living communists and socialists in Latin America. So there is this bizarre negation of actual history on the part of those who invoke the history.

So that part is not just working through this history in light of a guilty conscience, but rather aiming towards the recuperation and drawing out of triumphs. That’s what’s really crucial, and that’s what animates a positive presence today. Let’s look at the willingness of people to fight and die and organize. This is really strong if we try and recover the history of American communism. My god, American communists were the first to work on behalf of sharecroppers in the 1920 and 1930s. They were the first out there in the anti-racist struggle. So this idea that the Communist legacy is only one of misery and death is a remnant of the Cold War that the Left must abandon.

So there is also a moral component that you would like to focus on.

And it’s an exciting and wonderful moral component. I gave a talk at a labor group in Albany last January, talking about Occupy as a Left movement more than a populist movement. There was a guy there in his 80s who said, “I remember when my parents helped occupy apartments on the Lower East Side of New York to keep African American families from being evicted. And who organized that? The Communist Party organized that.”  He had a sense of pride and happiness about this, and we’ve abandoned people like him. I just spoke last week in Milwaukee, which has had 3 socialist mayors as we all remember from Wayne’s World. There was an 87-year-old woman sitting next to me. Her husband was a wild eyed Trot from the lunatic fringe and she was telling me all about the different socialist landmarks there, and said “I remember when they tried to take Communism away from us, and I’m glad people are now trying to bring it back.” It was totally inspiring. There are people out there who can hear this if we don’t keep repeating the stupid legacy of the Cold War on ourselves.

As you are speaking now it strikes me that confidence is an important part of your project. In The Communist Horizon you talk about how recent political events – Occupy, the Arab Spring – have helped people get over what Wendy Brown has called “Left Melancholia.” Is maintaining this confidence what is most important in these new movements, and does an overreliance on formal considerations (e.g. horizontality) work against this? 

I do see it as a threat. It’s the kind of threat where people are like, “I can’t sit through another 5 hour meeting, let’s just delegate some of this.” On the flip side though, it is clear that, particularly in the first couple of months, it was the horizontality that got people excited about Occupy. So there is something to learn there, and ask how we can combine elements of horizontality with other vertical elements and diagonal elements. There were some folks in Occupy doing a sort of morning after reflection on what worked and what didn’t work on September 17. One thing they learned was that a lot of people in the movement had tremendous leadership skills, but they also saw the need to step up and step back. So after one group exercises leadership you train and create space for others to step up. I love things like that. It seems like a really smart way to have a horizontality that is not dysfunctional because it also recognizes leadership.

The Communist Horizon is clearly an intervention in a Leftist discourse, but in writing a book like Blog Theory and speaking about communicative capitalism I imagine you get into lots of conversations with technologists of all sorts. How are these conversations different? Have technologists even been beset by melancholy?

I don’t think that the technology people are melancholic. They have tended to be always looking to the future, to every new gadget, and really optimistic, for at least the last 20 years or so. The problem is that much of that optimism is really libertarian, really individualistic, and also associated with the market. It’s almost like remnants of the dot-com bubble still circulate or reappear around new media people. Enthusiasm is there, but it’s not political. It’s a different kind of enthusiasm.

Are there lessons that the technologists could draw from Leftists, and vice versa? 

What the technology folks could learn from a Marxist Left is to be more critical of the relations of production that their utopian tendencies presuppose. Or, really, to be more critical of capitalism in general.

What the Left needs to learn from the technology people is this sense that “there’s always a work-around, there’s always a solution, that we can fix this.” I think that the Left doesn’t have that very much. They tend to settle into criticism for its own sake rather than a criticism that is building something else.

I also think that both sides need to learn from the history of Communism that collectivity is really the important thing. The hackers tend to be too libertarian and individualistic, the Left tends to be too critical, and both need to recognize that we can only get stuff done if we build collectives.

You describe the communist horizon primarily in spatial terms, as the point in relation to which we orient ourselves. Like [Jacques] Ranciere’s politics, this has radical consequences for what we see – as possibilities, as goals, as members of the polity that count. But horizon also invokes something different for me, namely the fusion of horizons that we find in Gadamer and hermeneutics. Do you think that the communist horizon also speaks to a fertile ground for communication and a widening of perspectives (contra the fears of many that Communism entails a radical reduction in our perspective)? Do we gain confidence to have different conversations?

I hadn’t thought of it in that Gadamerian way. The way I would extend that is to say that when we’re trying to rethink communism, we are learning from the past, but also recognizing the emancipatory energies that have always been a part of it. That should be a way to encourage and invite folks to more conversations than they’ve been willing to have.

I think that part of the problem on the Left has been that a lot of Leftist activists, particularly people my age (50 and over) had experiences with really hardcore Socialist Workers parties, or sectarian Marxists who often said “we can’t talk to these guys.” Because of their experiences with some uncongenial folks who were really rigid a stereotype of Marxism can emerge. But what you are suggesting is that the horizon idea can open up the possibility of these people re-thinking communism and putting back to use some of the energies that have been mobilized in its name.

The Idea of Communism, a collection that bears on many of the topics we’ve been discussing, begins with the following: “The long night of the Left is drawing to a close. The defeat, denunciations and despair of the 1980s and 1990s, the triumphalist ‘end of history’, the unipolar world of American hegemony – are all fast becoming old news.” Now I can see how this makes sense for people who have something like 1968 in common, or worked through the culture wars and identity politics, which in retrospect seemed to have had a depoliticizing effect on large-scale projects. But how do your students, who haven’t lived this sequence, respond to this renewed energy that some people have been bringing to exploring the Idea of Communism? 

The challenge with younger people might be a different one. Many of them are so individualistic that it’s hard for them to think collectively. They’ve been told that every person is unique, every voice counts, everything political is about their individual experience, and so I think that the challenge of working with a lot of young people is breaking through this individualism. I think that is why so many of them are attracted to anarchism, because anarchism just repeats the neoliberal ideology, except with an oppositional, kind of groovier flavor.

They have also grown up with the idea that communism is inextricable from fascism. This is why terms like totalitarianism are completely reactionary in political discourse, because they blur the differences and make it really hard to inspire people to think about what the egalitarian content of communism is. That said, sometimes when young folks start reading Marx they are like, “Oh, this is good, I thought this was supposed to be bad.” But that might not be that same “now we have the word back” that older people have.

One move you make in the book is replacing the Marxist formulation of the dictatorship of the proletariat with “the sovereignty of the people.” Some might say that “the people” are harder to identify as an empirical class, and this causes problems for Marxist theory. Do you accept this? 

I’ll be honest, I’m going back and forth on whether I’m right on this one. The orthodox part is that the proletariat is not an empirical class, even for Marx and Lenin. The proletariat is produced through time via capital. Capitalism has to produce a proletariat in order to keep maintaining itself as capitalism. So I like Zizek’s use of proliterianization, I think that’s really useful. If we keep that active part and recognize the people as that group that cycles in and out of proliterianization, then we have a somewhat orthodox view that is more convincing for us today.

I’ll admit that I found the focus on “proliterianization” compelling for the problems besetting workers in the knowledge economy. But this gets back to the question of confidence. Many place your work in the Autonomism tradition – these Italian Marxists who wrote in a grand style, as if everything they were saying had world historical importance. Does this confidence spill over into testing out some of the new formulations we find in The Communist Horizon?

 Two things. I think of my writing, at least since I’ve been working with this idea of communicative capitalism, as at the intersection of Hardt & Negri and Zizek. I take some things from the Italian tradition, namely how they talked about the communicative phase of capital, how capital’s subsumption happens via communication today, which I like very much. But I get antagonism from Zizek, which I don’t think the Italians have a good version of.

A couple of years ago at a conference at Cornell I was chatting with Michael Hardt. I said to him, ”God there’s so much that I admire in what you guys have in the Empire trilogy, but it’s just so optimistic.” Michael said, “Yeah, but we were trying to respond to what we saw as overwhelming Left pessimism.” Even though I would not have admitted it to myself until you just brought this up, I think that might have made a difference in how I started thinking about the ways that I wanted to make my arguments. Michael’s approach wasn’t Pollyannaish, it wasn’t naiveté, it wasn’t ‘Oh yes, really everyone just loves each other.’” There was much more of a kind of political/tactical choice, and once I understood it that way I think I was more on board.

Think about what’s powerful in Zizek? In part it’s the stuff that makes people laugh. One of the things that makes him so great as a speaker, or when you are reading his texts, is the stuff that’s fun, and that makes you more disposed to his ideas. We can think about these elements as part of the Left dismantling itself of its melancholia, and that this optimism now is a source of strength.

“I was born in Alexandria, Egypt. But I am not Egyptian. I was born into a Turkish family but I am not Turkish. I was sent to British schools in Egypt but I am not British.” So begins the afterward to Alibis, a new collection of “essays on elsewhere” recently out in paperback by the New York-based writer André Aciman. Since the publication of Out of Egypt, a richly textured memoir about his Jewish family’s final years in Alexandria, Aciman has been a consistent and inventive voice in the public conversation on issues of place, identity, and the elusive ideal of belonging. He is the author of novels such as Call Me By Your Name and Eight White Nights, as well as an earlier essay collection entitled Letters of Transit. Aciman also holds two titles at the CUNY Graduate Center — Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Director of The Writers’ Institute.

I spoke to Aciman about how these titles and accomplishments don’t make the quest for self-knowledge any less problematic, the role of Europe in his imaginary, and the difficulties that come with both teaching and crafting the essay.

Michael Schapira: You are both sentimental and unsentimental about the European landscape in Alibis, and there is a telescoping effect present in many of the essays on European locales, bringing different epochs into relation with one another. Sometimes you can work through problems like the effects of tourism or the erasure of certain histories, sometimes these overcome you and you feel a sense of loss. Am I right in characterizing this struggle? And do the reasons for visiting a place affect this?

André Aciman: Whatever I write about is not necessarily what I experienced. The enthusiasm or despair with which I embark to go to Europe is not necessarily genuine. And what I retrieve in Europe is not necessarily genuine. What happens that is truly genuine is what occurs on paper. On paper a story sort of manufactures itself. Sometimes it will come out through the vein of nostalgia for some reason. In “Place des Voges” I’m trying to connect with the place, but I can’t connect for whatever reason. It’s beautiful, I know, but saying it’s beautiful is not going to make it any closer. I come back to New York, I try to remember what it is about the Place de Voges that I am seeking, and I still can’t connect. I know that I will remember it with some kind of elegy in me that will bring something out, and then I realized that the only thing I could do is tell a story about who the people living there were. Connecting them and doing the research that sometimes you need to do brings something out that I didn’t know was going to be there, that even being there did not produce. It is the writing that produced it.

And frankly when I go to Europe, most of the time I’m bored. The romance is gone. Basically what I want to retrieve is the romance, and if paper can do it then paper will be my friend.

But what about Europe as a cultural category, like when we say that W.G. Sebald is a great exemplar of European writing, or Visconti of European cinema?

I think Europe is still for me a very dominant cultural force. In America we have the New York Review of Books, which I think is a fantastic institution. But it is sort of about great books and great art. This is still a very young country.

Books published in translation here might not even be 5%. Everybody reads American writers abroad — why, I have no idea. You wonder, what is enchanting about them? Basically, they are fun writers, they produce what I call prose — they just produce prose, they are not really poets trying to do something else. I see myself as a person who should have been a poet, was a terrible poet, lapsed totally, and said okay, I’ll do prose instead.

All good writers basically, without knowing it sometimes, are reinventing their language. They feel the need to reinvent the conventions of their language. Not just the grammar, but the very conventions of their language. Henry James is a writer that I deplore, but I do think that he was on to that. So was Edith Wharton, a writer I adore, actually. They really understood that their language needed to be reinvented because it wasn’t going to do what they needed it to do. The master of this is James Joyce, who went off the radar, but at the same time was a truly brilliant writer. 

We have been running a series called Teaching in the Margins that looks at the intersection of writing and pedagogy. In the spirit of that series, when and why did you become an educator? How has your perspective on teaching changed as your career has developed, and how has your practice as a writer changed?

I got a PhD in Literature because I was interested in becoming a writer. I didn’t know that teaching literature could actually preclude you from writing because it keeps you so busy teaching, publishing, and doing all the other stuff so that you have no time to write. When I was teaching at Princeton I wrote a series of chapters for Out of Egypt, got a contract, and I knew at that point that the whole thing was going to collapse, so I was faced with a difficult decision. I knew that if I wrote Out of Egypt they were going to hate me because they wanted a scholarly book, and I had no interest in producing a scholarly book at that time. So I took the risk and for me it paid off eventually — it was a blessing.

Now you are the head of something called The Writers’ Institute at the CUNY Graduate Center. Can you describe briefly your aspirations for The Writers’ Institute, and in particular where you see its value given that there are number of well-respected MFA programs already available in New York City (and even in the CUNY system, at Hunter College)?

It’s basically my baby. I’m sick and tired of people going to typical MFA programs because you don’t learn anything in an MFA. I mean you write more and you have a cohort of people who are there to help you, but that is often not enough. The Writers’ Institute is taught exclusively by the best editors in New York City, which means in the United States, which means probably in the world. These are people who have no patience with “this is what I was trying to do . . .” Basically they are surgical — nice, but also aggressive. And of course you want to work with these people because if they like you, they will publish you.

Do you think of it along the lines of an apprenticeship model?

Forget apprenticeship, it is more about getting to know the person you want to meet anyway.

You have taught creative writing courses at the Institute. What kind of unique challenges come with teaching the essay form? Often American students will have taken composition courses or even creative fiction workshops where directness and economy are virtues, but the essay entails circling the matter at hand, coming at it from different angles. Is there a process of unlearning that comes with teaching the essay?

There are two answers to the question. The essay itself cannot be a five-paragraph essay. That is the death of the essay. When he was 10 one of my boys wrote a beautiful essay about a hot dog vendor, which I thought was really well done, poetic in its own way. The teacher sent it back with a D because it was not a five-paragraph essay. I said “the guy is a hot dog vendor, what are you going to prove? What is the conclusion? There is no conclusion.”

The other enemy is not the five-paragraph thing. It is that many students are far more comfortable in writing for their school paper. It is hard to go from there to developing a voice in fiction that is purified of all that newspaperese. If you can get rid of that then you are on the right track, but it is a lot of work.

In addition to running The Writers’ Institute you are also the head of the Comparative Literature department, and interact with other academics in an academic setting. For example, we were both at a speech at the Grad Center last week and a non-academic audience would have a very different discussion than the one we witnessed. Why kind of continuities and ruptures do you find when adapting these conversations and conventions of academic writing to your essays or more popular forms of writing? 

Well, Alibis is an educated man’s book, there is no question about that, though it’s written for people who don’t know all the specifics, but get the point. You don’t have to have read Proust to understand what a madeleine does in the essays. But to put it as pictorially as I can, I like the idea that there is not just one of us, with one profession and one set of ideas. I like the idea of being like a milk bottle in an amusement park – you know those things that you shoot down. Each one of them is a part of you; there are maybe 30 of you, but definitely not just two of you. And what’s more, they have to talk to each other. Some never talk, they hate each other. Some seek to be friends; some are in love with each other. They change all the time. I find that my identity is the same way. I’ll go from novel to essay to being a reviewer for an academic press, and you do all those things because fundamentally you are a writer, and a writer should have no pretention to be anything else but to be a writer. And when I’m not writing I’m teaching about good writers.

The essays in Alibis often made me think of William Morris, who I was reading about in another book [Sinead Murphy’s excellent The Art Kettle]. Morris made many efforts to cultivate a commitment to craft, or to push the morally uplifting work that comes with of surrounding yourself with beautiful objects. For Morris much of this was expressed through design, but in Alibis it comes through the senses — such as the persistent focus on smells throughout the essays. The problem that strikes me is that this project can be expensive these days, with cheap, serviceable goods possibly distracting people from this focus. Do you see prospects of reanimating a commitment to craft, beauty, or attending to things in our environment in ways that were perhaps more common in the world you depicted in Out of Egypt or Morris hoped for in 19th century Britain?

I actually think it’s cheaper than you are making it out to be. We all buy things. My students may not have any money, but they wear a different kind of sneaker every week, so they must have a collection of sneakers. Why do you need six pairs of sneakers? Well, because it does something for you. So I think every single person has something in which they invest money that they call “a luxury.” You buy the Penguin edition that costs five times as much as the Dover edition. I collected aftershaves not because I’m an aesthete, but because they became important to me. Every aftershave had a part of me that I couldn’t retrieve unless I went there to that smell. I went to the gym today and after shaving rather hastily I realized that my aftershave was finished. I didn’t throw away the bottle, it’s in my gym bag and I’m going to bring it back home. I like these bottles, don’t ask me why. I have no idea. But if something is important or beautiful to you, then you will find ways to incorporate that thing into your surroundings.

Partially because of the facts of your biography, partially because of the Alexandria you depicted in Out of Egypt, you have often been considered to be a cosmopolitan writer. I find this to often be an empty term meant to signify some other notion (sometimes politically quietist, sometimes having to do with questions of identity). Have you thought much about this label? What might it mean in your case and what it might it mean in general for writers of our time?

It’s a complicated term because it has sexiness built into it, which is the unfortunate part. Cosmopolitan means that you are multi-national, that you belong in many places, that you can belong in many places, that you are tolerant of other people, that you’ve travelled widely, that you are a jet-setter, it has all these fringe things. But actually being cosmopolitan means that you lack something fundamental, which is an anchor, a way of belonging to a place, without which you feel you have an identity that is a minus. That is how I was born. I was born in a place that was never going to be my home — I knew this from my earliest childhood. And I didn’t want to belong to it either, because I hated it and couldn’t wait to get out. But every other place I went to from there was never going to be my home either, and I knew that as well. Italy was not my home, France was not my home, England certainly wasn’t, and the United States, even though I became an American citizen, is in many respects a foreign country. So, yeah, you are a cosmopolitan, you speak many languages, blah, blah, blah, but you’re lost.

At the end of the day, I think every American person, even your age, at some point is comforted by the fact that in some homes you visit there is likely to be white Wonderbread, peanut butter, and jelly. I’m using a tribe metaphor to drive the point home, but there is no peanut butter or jelly or white bread in my past. That is lost. So I always have to invent a sandwich. But I’d pay anything to have that safety. I don’t know what it is.

However, the place where you spent your childhood has been in the global eye for the past year. How do you look at recent events in Egypt?

Mostly anger. I cannot forgive Egypt for what it did. I think the Egyptian people are wonderful people. They are also probably the kindest people I’ve met in my life one on one. Even if they don’t know you and meet you in the street, they will be nice to you, because that’s how they are. But when you politicize them, which unfortunately they’ve all been, they can become extremely radicalized. Then you see horrible things occur.

We have a democratically elected government, but I don’t know what that means. You can see what the leader is doing right now; it’s like a coup d’etat, from somebody who rose because he allegedly believed in democracy. I don’t know where Egypt is. I don’t know what its values are; I don’t know what the Middle East is all about any longer.

But as I’ve said in print many times, I am with the young people who were in Tahrir Square, who want exactly what young people around the world want. They want a future, they want prospects, they want jobs, and they want the ability to speak and to think freely. Those are the people who really led the rebellion. I trust them, and would do whatever I could do to back them up, which unfortunately is not much. But the other actors are retrograde; they are leading Egypt back into the desert as far as I’m concerned.

Coming back to the book, was it difficult to keep a consistent tone throughout Alibis?

I was never an essayist, but when Out of Egypt came out I gave a lot of talks. It occurred to me that I could craft those talks in such a way that I would give a different talk every time I was invited, particularly if I was invited to a different city. Eventually what happened is that I would write a talk and deliver it as a talk, but it was really an essay. What I wanted to do as a craftsman was to write in such a way that you could produce something that is scriptorially quite eloquent, yet at same time make people forget that they are hearing a paper. Many papers lack the human function, so I write with voice implied, and I hope that comes though.

And how do you go about sequencing a book of essays like this?

First, you make a list of all the essays that you have. I then went and spoke with my publisher. We sat down and I said we had to remove quite a few of them because it is not a collection of essays; it has to be a book with a particular tone to it and a particular vision. I had no problem and he had no problem about having a short book — it could have been twice its size, but it would have no character.

I came up with the title of Alibis because it captures everything about the nature of the essays. They are all about being somewhere else. Not only in space, but somewhere else in time, as well – of having another identity, another persona. Like the milk bottles I was speaking about.

There is a moment in the essay “Lavender” that I think is the best thing I’ve ever written. The narrator is describing himself at this age, himself at that age, himself at another age, and obviously he is suggesting that none of them have died. They haven’t morphed into each other — they are all there. He then says that I have all these mes and obviously have a life, but I don’t have a sense that I’ve lived my life. I may have lived quite a different life — or the real life that I should be living maybe has not been lived yet. That is the kind of question that you ask yourself in an essay; it is the kind of question that Montaigne would have asked of himself. And there is no answer for these questions, there is no one form for it.

[W. W. Norton & Company; 2012]

Back in April a piece appeared on the New York Times Style Magazine blog announcing the imminent UK release of Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy, with a US edition to be published in the fall by Faber & Faber. For any longtime and slightly obsessive fan of Will Oldham — which is to say the majority of his fan base — this was something of a major event. We learned that “within the book’s 382 pages Oldham answers nearly every question one might wish to ask about his prolific output,” giving some credence to his characterization of the project as “the last interview.”

Despite a long, productive, and notably wide-ranging career in music and film, Oldham has always been a somewhat elusive figure for the media and for his fans. This is partially due to his provincial nature as a stalwart of the Louisville arts community, and partly due to an admirable disregard for the conventions of media presentation. Thus the lengthy interview, exhaustive and detail-oriented in the hands of musician and occasional Oldham collaborator Alan Licht, is less about setting the record straight than about providing the proper forum for a fuller picture of the artist and the man to emerge.

To my mind this is a more important enterprise than the slew of memoirs by high profile baby boomer musicians that have been released in the past few months, mainly because Oldham’s general lack of media availability can have certain effects on his fans. I remember my first trip to Louisville to visit my friend Lydelle, a very cool person I became fast friends with when we were teaching in France. However, she became infinitely cooler once she divulged that she ran in similar circles with “Will.” One night she took me out to see a local supergroup called The Health & Happiness Family Gospel Band. It was everything that I could have wanted as a Yankee in the South: faux-wood panels, very cheap beer, an opening group that was passing around moonshine made from an old family recipe, and then a sweaty man in a loosened tie flanked by a guitar player with a jewel-studded bolo leading a raucous gospel show. And then, just as Lydelle had threatened on the way there, Will Oldham showed up, first just to watch and catch up with friends, but later to join the band on stage for a few songs. This was too much for my shamelessly exoticizing gaze – to see one of my favorite artists in their native environment, awash in authenticity. As I drove past a decidedly inauthentic stretch of man made lakes in Indiana the next day I called my friends to make the — to my mind, at that point, brilliant — distinction between the vibrant cultural impulse of the South and its complete erasure once you crossed over into the Midwest.

Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy goes a long way to temper these over-the-top and naive (to be generous to my younger self) reactions to his musical and artistic output. One of the interesting things you learn about Will Oldham is that his ascension in the Louisville music world was first and foremost as a fan. While his brothers Paul and Ned were playing in bands with people like Steve Albini (Big Black, Shellac), David Grubbs (Gastr Del Sol), and Ben Chasney (Six Organs of Admittance), Will was pursuing acting with the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Though if he was just a music fan, he was really good at being a fan, forging friendships with the artists with whom he was to later collaborate and meeting some early heroes (like Glenn Danzig, a surprisingly influential early figure in Oldham’s musical life).

At the age of 19 Oldham had already assembled an impressive acting resume – landing roles in John Sayles’ Maetwan and working in productions associated with the Actors Theatre – but decided to abandon this path after an ill-fated stay in LA. Here is how he neatly sums up his decision:

“I went to Los Angeles, got the agent, went on numerous casting calls and numerous auditions, had numerous discussions with agents, did Everybody’s Baby and saw how people that I admired…were living and what the issues at hand were, and what life in Los Angeles was like, and what politics and processes most people were engaged in on a day to day basis…and just thought ‘I don’t recognize what is cool, I don’t recognize what I was hoping for.’ It started to seem like, ‘Wait, this actually has no relationship whatsoever to what I thought I was preparing for. Uh oh.’”

This kind of reasoning indicates a pattern for Oldham, and it’s one that readers are likely to find admirable. What is progressively revealed in the book is the whole way of life, not just the particular rationales that influenced key “career decisions.” So, for example, Oldham speaks of a breakthrough, a “new style of touring,” that came during a 2002 tour with rainYwood, who eventually turned into Brightblack Morning Light. What made it revelatory was the seemingly banal insight that the terrain you cover during a tour could become instantly more meaningful and fulfilling if you were doing it with friends and took time to enjoy the setting.

So they limited the tour to three western states and would camp out most nights after the show, often near surfing opportunities. Oldham’s frank accounting for why he often eschews conventional touring and publicity protocol reveals how difficult it is to remain centered over the course of a career when there is so much pressure pushing you towards uncomfortable situations.

The book is organized into 11 sections, more or less chronologically ordered, but often moving forward or looping back upon topics already covered. Though the focus here is on Oldham, Alan Licht deserves a great deal of credit for moving so deftly through the material, sometimes prompting his subject with an apt Nicholas Ray quotation, a reference to an old Robert Duval film, or a lyric from anywhere in the catalog. As the book proceeds he provides enough of an auto-commentary to keep the biographical thread during forays into topics that any fan would find interesting: “Do you find drugs useful, enjoyable, or both?” “How important are lyrics to you as a listener and as a singer?” “Have you had any interesting dreams lately?” “Overall, what effect do you think the audience has on your work?” These are interesting questions, and Oldham consistently provides considered, interesting answers (to tease the dream question a bit, I can say that it involved Bruce Springsteen, a haunted hotel, and an aborted attempt to call a phone sex line).

There is a potential for any extended statement from an artist to become tedious at a point if they are clearly going to remain truthful throughout. The will to self-mythologize is what makes books like Bob Dylan’s Chronicles or Errol Flynn’s My Wicked, Wicked Ways such a pleasure to read. Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy can get bogged down at times in the minutia of the recording process, or cataloging who played what parts on certain records and live shows. But Oldham’s life has led him in a sufficiently varied set of directions and put him in contact with enough interesting and creative people that you appreciate his attempt to set things down in a relatively straightforward manner.

Hearing how he imagines the character of Bonnie “Prince” Billy — arguably the guise under which he has solicited the most attention from fans and press alike, but initially a concession to his fans’ misguided insistence that all songs should have some kind of intentional creator behind them — in terms of his larger musical project is incredibly instructive not only for his listeners, but also for anyone who thinks deeply about the function of “the alter ego.” You also get sidelong glances at the early days of Drag City; brushes with seminal bands like The Royal Trux, the Silver Jews, and the Dirty Three; or encounters with Harmony Korine, who used to call Oldham using a fake name years before they met in person (Korine provides the “You Fuck” on “A King at Night” from Ease on Down the Road).

The most appropriate frame through which to view the book is no doubt as a reference for fans. Those not familiar with the work or with the lacuna surrounding Oldham’s identity as an artist and man will most likely get lost in the steady stream of unfamiliar names. However, as an antidote to the self-serving, grandiose, and often grotesque nature of many “rock memoirs” Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy is a refreshing kind of book — one completely appropriate to the creative character with the modest and reasonable ambition of leading a creative life. Oldham can be effortlessly weird without giving the reader pause. That such an approach doesn’t mean that you can’t amass a large, devoted audience is a lesson that deserves a wider circulation and has found a worthy ambassador.

[FSG; 2013]

There are many lessons that can be drawn from the cases of the late Christa Wolf and of Günter Grass, arguably the two most important figures of post-war German literature. For decades both occupied a unique position of moral and artistic authority on the world stage. Both attempted in their writings to work meaningfully though a history so beset with atrocities that nuanced accounts can too often be edged out by more psychologically and emotionally comforting broad strokes.

In both cases, a set of biographical disclosures later in life challenged this authority: for Grass, the 2006 admission of his involvement in the Nazi war effort as a member of the Waffen-SS; for Wolf, the unearthing of files detailing her work as an informant (Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter — Informal Collaborator) for the Stasi from 1959-1962. Both revelations drew considerable attention within Germany and in the wider world of letters, for many serving as a coda to the period of committed literature and as the confirmation of what Kierkegaard famously called ”an age of publicity,” where biographical detail does the work of careful criticism. (To stay within the German context, look no further than Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy  for a contemporary example of this phenomenon.) Of course, the real lesson to be drawn from these cases — the lesson which the most bellicose critics at the time of the revelations obstinately refused to consider — is that the intersection of art, history, and biography is far more complicated than we would like to admit.

Christa Wolf was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles when her involvement with the Stasi first came to light in 1993. Amazingly, she claimed to have no recollection of informing, thus making a Grass-style confession impossible. As she writes in City of Angels: Or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud:

How can I avoid feeling compelled to justify myself? That would be the most idiotic way of all to behave. But is there any possible correct, appropriate way to behave in this situation?

Wolf was a committed dissident in the GDR (East Germany) and a forceful voice resisting Western triumphalism after reunification. It would seem like some sort of explanation was owed to the public. Yet how does one give an account of oneself when the link to the past, to the psychological and cultural backdrop of such fateful decisions, is not even subjectively available? “It’s about memories,” she tries to explain to a friend, “about how we remember: my topic for decades, you understand? And somehow I could have forgotten that.”

City of Angels: Or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud, Wolf’s final work, was written a decade after her time in Los Angeles. The gap is significant and lends credence to her sincerity in wondering how to behave given the extraordinary circumstances. Officially a novel, City of Angels is a book that hesitates between fiction and memoir. It is not a public confession or apology for Wolf’s actions. Instead, it’s a careful attempt to reconstruct the complex interiority denied by a crucial gap in her memory. For some writers, the double remove of time and place would pose significant challenges. But for Wolf it is undeniably an asset because her efforts require such a large scope.

First, there is the matter of history. One of the recurring motifs early in the book is the question of “the Turn”: of what it means to hold a passport for a country (the GDR) that no longer exists. Wolf’s exasperation with such questions quickly turns into an almost ethical project — her goal is to give these flippant questions the careful attention they deserve. This means turning to the L.A. exiles (primarily Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht), to the Jewish diaspora of Holocaust survivors, to her childhood in Mecklenburg (controlled by the Nazis and then the Soviets), to her various disillusionments with formal socialist party structures, to her various disillusionments with reunification, and to virtually anything that resists the easy closure that most questioners are asking of her, especially as concerns the bulk of her life as a member of the socialist party in the GDR.

There is also, of course, the matter of personal psychology, and again for Wolf this requires a bit of creative leeway. During her years in East Germany, Wolf was famous for registering shifts in the political climate in her health, the most pointed example being a heart attack she suffered shortly after giving a speech at the soon-to-be-demolished Berlin Wall. In Los Angeles, Wolf is similarly moved by her environment. Even before the revelations come to light her body is responding to the staggering range of Western democracy’s successes and failures. She is open to the wounds of American poverty (i.e. racialized poverty) and to the flatness of culture. Once the revelations of her past come out the floodgates really open. The most affecting part of the book is Wolf’s struggle with despair, conveying periods of moroseness not often found in the works of older writers:

Sometimes I think I only have to make the right kind of effort, and then the right sentences, the saving sentences will appear. But then I learn yet again that no efforts are of any use. What I need to see does not want to show itself. I suspect that it is something very simple, and that’s why it is so well hidden.

It is in this space of suspension that Wolf offers her most penetrating insights.

Despite the well-known events that hung over the writing and eventual publication of City of Angels, the book is actually quite diffuse. Some of its themes will grab readers, others will seem out of place. For example, with the recent granting of the Nobel Prize in literature to Mo Yan, many will appreciate Wolf raising the question of how it is possible to be a committed dissident (or artist) while living under an authoritarian regime towards which you are occasionally conciliatory.

Less interesting are the descriptions of dinner parties that Wolf attends with other Getty Fellows and L.A. artists and intellectuals. (This actually could have been developed into something quite interesting if Wolf reflected more fully on the history that begins in committed, political literature but then finds itself in Southern California, in a network of “global writers and artists,” drinking Sonoma chardonnay and demonstrating how to perfectly time a risotto.) Moreover, we might expect Wolf to be a sharper observer of Los Angeles, a locale which was itself going through a sweeping period of transition, like Germany reckoning with the weight of different histories living on top of one another. But in Wolf’s American scene there is something lacking. The grand themes of literature, not reportage, are her strong suit.

Speaking at a memorial service shortly after Wolf’s death in 2011, Grass made the following remark: “Christa Wolf belonged to the generation in which I also count myself. We were stamped by National Socialism and the late — too late — realization of all the crimes committed by Germans.” One can only imagine the weight that such conditions would put on an author. The major challenge that Wolf faced from 1993 up to the writing of City of Angels was to her moral authority. The public now demanded confirmation of certain aspects of her character: consistency, honesty, a commitment to ideals beyond herself. Her writing was not a platform from which to tell others how to live.

I emerged from City of Angels with a deeper appreciation of how significantly this challenge was felt by Wolf, and how in many ways it had the paradoxical effect of intensifying the final years of her life instead of forcing her into sad resignation. However, as Grass says, the full measure of this struggle is bound to elude younger readers, and maybe is not possible to write anymore.

Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers has been widely lauded for its ambition, intensity, and surprising moments of humor. She recently pulled off the rare New York Times trifecta: A Books of the Times review, a Sunday Book Review, and an author profile. In many respects a bildungsroman about a young artist named Reno, The Flamethrowers effortlessly spans a wide range of times and places — a proto-Futurist movement in 1910s Italy, the New York City art scene of the 1970s, and a landspeed trial on the Bonneville Salt Flats, to name a few. I recently emailed with Kushner about initiations and introductions, Clarice Lispector, challenges to the nature and status of work, politics in art, and writing about the American West.

Michael Schapira: There is a moment early in the book when your protagonist, Reno, first falls in with a set of New York artists. You write:

“There were tacit rules with these people, and all people like them that I later met: You weren’t supposed to ask basic questions. ‘What do you do?’ ‘Where are you from?’ ‘What kind of art do you make?’ . . . Asking an obvious question, even if there were no obvious answer, was a way of indicating to them that they should jettison you as soon as they could.” 

I found this to ring very true, albeit with my far more limited experience navigating the art world. How did you pick up these lessons or develop an ear for the way artists and gallery owners speak? 

Rachel Kushner: I have spent a lot of time in the art world, and I guess I do listen to how people speak. I’m interested in what they say and how they say it. But perhaps the quote above, if true, is true of certain kinds of people generally and not just of those in the art world? I’m not sure. I might even be one of those people myself. Not one who would or might jettison somebody — no, I hate that kind of exclusion — but I do prefer to converse in a way that is “in medias res” perhaps. Catching a wave with someone, getting on a topic, having an exchange that feels real and interesting, and isn’t a formula for “getting to know you.” When I see someone for the first time in a while and they ask, “How have you been?” or “What have you been up to?”, it’s politeness, but a bit of a conversation stopper. Also, the general resume information isn’t always the thing that tells you much about a person, is it? Not everyone wants to be reduced to these formulae for identity.

I think being sensitive to that, to how to get to know someone on his or her own terms, is one of the nuances of sociality. And the narrator is kind of figuring this out in the moment of her immersion. It was an opportunity to describe something I feel I understand, or have at least experienced — both ends of it.

Beyond this, there are different initiation protocols, if you want to call them that, that Reno experiences throughout the book. There is her immersion in the New York art world, her discomfort in the Valera’s villa at Lake Como, her easy though ambiguous acceptance into a radical political group in Rome. Did you look at this as a way to weave in a bildungsroman aspect to a book that gains so much of its strength from building out these different environments? Or was this more a way to tease out the broader theme of how art, economics, and politics were inescapable forces in shaping all the characters in the book, despite their efforts to deny this?

Well, gosh, thank you for so thoughtfully stating all this. Both. Every scene in the book is meant to, I mean should, both deepen the characters featured in it, and put pressure on the subjects, themes, and various kinds of meaning that come up in the writing. The last part of your question is a nice argument that one could make for the book or what I’m getting at, but when I am writing, I’m not going for effects. I mean, wait. I am going for effects, actually. But not arguments. Although books make excellent occasions for arguments — such as that characters are shaped by the forces of history and of culture. But those occasions come after, with the book as an instantiation of the argument.

What I mean to say is that I am writing for pleasure, and in hopes of trying to activate in the writing many different aspects of who I am and what I believe, and that any biases I have about how character comes into being, in life as much as in art, burble up unconsciously rather than polemically.

The book is wide ranging, but I thought there was a very interesting affinity between the art scene in New York in the 1970s and the Autonomist movement in Italy. In his introduction to The Unseen Antonio Negri writes that Nanni Balestrini “represents the invisible yet powerful transformations from material work to immaterial work, from revolt against the boss to revolt against the patriarchy, along with the metamorphosis of bodies brought about within this movement, and the imagination that this new historical condition (social and political to be precise) brings to speech.” In a way the New York artists (e.g the land artists that inspire Reno) were also challenging the status of work, of “the work” that went into a work of art. 

You have been asked about the relationship between the revolutionary moment in the book and current social movements. There are certainly scenes of people pouring into the street or of police clashing with protesters, but I was wondering if you thought that a challenge to the nature and status of work, so present in the art and political movements of the 1970s, still rings true today?

This begs a bit of defining, or redefining, as to what Negri’s position was, in regard to the autonomist and workerist movements, and his role as a primary theoretician of organized autonomy. It is a basic fact that in Italy the sites of antagonism slowly spiraled out from the factory protests (Fiat, Pirelli) of Italy’s “Hot Autumn” in 1969 to an outright refusal of work by an unproductive class in the broader metropolis, whose desires had nothing to do with the productivity of capital or with proletarian needs. I don’t claim to be an expert on these things, but my understanding is that Negri comes out of a theoretical and political tradition in which the worker and factory remained central, even to the diffusion of antagonism to the city itself.

When it was clear, in the years 1973 to 1977, that there was an entire class of non-workers involved in protest in urban sites of refusal, Negri called this class the “socialized worker,” who operated beyond the sphere of the factory, in the milieu of the “diffuse factory” of the metropolis. This has been critiqued as Negri’s rigid insistence on reincorporating non-workers into his own conception of class identity and the role of the worker in revolutionary politics. As Jason Smith has written, summarizing the French political collective Tiqqun’s critique of Negri, “organized Autonomy’s theoretical proposals — especially Negri’s ‘socialized worker’— represent a commitment to the fiction of the social and to the metaphysics of production.” Tiqqun’s position — and perhaps Smith’s, too — is that Negri made a grave and crippling miscalculation, in his insistence on a class identity based on work.

Negri, Tiqqun seems to assert, could not recognize the true and real site of antagonism, which, by 1977, had little to do with work, and with a classical geometry of worker, institution, and state, but was about a new incivility that rejected the entire sphere of work as such, and society as such. There are some, like Tiqqun, who see this incivility and rejection as relating directly to contemporary times, perhaps calling for the emergence of an “imaginary party,” a new ghost built in the leftovers of a nonexistent or defunct class war. The nature and status of work, to try to directly answer your question, was already crumbling in the 1970s. In fact, the 1970s was its death, and burial, and also a moment when the question arose, as to what is to be done when the sites of antagonism are no longer the factories but the entire world, spread through with reproduction and consumption. What is to be done now? We are still asking this question, and attempting to answer it.

The art question above I’ll respond to separately, even as I agree with you that there is some resonance between them. In the late 1960s and very early 1970s there were artists in New York working in ways that could be seen as perhaps problematically romanticizing working class life, and even reproducing class structure while pretending not to, like Robert Morris driving a forklift into a museum in a hardhat, a stogie in his mouth like a labor boss, as the critic Julia Bryan-Wilson pointed out in her excellent book on the Art Worker’s Movement. Morris, Carl Andre, Richard Serra and Donald Judd were all artists whose work utilized factory aesthetics and modes of production. They dressed like factory workers. They theorized that art was labor, but was it really labor? A privileged site of it, to be sure.

Just slightly later Lucy Lippard wrote about the dematerialization of the art object and this, in the hermetic world of art, was certainly a shift away from sellable objects, it was a rejection of the marketplace . . .  but only for a moment. The market, the dealer, and the artist have all learned to get around this playful challenge to sales and profit.

In any case, I don’t make easy parallels between art and politics. A lot of politics in art is just institutional critique, which, in my opinion, is not all that political. It’s about the careers of artists and their oedipal resistance to the museum that they need so badly. That said, I’m not really sure art is suitably the arena for politics. And neither is the novel. Ideas can drift through both, but never as driving forces. Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

Writers will often bristle at being assigned a function or being told they are needed, but one key difference between the Autonomist movement and conceptual art in the 1970s seemed to be the role of writing. Autonomism influenced poets like Balestrini and Umberto Eco and spawned a unique style of Marxist criticism in people like Bifo and Paolo Virno. Writing seemed central to the movement.

However, much of the work of conceptual art, whether it be performance art, land art, or minimalism seem less dependent on developing a style of criticism or explaining one’s work. The goal seemed to be to collapse the distinction between discourse and practice and thus blur the distinction between art and life. In general, do you think that political movements benefit from developing a specific style of writing? Or is there a lesson that political actors can learn from art that moves away from a focus on writing?

But the artist’s movements you mention — Land Art and Minimalism in particular — spawned entire discourses in the art world and even the very tradition of artists developing their own theoretical claims in order to define, from inside, what it was they were doing.

These artists developed their own terms of discourse, really entirely. This is a moment when all of these artists were writing long theoretical pieces in the pages of Artforum. By the early 1970s, you have Avalanche Magazine, which was specifically founded as an outlet for artists to articulate the theoretical underpinnings of their own practices. A great deal of Robert Smithson’s discourses on his work and on entropy originated in the pages of Avalanche. Bomb Magazine, later, was founded on a very similar principle. It answered to a need in a time when it was important, suddenly, for artists to explain their own work. Donald Judd wrote long pieces about Minimalism. So did Carl Andre. So did Robert Morris. These people took it upon themselves to define what they were doing.

Smithson’s writings are still being read by young artists, they are perhaps as important as the earthworks he made. I joke, in the novel, that the ethos of Minimalism — “what you see is what you get” — the thereness in the room of a simple and industrial looking thing — is always problematic because in fact to really get the thereness of an object you had to have read about Minimalism. The object does not detach cleanly from its discourse and rise up in its thingness for the uninformed viewer. Those who know about Minimalism are able to situate the thereness by virtue of an instructive discourse they read about beforehand.

I really liked a piece you wrote in Bookforum recently on Clarice Lispector. Do the habits that you build up as a critic or editor bleed into the writing of the novel? You clearly have done a lot of research, so is one of the pleasures of writing the novel introducing people to a new world (conceptual art, radical politics of the left and the right in Italy, motorcycle racing)?

Thanks for mentioning the piece on Lispector, which required a much higher research-to-word ratio than The Flamethrowers. I welcomed that assignment because it would force me to attempt to become an expert on her, spend a period of time as a Lispector inspector.

With fiction, I see the role of expertise maybe a bit differently. Although not completely differently. I like to read novels where the author seems knowledgeable; like someone you know you could walk calmly next to through a complicated situation and he or she would be alive to its meaning and ironies. And you wouldn’t even have to mention them out loud to each other. A writer who cares about the world and about the smaller but not insignificant details that can be cracked open to find humor and meaning. That’s how I like to feel when I’m reading and what I try to go for when I am writing, in the sense that I want to activate what I know but in a manner that is organic to the narrative, and not simply knowledge for its own sake.

The novel is a special occasion, or a whole array of them, occasions in which only something very filtered and metabolized and appropriate to context can be called upon. I don’t like the info-dump, as it’s known. Finally, I actually didn’t do a lot of research. The novel enfolded certain areas of knowledge — art, politics, motorcycles — that I had acquired just in the course of life, as a person. These things were not fields of study that I pursued in order to write about them on this occasion.

In the Bookforum piece you wrote admiringly of Lispector’s disregard of classical narrative. “Let no one be mistaken,” Lispector writes in The Hour of the Star, “I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.” There is certainly a narrative thread that runs through The Flamethrowers, but did you draw on Lispector or other authors to afford yourself more freedom in the story that you wanted to tell?

I love that line. “Let no one be mistaken, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort”! You could tattoo every line she’s ever written on someone’s flesh and it wouldn’t be a waste. I mean, as far as those “sound-bite wisdom” tattoos go. Her simplicity is an achievement, a precision that can only be arrived at with her intelligence and her ambition, her need to close in on the truth. But I did not draw consciously on Lispector. I was thinking of her in a sustained way only later, after I finished my novel.

That said, I do perceive the narrative thread as doing multiple kinds of work, one of which is to buy me some space to do other things besides further a plot. Lispector is different. She isn’t digressing, as there is practically no narrative, and by the end of her life, there was none at all, and those are the best books! I like certain works that have a story, but don’t sacrifice nuance to that story, and that try also to pour in complicated meanings that don’t inhere in “plot.” Like Gaddis’s The Recognitions. The early DeLillo novels, End Zone, for instance — a classic and a favorite. Celine, Journey to the End of the Night. Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke . . . Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and 2666, which to me are one grand tapestry. Pasolini’s crazy and unfinished Petrolio. There were many books that enabled and influenced my own, but not directly or explicitly. I name those but there are always so many.

The first major setting in the book is the Bonneville Salt Flats, where Reno is trying to set a land speed record on a motorcycle. Your descriptions of the landscape are very beautiful. They struck me as very accepting of the landscape, which in the book is contrasted with the way New York based land artists viewed the “real authentic West.” Even though you’ve spent so much time in New York and other big urban areas, do you still consider yourself a Western writer? Does that designation even have any meaning to you?

It’s a good question. But no, the designation “Western writer” strangely holds no meaning for me. That said, I love certain writings about the West, but it seems not to matter to me that the writer be from the West. In any case, I find people’s firm and insistent grip on identity and origins to be sad and arch. Who knows what defines us? What interests me and excites me at a given time — that is what defines me. And I will go ahead and feel suitably proprietary about whatever it is I want to understand and transmute into fiction.

But it’s true, I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don’t identify that state of mind as having to do with my own origins, having grown up in the west, although I certainly crisscrossed Nevada countless times growing up, and then as a young adult, in cars and on motorcycles. I know the landscape so it was not difficult for me to write about it, and it is tissued into the primary scenes, if you will, so it was there, waiting for me, as material. But I think anyone who has been enraptured by the west can write about it. You don’t have to be from it. Robert Smithson, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, have all contributed to a Western canon of some kind. Blood Meridian was without question the novel that made me want to become a writer. And I think McCarthy is from Tennessee, right?

[University of Chicago Press, 2013]

Is Emil Cioran an author to be feared? Is his writing dangerous in some way that should, for example, prevent me from including his aphorisms at the end of group emails? Is this kind of question ridiculous to even ask nowadays, when the more appropriate question would be whether it is possible to take Cioran, or any writer for that matter, seriously enough to feel his threat? I would have thought not, had a classmate not raised this very issue when I suggested that we read The New Gods in our reading group. What about Cioran’s early admiration of Hitler, they objected? And his enthusiasm for the Iron Guard, a fascist political movement from Cioran’s native Romania? This is not to reduce writers to their politics or biographies, they assured the group with the obligatory reference to Heidegger, but just to raise a note of caution to make sure that we knew what we would be getting into.

In the case of Cioran the question of biography is either distracting or illuminating, depending on which way we take it. To begin with distraction, namely the political side, it is not the most earth shattering insight to observe that among the big ideologies of the 20^th century, the one most shot through with contradictions was the anti-Semetic strain of fascism. Take, for example, Celine, the virulent anti-Semite, writing to a former lover, a Jew, on the news that her husband was killed in Dachau:

Dear Cillie,

What awful news! At least you’re far away, on the other side of the world. Were you able to take a little money with you? Obviously, you’re going to start a new life over there. How will you work? Where will Europe be by the time you receive this letter?

We’re living over a volcano.

On my side, my little dramas are nothing compared to yours (for the moment), but tragedy looms nonetheless . . .

Because of my anti-Semitic stance I’ve lost all my jobs (Clichy, etc.) and I’m going to court on March 8. You see, Jews can persecute too.

Cioran’s writing is undergirded by this same political and moral inconsistency (“volcanic” or ironically funny, depending on the topic). The moments that might make the reader cringe are momentary, not foundational, and certainly not prescriptive in the full-blown sense. And, moreover, the content of these accusations are up for debate. For his ideal political regime Cioran names “a Left without rigid dogmas, a Left exempt from fanaticism.” On the Jews, “there is an extraordinary Jewish optimism. The Jews are the only tragic people that remain optimists.”

But, turning to the illuminating function of biography, Cioran suffered from bouts of insomnia. “They began in my youth,” he said in an interview, “when I was about nineteen. It wasn’t simply a medical problem, it was deeper, in fact the fundamental and most serious experience of my life. All the rest is secondary. Those sleepless nights opened my eyes, everything changed for me because of them.” Indeed, for Cioran there might be something to fear from the consciousness born of insomnia. A fragment from the “Strangled Thoughts” section of The New Gods reads, “Insomnia’s role in history, from Caligula to Hitler. Is the impossibility of sleeping the cause or the consequence of cruelty? The tyrant lies awake — that is what defines him.” Cioran will often frame his thinking in terms of duration, frequency, and intensity, and for the author of The Trouble with Being Born you can imagine the cruel thoughts that would issue from the heightened consciousness of a string of sleepless nights.

The New Gods is the most recent of Cioran’s books to be reprinted by the University of Chicago Press, beautifully translated from the original French by the poet Richard Howard (the others are On the Heights of Despair and Tears and Saints). It consists of a diverse set of essays and aphorisms, but many of Cioran’s cherished themes run throughout the book. The opening essays, “The Demiurge” and “The New Gods,” could be called pieces of speculative theology. The first recounts the alternative creation story put forth by the Gnostics, namely that the creator of the material world followed a logic of evil and imperfection. The second is a genealogy of religious fanaticism and has us linger on the pivotal moment when Christianity violently detaches itself from and subsequently suppresses pagan religions. Contra Tertullian, “the soul is naturally pagan,” Cioran writes in a Nietzschean mode, invoking the echo of our natural dispersal of energies in a polytheistic cosmology. Christianity once had the vitality to fight this battle, but has for quite some time now settled into the worst form of religious mediocrity. Lest these reflections remain on a level of abstraction, or needlessly luxuriate in the most pessimistic consequences to be drawn from human history, he brings us right into the secular present:

In an age when, lacking religious conflicts, we witness ideological ones, the question raised for us is indeed the one which haunted waning antiquity: how to renounce so many gods for just one? — with this corrective, nonetheless, that the sacrifice demanded of us is located on a lower level, no longer that of gods but that of opinions. As soon as a divinity, or a doctrine, claims supremacy, freedom is threatened. If we see a supreme value in toleration, then everything which does it violence is to be considered a crime . . .

As interesting as these initial essays are, Cioran is at his best in the form of the aphorism. “The aphorism,” he has said, “is scorned by ‘serious’ people, and the professors look down upon it. . . . I can put two aphorisms that are contradictory right next to each other. Aphorisms are also momentary truths. They’re not decrees. And I could tell you in nearly every case why I wrote this or that phrase, and when. They’re always set in motion by an encounter, an incident, a fit of temper, but they all have a cause. They’re not at all gratuitous.”  Some readers might challenge this final point, as there is surely some gratuity in the “Encounters with Suicide” and “Strangled Thoughts” sections. (To take a representative example from each: “You haven’t seen to the bottom of a thing if you haven’t considered it in the light of prostration.” “Chatter: any conversation with someone who has not suffered.”) But the overall effect of Cioran’s prose is to trouble and unsettle the dogmas that so often collapse our writing and thinking into paeans to banality: that more democracy is transparently good, that childhood is a reserve of innocence and goodness (Cioran quotes Calvin here, for whom children are “little lumps of filth”), or that we can definitively prove the superiority of interest over indifference.

In this regard Cioran is to be feared as much as Pascal, Montaigne, or other great French skeptics were to be feared in their times. There is a discomfort in submitting yourself to a form of radical self-scrutiny, and then taking the further step of submitting the results to others. But, to return to the worries of my classmate, there is also a great deal of poetic work that such a move accomplishes. “The desolation expressed by a gorilla’s eyes. A funeral mammal. I am descended from that gaze.” “When we meditate upon vacuity, impermanence, nirvana, crouching or lying down is the best position. It is the one in which these themes were conceived. It is only in the West that man thinks standing up. Which accounts perhaps for the unfortunately positive character of our philosophy.” “My rages lack breeding: They are too plebeian, too earthly, to be able to emancipate themselves from a cause.”

As should be clear by this point, given that I’ve had to fight the urge to hand the language of this review completely over to Cioran, I am among those who cherish this form of writing for maintaining the link between philosophy, literature, religion, and culture that the professionalization and specialization of each of these domains works so hard to sever. “I’ve never practiced a profession and have lived like a sort of student,” Cioran has said. “I consider this my greatest success, my life hasn’t been a failure because I succeeded in doing nothing.” In light of our contemporary fear of freedom it is hard to disagree with the reasonableness of Cioran’s self-accounting on this point.

There are few filmmakers working today like Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, the sibling duo from Belguim who have, amongst their many festival accolades, directed two Palme d’Or winning films — Rosetta (1999) and L’Enfant (2005). I first encountered the brothers when I was living in northern France, once an industrial center that, like the Dardenne’s native Seraing on the outskirts of Liege, had witnessed the devastating consequences of de-industrialization. What was left has become at once a familiar feature of our everyday lives in the West and a rarity in our cinema, namely the abstract and characterless zones of commerce, circulation, and housing on the urban periphery. It is here that the Dardennes set their everyday dramas that, by virtue of their straightforward, unadorned presentation, are some of the most revealing and affecting films in contemporary cinema.

In The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers: Responsible Realism Philip Mosley provides an essential account of where this cinema emerged and what exactly makes the Dardennes such distinct and important filmmakers. Mosley is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University and has produced many works of scholarship and translation, including Split Screen: Belgian Cinema and Cultural Identity and a translation of Francois Jacqmin’s The Book of the Snow, which was shortlisted for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize. I spoke with Mosley about what he means by “responsible realism,” the importance of working class political movement for realist filmmakers, and the history of Belgian cinema.

Michael Schapira: How did you first encounter the films of the Dardenne brothers? Did you immediately respond to their approach to filmmaking and the subject matter of the films?

Philip Mosley: When The Promise was released in 1996 and made the brothers’ reputation as filmmakers, I was already familiar with Belgian cinema, having studied it as an expansion of my initial interest in Belgian francophone literature, of which I’ve translated a number of texts in prose and verse. Eventually I wrote a history, Split Screen: Belgian Cinema and Cultural Identity. Growing up in eastern England close to the North Sea, I had traveled often to France and the Low Countries and had been exposed quite early to their languages and cultures. Then I had lived in Glasgow, Scotland in the 1980s before coming to the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area of northeastern Pennsylvania. Both areas, rich in industrial history, have had to face the challenges of postindustrial decline. So the content of the Dardennes’ films immediately chimed with my own experiences of these predominantly blue-collar communities.

In the book you write, “One consequence of the collapse of traditional leftist discourses and grand ideological narratives has been in how realist cinema of the last three decades has represented ordinary people.” Yet even if this is the case you still see strong exceptions in the Dardennes, Ken Loach, and Mike Leigh, all filmmakers from places that were once heavily informed by a strong working-class consciousness and their correlate political structures. Even if the grand ideological narratives have collapsed, do you think a kind of vestigial memory of working class life can still guide realist filmmakers? And if so, have you thought about the challenges that this poses to American filmmakers, who have a much less organized form of class consciousness to tap into?

The Dardennes certainly draw on a “vestigial memory” for their films. They grew up in an area that had long been the engine-room of Belgium, one marked by a strong political consciousness. They witnessed the death throes of those heavy industries that had spawned the working-class solidarity of their communities.

They were also influenced by the grand sweep of post-1968 European leftism. It has been more difficult for American filmmakers to tap into these sources of class consciousness whose ideological structures have become buried beneath a superficial and homogenous culture. The process of tapping ought perhaps to be an easier task for independent directors free of studio demands and constraints. Hollywood invariably has trouble with unadorned representations of the poor and the disadvantaged whose life stories may not produce positive resolutions in the form of glamor, adventure, triumphant individualism, and social mobility.

I liked the sequencing of your book. You begin with a chapter on what you call “responsible realism,” then mark out the philosophical and cinematic touchstones that are helpful to understand the arc of the Dardennes’ career, and finally proceed chronologically through the filmography. Why did you choose this kind of approach, as opposed to drawing from across the filmography to make different thematic points?

Most people know little of Belgium and even less of its French-speaking region of Wallonia. I thought some context at the beginning of the book would help readers understand and appreciate the culture that gave rise to the brothers’ cinema. However, in search of universal meanings their films resolutely transcend a restrictive localism. This places them in an international tradition of auteurist cinema from which they have drawn great inspiration. Since the debate on cinematic realism remains open, I deemed it prudent to engage with it at the outset and to establish a particular place within it for the Dardennes’ work. My chronological approach seeks to clarify the evolution of their work from documentary to tentative fiction to an assured and distinctive style in The Promise and beyond.

The Dardennes’ films are political in many ways: in the choice of subject matter, location, realist aesthetics that avoid “the lure of the melodramatic and the imposition of the doctrinaire,” and even the very deliberate method in which they make their films. In all these ways the Dardennes are challenging the narratives of what we could call late capitalism. This was most apparent when a labor law regulating pay to teenage and casual worker was dubbed “The Rosetta Plan,” named after the titular character of the Dardennes’ 1999 film. Is this the type of political impact that you think can follow from a “responsibly realist” orientation (i.e. non-polemical films that nonetheless stir up people’s political beliefs)?

Yes, I believe it is. The Dardennes powerfully depict how individuals become mired in poverty, unemployment, violence, alienation, etc., and how they try to deal with these issues, but their tight focus on personal trajectories as well as their rigorous control of narrative, dialogue, and mise-en-scène never allows any ideological tub-thumping to enter the frame. Among masterful realists I love Ken Loach’s cinema, but occasionally you sense he slips into a doctrinaire mode. This does not happen with the Dardennes, whose characters, plots, and locations deliver an implicit political message.

The urban landscape, especially those peripheral spaces that Luc Dardennes described as “a landscape of empty devastation,” is so important to the aesthetic of these films. Do you think that the Dardennes could make a rural version of their films? Or, do you think they subscribe to the hypothesis set forth at the beginning of Henri Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution: “Society has become completely urbanized”?

In principle, yes, the Dardennes could go rural and still find appropriate themes and scenarios, but it’s unlikely given their rootedness in an urban environment they know so well. As much as I respect Lefebvre (and cite him in my book), I don’t agree — and I doubt the Dardennes would either — with his statement, which is not to be taken literally, as it would be absurd, but serves as a metaphor for an increasingly urbanized locus of power, influence, and mass communication in society. Realist cinema can work well in rural contexts: for example, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, which captures pitch-perfectly and unsentimentally a poor, demoralized redneck community in the Ozarks.

A professor of mine once opened a course with the cryptic claim that organized crime is the unacknowledged scandal of our times, and we ignore it at our own peril. Reading your book actually gave me a little more clarity on what he might have meant, especially in your discussion of human trafficking (The Promise, The Silence of Lorna, The Child) and the everyday forms of exploitation that follow the breakdown of social cohesion and trust. How important is crime in understanding the desperate situations in which many of the characters find themselves?

Both small- and large-scale crime are very important to an understanding of the Dardennes’ cinema. The influence of Bresson is felt. At the heart of all of the films is an unspoken statement of the causal nexus that draws people on the socioeconomic edge wittingly or unwittingly into criminal activities. Even in Falsch (1986), their only non-realist feature, which is a highly stylized, dislocated, atemporal depiction of the reunion of a German Jewish family, the mass crime of the Holocaust remains a determining factor. The possible exception is Rosetta (1999), though we still witness the petty crime of a young man cheating on his employer as a critical plot element in Rosetta’s own desperate search for work and identity.  Other films run the gamut from human trafficking to extortion to drug dealing to murder, but the brothers are careful not to sensationalize any of this criminality for dramatic or visual effect.

You write that “the brothers see themselves as making films about individuals in universal situations: economic hardship, social disintegration, personal isolation, and moral responsibility. They have no need to go beyond their own area to discover people and conditions that pertain to those chosen themes of their films.” Do you think Belgium (and Wallonia in particular) offers specific advantages because of its recent history of deindustrialization, or are the Dardennes pointing to something that works across different settings (i.e. are they articulating here what you mean by “responsible realism”)?

As I mentioned earlier, the deindustrialization of Wallonia coincides with the Dardennes’ biography: young teenagers when the coal mines began to close in the 1960s and young men when the steel mills were shutting down. They are knowledgeable enough to be confident of their own environment as representative of a way of life and a set of social conditions that may be found throughout postindustrial society. This confidence in the universality of their films shows itself paradoxically in their satisfaction in making them at home. Their “responsible” realism has to do with the ethical crises faced by their characters and also with their own suggestion of those characters’ potential for changes to the good. But in their films such a possibility is not limited to members of the underclass of Liège-Seraing in a particular historical juncture; by implication, these are stories of everyman. It is not for nothing that their cinema pays homage to the humanism of a Kurosawa or a Rossellini.

For those like myself who are largely ignorant of Belgian cinema, can you recommend some key films in its history?

Until recently Belgian cinema was virtually unknown outside of French- or Dutch-language regions and sometimes even within Belgium itself, where homegrown products struggle generally to compete with foreign films. A largely artisanal cinema dependent heavily on international coproduction, it has suffered from poor distribution especially in the shadow of the powerful French film industry. Before the 1980s the key auteurist was the late André Delvaux. His exquisitely crafted magic realism — in films from the 1960s and 1970s such as The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short, Rendezvous à Bray, and Belle — is what first drew my attention to the peculiar qualities of Belgian cinema. And during that period the talented and unpredictable Harry Kümel almost offhandedly made Daughters of Darkness, now a lesbian vampire cult classic.

Since the 1980s Belgian directors have become better known and their films more widely distributed. The breakthroughs came with Jaco Van Dormael’s Toto the Hero; the mockumentary Man Bites Dog, made by three novice filmmakers; The Music Teacher and Farinelli by Gérard Corbiau. As a result, in the last twenty years more Belgian films have caught the eye, such as Everybody Famous! by Dominique Deruddere, who nurtured a quirky American connection in his early work; Daens by Stijn Coninx, a powerful and very political period drama; and Bullhead by Michaël R. Roskam, recently nominated for an Oscar. We cannot ignore the work of Chantal Akerman whose uncompromising formalism turned Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles into a staple of structural and feminist cinema. Finally, though copies are even more difficult or impossible to find than features, there is also a strong tradition of Belgian short film, documentary, and animation. Belgium is, after all, the home of Tintin and the Smurfs!