Ohmann Interview

the minnesota review n.s. 45-46 (1995-96)

Jeffrey Williams

English in America Updated: An Interview with Richard Ohmann

JW: The question I want to start with is about English in America, which strikes me as having been ahead of its time in dealing with issues-like institutionalization and professionalization-that are very current now. What was the field like when you wrote it?

RO: I remember when I came to think that I was writing a book-rather than just the stray article-and I knew that I wanted to write about the institutions of English, I looked around to find out what the historians and the sociologists had said about departments, and I was astonished to find that they had very little to say at all. There was literature on professionalism that was some help, especially an older scholar named Everett Hughes, but the sociologists were remarkably silent about departments-the institutions in which they themselves and we work. So I felt that I was making it up as I went along, clearing the brush, and I'm sure that the path was erratic, but it was a kind of a path. I don't claim credit for all of the explosion of interest in professionalization in the institutions of the academies, but I think that what I did in English in America, along with work that was underway simultaneously by Burton Bledstein and by Magali Sarfatti Larson, really opened up a field of inquiry, and with a certain political urgency in doing so. So I'm satisfied about that, though I have not read parts of English in America during the intervening eighteen years, and I'm sure that there are parts that I would find very embarrassing now if I read them again. But some parts of it seem to have set some energies going for people in our field or in other fields-the section on composition and the sections on departments especially.

JW: A colleague once told me that it changed the way he looked at this profession and in some ways brought him to marxism.

RO: Really? You said it was a work that was slightly ahead of its time, but in another way, it was entirely part of its moment, which was really a few years before it came out. That was the time when a whole bunch of people in the U.S. were engaging in a ruthless critique of all things existing, to use one of my favorite phrases, and when it seemed as if every day when you went to a meeting, new knowledge and thought opened up, and it was very exciting. There's no possibility that English in America could have turned into what it was without the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association, without the New University Conference, and the people in literary and cultural studies who had small meetings within the bigger NUC meetings and astonished ourselves mutually with the way we were looking again at the work that we did. In short, its ideas came out of the politics of that time and the efforts of mostly younger intellectuals. I was the one, as it turned out, that specialized in departments and the institutions of writing instruction, but the book itself, as can be said of almost all books, can best be thought of as a kind of collective project, or the result of a collective project of that time. It was unthinkable without The Movement, as we used to call it.

JW: What do you think of the current concern with these issues?

RO: I hope that there is more and more of it. I value very much things that people like Evan Watkins and Bruce Robbins and Jim Berlin have done. They've gone, in some ways, well beyond what I did, and it seems to me that there are also a lot of historical studies of the discipline and institutions, especially of writing. People like Robert Connors have been grounding the kinds of points at which I more or less conjectured about the history of composition, both in English in America and in Politics of Letters.

JW: How did you come to do this kind of work, to be interested in the things you deal with in English in America?

RO: The simple answer-it's a double-barrel answer-I was increasingly discontent and uneasy with what we were doing in our own rush towards fuller professionalization and specialization in the early 60s, and I was angry about race and militarism and class in our country, and those two strands fused for me. I turned back to look at our work in light of the critiques that were being staged of American power around the world-the Vietnam War and racism, and then a little bit later, male supremacy-so those two things simply came together because I needed to know why I was doing the things I did and what they were contributing to, or how they were critical of, the uses of power in the country that I was contesting more openly in the field. I never thought I was writing a book. In fact, I've never in my career so far set out to write a book and written it. The ones I've set out to write, I haven't written. The ones I've written, I did not intend to write.

JW: Really? What were you planning on writing next? You wrote a lot of pieces for College English . . .

RO: I gave talks and wrote articles about particular questions and eventually I began to see that these could be part of a kind of an overview of our profession. And some time around 1974 I decided that I would turn that into the book. In the material you sent me, you asked a question about writing style, and I think that one of the ways I came to the kind of-we'll say "conversational"-style I now like and try to use is that so much of that writing was addressed to particular moments, crises, occasions, and it came out of a ferment of, well, anger, among other things. I wanted to write with a certain energy, as if there were real people there reading it.

JW: What's the connection with College English? You were editor for them at one time; could you fill in that background? It seems relevant to this question of writing style, since it reaches a larger and more general audience than most other journals except maybe PMLA.

RO: Oh, absolutely. It probably has about 15,000 readers. Well, College English was very important to me. I feel it was more important to me, in a sense, than I was to it, though I am proud of what College English was during those years. It seems to me now that an editor would have had to be an idiot at that time not to produce an interesting journal-partly because of the ferment that I talked about earlier, and partly because things just came in. We got articles from Oregon or Arkansas or from a person you'd never heard of that gave the "Gee whiz, Marge, look at this" effect, as the editor of the National Inquirer puts it. It was exciting. Don Gray, who was the editor after I finished, told me once that he had looked back over a number of the issues during my editorship and thought that material like that just wasn't coming in. Of course, we did do some soliciting and farm out some edited issues so that we were active in cultural production there. But also, we were learning a lot and having our eyes opened. Most of the writing had a certain intensity-not all of it in the conversational voice-but with energies that were not conventionally academic, so I'm sure I learned something from the writing that came into College English at that time, too.

JW: How did you come to be affiliated with it? Was it the interest in teaching?

RO: Well, when I was a graduate student and a teaching fellow at Harvard, there were two or three journals around the staff room, the place where the TA's hung out, and one of them was College English, and I realized then in the late 50s that in each issue there was usually something that I was interested in, maybe that I could use in my own embryonic teaching efforts, and that it was different from PMLA and JEGP and so on, and I kind of liked it. So I went to a couple of NCTE meetings, but I was more active in MLA before 1966. College English is the journal of the college section of the National Council of Teachers of English; the college section committee picks its editor. They opened up a competition in 1964 when Jim Miller at the University of Chicago was about to end his term, and they asked me if I wanted to apply, and I put in an application and got the job. And then history took it up. I mean, I had a prospectus in College English some time during 1965, and it was, I think, much more oriented towards theorizing everything, theorizing literature, the profession, language, and so on, than it was towards political intervention . . .

JW: Some of your early stuff-some of the citations I've seen-is about linguistics.

RO: Yes. I did two bodies of work early on. One had to do with stylistics and was grounded especially in transformational grammar, and the other had to do with pragmatics and was grounded in speech act theory, and there was some overlap between the two. I still retain an interest in speech act theory, though I don't practice it very extensively anymore. So those were my interests, and by the time I became editor of College English, I was disturbed, as I mentioned earlier, by the seeming juggernaut of professional expansion and the kind of irrationality of some of the practices that were developing-that is, too many books to read and books read only by eight people, which became, if anything, more extreme. But events took their course and College English turned out very differently from what I envisioned.

I mentioned that there were guest-edited issues, some of them especially important, including one of the first issues of feminist criticism and critique, about 1970 . . .

JW: Who edited it?

RO: Elaine Hedges and Susan McAllester. And there was one that Ira Shaw and Dick Wasson edited on marxist criticism, which was one of the first such issues that came out. Another was an issue in 1974 edited by Louie Crew and Rictor Norton called "The Homosexual Imagination," which was the first issue of a scholarly or professional journal ever on that subject.

JW: Long before Eve Sedgwick . . .

RO: Long before Eve Sedgwick. That was the only time that the people to whom I theoretically reported-the college section committee-raised objections to anything I was doing in College English. They didn't mind the marxists, the anarchists, the feminists, and so on, but it deeply upset them that the homosexuals were now in College English. But they didn't try to fire me.

JW: Really? There was grumbling?

RO: Oh, yes. Some people did not want that issue to be there. And now it's twenty years later, and I'm going to chair a session of 4 C's this spring that celebrates the twentieth anniversary of "The Homosexual Imagination" in that issue of College English, which is an indication of how things can turn around.

JW: Speaking of changes in the profession, how would you update English in America now? Obviously, you talk about some of the same things in Politics of Letters and some articles I've seen, but what would be one angle you would take now to update it? Any afterthoughts on it?

RO: Well, there would be no simple way to update that book, except by looking back critically upon it and attempting some kind of dialectical interaction with it. There are parts of it that, if it were to be reprinted, would probably just have to be scrapped. But even in some of those portions of it-the last three chapters, for example, when I made distant and conjectural forays into issues of knowledge and power-even those parts were generative for me-things having to do with technology and the environment and the challenges to the biosphere, the particular way that our society had and to an extent still has of generating and deploying knowledge that serves capital and profit. It's just that I wasn't very well equipped to write about those things at that time.

JW: I was wondering when I first read it, because it seems implicitly marxist in that you work out, for the most part, how English education is an ideological state apparatus . . .

RO: That was not available to me as a marxist critique then. That is, I did not know Althusser, and I hardly knew the marxist classics. I knew at that time some writing by radical political economists and other radical groups within the U.S. academic professions. Just at the time that English in America came out, I was working with study groups, with faculty members and students, to learn marxism. The kinds of language and concepts that were available to me then had to do with power elites and the power structure and the techno-structure, things of that sort. I mean, it turned out, of course, that marxism tremendously enriched and deepened for me those sorts of perceptions and arguments, but it really joined in afterwards. There was another part of that question.

JW: Yes, how would you update it? There are different factors on the scene now, obviously, and there are different contours of multinational capitalism that have been played out, so that might be an unfair question.

RO: I couldn't, without rebuilding the entire architecture of the book, in the light of what happened later. Incidentally, within two or three years of publishing English in America, I had read some things that would have made a big difference had I known them at the time. Braverman's Monopoly Capital especially was a crucial text for me in rethinking work. I was reading those books about 1976 or 1977 with study groups, and there was probably nothing more important for me than Braverman in deciding that I was willing to try to be a marxist. But then, on top of that, of course there have been major changes in the positioning and structure of the professional managerial class . . .

JW: Which wasn't even a phrase at that point . . .

RO: No, that wasn't available to me. The Ehrenreichs' article first came out after that. Anyway, there were new structures and processes, and there was also new writing about that class, which would have related if I had had it available. Nonetheless, English in America is tentative and hesitant and in some ways rather crude about the way that a certain section of the PMC, mainly people who teach English, work for capital. There's little there beyond saying we teach students to be obedient and punctual and so on . . .

JW: Neat manners and handling memos . . .

RO: Right. Those things are really more about how the PMC reproduces itself than they are about how we discipline the proletariat; those things have been theorized better, and I would want to talk about that. I definitely want to talk about the evolution of late capitalism, post-Fordist capitalism, with the help of people like David Harvey, whose book, The Condition of Postmodernity, when I finally got to it, a year and a half ago, helped me think about these things a lot. I sometimes write now about the regime of flexible accumulation and the development of highly mobile forms of capital, credit, and so on, intensely innovative production, with technology, and especially the creative uses of flexible pools of labor all around the world, as characterizing the situation we find ourselves in now. It's remarkable the extent to which, as I've written in an article called "English After the USSR," you could understand some of the things that have been happening in the academic work force, English especially, as homologous to those developments from Fordism to the regime of flexible accumulation. We were a little laboratory for the use of mobile, exploited, part-time, flex-time labor . . .

JW: All under the optimistic auspices of giving people more opportunities . . .

RO: Absolutely. There's no law that forbids you to teach eight courses a semester at $1,700 a course at eight different colleges.

JW: I have a former student who is getting his Ph.D. at University of Maryland and he teaches three different courses at two local colleges, which I think is horrible. I mean, the profession has abandoned him ...

RO: It's terrible. Jim Slevin wrote an article about this in The Politics of Writing Instruction, which lays out the dismal facts, and proposes professional remedies-not exactly unionization, but banding together to fight administrations to end this scandal. I don't think that's easy to do. I don't think it's possible to do without a much more integrated national politically savvy organization of academics. The attractions of this kind of work policy to administrations are simply too overwhelming. I've been serving as a consultant to one of the State University of New York colleges for the last three years, and between my first visit there and my second visit there, the seven or eight full-time, non-tenure-track faculty members, who had benefits and decent salaries and who were doing most of the composition work there, had disappeared entirely, to be replaced by a group of part-time adjuncts at a salary something like the one that I mentioned, $1,700 a course. I'm talking about a very remote place in upstate New York where they've been able to find a phalanx of adjuncts at those salaries to come in and teach. I spoke about this with the dean on my last visit there, and he said that even now this college was not up to the benchmark for the SUNY system, meaning that it didn't have as many adjuncts in relation to tenure-track faculty as the average for the entire system; therefore, it had to do more of this. These are budget-driven decisions, and the ethics of them can easily be adjusted-tempered-by the observation that there are people out there who are willing to do this work. But it's a very serious obstacle to organizing professionally and politically because we do have these increasingly divided groups. Anyhow, it was dumb of me in English in America not to have paid attention to the job crisis which already existed. In fact, the job crisis in English burst upon us in 1969 at the MLA convention in Denver.

JW: It was my understanding that it was much later, in 1975 or so. You mentioned, in a piece that I just saw in College English, "Graduate Students, Professionals, Intellectuals," that the situation you came out of was a lot different because jobs were so plentiful.

RO: They were plentiful up through 68, and then our field participated in the tectonic plate shifts that Harvey describes in his book. That is, all those changes that you can mark from about 1970 included, as a very, very minor part, the job crisis in the humanities, especially in English. The 69 MLA convention was supposed to have been held in Chicago, but because of what happened at the Democratic Convention in 68, a number of organizations were boycotting Chicago, and MLA was persuaded to do that and went to Denver instead. MLA had never met in Denver or such a place before. But the Radical Caucus people went out there expecting to carry on inquiry and provocation and disruption in the same ways that we had in 68 in New York, and to an extent, we did. But suddenly, on the first day of the convention, there was a new organization. It was called the Job-Seekers Caucus-graduate students who were finishing their Ph.D.'s and had no historical reason to expect that there wouldn't be more jobs, found that there were no job interviews, a lot of jobs had dried up, which has continued for the intervening twenty-four years with small oscillations one way or another.

So that was definitely out there in professional space to be charted. I can't remember whether I even alluded to it in English in America, but the general critique that I staged was one of an affluent profession which is able to take advantage of a historical conjuncture to strengthen its own position, and that was true for the tenure-track and tenured people, but meanwhile the peripheral army of the unemployed was being recruited right then in a very big way. That I would want to talk about in an updated edition. I might also mention another consequence for our field: the college in the SUNY system that I alluded to earlier has essentially no one in the English department, except for the very recent hires, who came there after about 1970. In 1970, after expanding for fifteen years from an old normal school into a rather large college, the money began to run out. They participated in the job crisis that began in the 60s, so there were no more additional positions. Most of the people who were hired then got tenure between 1970 and 1975. That, in itself, is a minor problem for English departments all over the country-too many of my generation are occupying the tenured jobs.

JW: I realize that it's a complicated set of factors, but what is the political valence of that pool of unemployed? I mean, is it some sort of deliberate emaciation of intellectuals, or just a function of the job market and post-Fordism?

RO: That's such a complicated question, let me just say that there are contradictory forces at work here. One is that because the jobs are so few and the stakes are so high for graduate students and untenured faculty members, there are some pressures to do whatever it is that needs to be done in your particular institution, and that may be a repressive influence, but at the very same time, the little victories of the last twenty-five years are nonetheless victories, and intellectual work of the sort that you and I do now can also claim its own rewards. That is, you can get tenure for being a feminist, a queer theorist, or a marxist, so I don't think that there's a simple way that the two-class system in our profession is going to play out in terms of intellectual work.

But it's such a hard question to think about politically. You asked me in the questions you sent about what chances there are for political work in the academy; it's very hard for me to think about that question as a labor question. I know that's only part of what you meant, but it seems to me that this sort of dual labor system, which has been developing and strengthening for twenty years or more, is basically in all sectors and all economies. It's worldwide, and the break-up of so-called actually existing socialism is just going to mean further possibilities for maquiladora schemes, and the farming out of labor processes, and places where people are very poor in what used to be the second world, as well as what used to be the third world, and of course many parts of the United States of America. So you can't look at your unfortunate younger colleagues who are adjuncts and exploited graduate students and think of the chances for improving their and all our lives without thinking about the people who are assembling electronic devices in Mexico and the Philippines and so on, about the new knowledge markets of various sorts that have developed all over the world. It's a challenge that far exceeds my powers of analysis, but I am convinced this can't be solved within English as a profession.

JW: What do you think about the prospects for the new university and for the corporatizing of the university?

RO: Here again, this is an important subject, and it's one that's beyond my grasp at the moment. David Noble, who wrote America by Design and some other really important books, is suggesting that the universities essentially are getting out of the education business now.

JW: And what are they in now?

RO: Well, contracting more and more. I was talking with an anthropologist at Berkeley, and he told me that about seventy-five percent of the University of California's budget is money that does not come from the state of California.

JW: It's grants and contracts?

RO: Grants, contracts, federal money, tuition. There are also ways in which knowledge and learning are being packaged and sold entirely outside the university system, so that universities will have to compete with things like IBM, Whittle Communications, Channel 1. Companies are spending more and more on education of their own people, I guess I should say training, that is, re-tooling employees with the kinds of knowledge that they will need as new technologies get in place. And then the states and municipalities and probably even countries compete to attract capital increasingly by offering a pre-trained work force to companies that will move in. South Carolina did this with BMW-I talk about these things in "English After the USSR." Universities cannot take for granted anymore, really, that they are the main purveyors of knowledge, theoretical or useful, to our society or to the world. Public schools are going to be competing more and more with these other agencies, and I think that the ideal of the university, which was always belied by circumstances but was nonetheless not a bad ideal, will have a harder time flying as an ideology and certainly as a practice in the future.

You asked, and I think rightly so, what were the universities doing before, and you mentioned class reproduction. Yes, they were always doing class reproduction . . .

JW: Although most people just didn't go to the universities before. I think in Graff's book, Professing Literature, there's a statistic that one or two percent of the population went to university in, say, 1900 to 1920.

RO: A little earlier, right. I mean, the PMC established and expanded its class position in connection with the growth of the university-two things that are inseparable-and our class helped make the universities invaluable to the entire economic system. Now, universities will still certainly be in the profession of class reproduction.

JW: On the other hand, one could see it as providing more possibilities for working class people to go to a university and be trained for bourgeois life . . .

RO: That happened a lot in the post-war period, and there are millions of students in community colleges and in state colleges now and in the elite colleges who are the first in their families to go to college. The hegemonic process works in part because some of those people do in fact achieve their ambitions and their parents' ambitions. The ideology of equal opportunity would not be so durable an ideology unless there were some truth in it. I think the truth is going to diminish and that the promises being implicitly made to working class students, that if they work hard in education, they will be able to climb above their parents, are increasingly false promises. This too is inseparable from the separating out of the world's work force into core workers and peripheral and flex-time workers. I think that more and more of those working-class students who go to our colleges will find themselves driven towards very job-specific training. And it's also getting harder and harder for them to go to college at all. I don't know the specifics on this, but I bet that more are choosing other ways of moving into the job market now than just a few years ago.

JW: Right, there's been a severe reduction in college-aid programs and things like that.

RO: Reduction of college-aid, the increases in cost of public and private institutions, the cutbacks in universities which are making many students take six years to complete the B.A., partly because the courses that they need to get through their majors aren't there at the right time, partly because they have to keep dropping out to work. It's getting tougher . . .

JW: There's a sweatshirt at my school that says on the back, "ECU, the best five or six years of your life."

RO: There you go. I don't think the universities will play quite the role, either, in preserving the porosity of the class structure as they have in the past or sustaining the ideology of equal opportunity as they have. But, on the other hand, they of course will go on, at least for a while, playing several important roles: one is to reproduce the professional managerial class and the bourgeoisie. Even with the exorbitant cost of education at places like Wesleyan, they still, knock on wood, have plenty of applicants who want to come here and are qualified to do it. The colleges and the universities that survive the squeeze of the last decade and the first half of this decade, I think, will still be in a strong position to keep reproducing those two classes. Even with the move towards training, it looks to me as if cultural capital will continue to be valuable, needed, and that students whose parents have money will continue to want to go to places like this, and many students who don't have money will continue to want to try to get financial aid to go to places like this.

JW: It seems to me that there is a greater hierarchization of universities now. You don't hear the rhetoric that you used to, that the state universities, say a Stony Brook, compete with places like Harvard or Yale . . .

RO: I think that polarization is going on, though one must remember that the private institutions, with a few exceptions, are under a lot of duress right now, and have experienced some cutbacks and speed-ups, that I think impair the quality of education, but your point is right.

JW: I wanted to ask you about your work with Radical Teacher, since you mentioned it. You publish fairly frequently there and I know that you're an active member of the group around it. So, what's your connection with Radical Teacher? What does the group do?

RO: Radical Teacher, well, we call it a socialist/feminist news journal, and that's accurate except for the inappropriateness of the term "news journal" for a magazine that comes out irregularly. It came out of the Radical Caucus in the Modern Language Association after five or six years when Radical Caucus was quite active inside MLA politics and intellectual activities.

JW: About when was that?

RO: That was 1975. I think a particular concern of the people who started the magazine was that there was a risk that the move towards high theory, including high marxism, might deny teaching the critical scrutiny that it needed. Somebody needed to be looking at teaching as its own political activity or arena, and that was our particular aim-to think about the politics of teaching itself, pedagogy along with the politics of institutions and professions and the politics of knowledge. The magazine has always had a kind of a pragmatic urgency about it-that you can meet your classes three times a week and things go on there, those things are important, and there are ways to do them more or less effectively.

JW: It seems to me that the focus on teaching distinguishes your work from other well-known marxist theorists, and it also implicitly answers the question what is to be done. And the style that you write in-maybe we can talk about this in a few minutes-uses more ordinary language, in the way Orwell prescribes in "Politics and the English Language," than most theorists . . .

RO: There have been times in the last thirty-five years when Radical Caucus people have stood in some antagonism to marxist literary criticism because of these kinds of issues, about how theoretical are they going to be and how practical are they going to be and to what extent are those two things in some sort of jarring relationship to each other. But I don't want to leave the impression that I align myself with "what do we do Monday morning in opposition to theory," and I have strong theoretical interests of my own.

JW: There's an essay in The Politics of Letters-I think it's called "Teaching as a Theoretical Practice"-where you talk about a course and cite a handout that you pass out. You talk very specifically about ideology and marxist theory, as well as how they bear on the works of literature in the course . . .

RO: Exactly. And I've mentioned some theorists today that have been important to me, and certainly add Fred Jameson to that list. Fred said to me once when we were talking about this exact matter, that he had always assumed that there would be a certain division of labor on these matters, and I agreed. I don't want to align myself with the . . .

JW: The anti-theory crowd . . .

RO: Right, or the pragmatic get-out-in-the-streets-and-put-up-the-barricades kind of people over against the theorists. That antagonism is sometimes real enough and worth sharpening, but I don't believe that we all have to be one sort or the other.

JW: That's sometimes the knee-jerk response. How do you find Jameson useful?

RO: Well, in so many ways. I want and need the drive towards both master narratives and utopian . . . when I read him, I often find that I labor pretty hard and I've read two or three pages without much payoff, and then the light bulb comes on. You know, I think that if you get one idea every three pages, that's a reward for the effort. The first chapter of The Political Unconscious is very important in thinking about some of the things we've talked of earlier today as well as some of the writing I'm doing myself. The article that Fred did on third world literature as allegory is a valuable provocation, probably eighty percent wrong as Aijaz Ahmad and others have argued, but still, he has to say those things in order for those debates to take place. Or, of course, "The Cultural Logic of Late Capital," which I had a serious criticism of . . .

JW: It's very schematic . . .

RO: Yes, but he put those things out and initiated debates. He's done that time and again over the years, and he is willing to be wrong. I think that's great. What I get from him are fresh and productive ideas. If you look back on something that you read or were fond of that you wrote fifteen years ago, you wouldn't want to say, Well, I really settled that argument, so much as to say, Well, I can see I was wrong in a lot of ways, but you know, I joined in and intervened in the process of critique, and that article or that book can now be thrown in the dustbin in history and I won't feel sorry about it at all. One of the little conventions of our profession that is personally irritating to me, though I probably do it to others, is the use of the present tense-"Ohmann says," "Jameson says"-and it's something that you wrote in 1975. Well, I don't say that now, you know. I said that, and it was sort of right and sort of wrong, and we've moved way beyond that.

JW: To take up the question of style or writing, it seems to me that criticism has circled back from high theory-Jameson, for instance-to more publicly accessible criticism-as in Michael Brub?'s work. I see this change in writing as salutary in some ways, although I'm skeptical of it too. Anyway, what do you think of it as far as your writing is concerned, and also about it as a general trend?

RO: Well, you have to think very seriously about a bunch of issues when you raise this question. One is about who reads, and that sounds obvious, but there are contradictory forces here, too. The entire professional managerial class and many other working class people are now positioned to read and be interested in serious but accessible and energetic writings about a variety of subjects, and that's a huge audience. On the other hand, it's an audience that doesn't, in fact, read a whole lot. Probably less in the U.S. than any of the other advanced countries, and although the Voice plays a dynamic part in the intellectual life of our metropolis, it's important to remember that just writing reader-friendly prose will not mean that your work gets read in McDonald's and at factories at lunch time, and so on. And if anybody's serious about that, then they've got to turn to other media; even to reach some of the more general print channels for us is not all that easy. One of the essays in Politics of Letters-the one on television and the sterilization of politics-came out of an effort on my part to try to push through the professional borders. I gave that, initially, as an improvised lecture the morning after election day, 1976. I had a class then, and I watched the evening news the night before, and I got some notes together and talked about it with a class of people who would have watched it, and then I gave it as a talk someplace later. I tried it out on the Atlantic. Then I sent it to Mother Jones, but they didn't want it either. They wanted more journalistic writing. They didn't want to hear about hegemony. It's not a great piece, but I'm telling this story just to suggest that writing in a lucid and lively way is not necessarily going to get you into T.V. Guide, though Barbara Ehrenreich has been in T.V. Guide.

JW: Jameson certainly doesn't write that way . . .

RO: No, I wish that he wrote a little more accessibly. Anyway, what I would insist on is that questions of writing never be detached from questions of social relations. You won't get very far about public voices and broad audiences and accessible writing without thinking very precisely about who writes, who reads, at what sites, under what circumstances, when there are times that perhaps intellectuals can answer a need beyond our own circle. It's more a question of being able and ready to write in such a way or to talk or make videos in such a way as the circumstances present themselves.

JW: I see what you mean. Even a hero like Orwell was speaking to a limited public. In the College English piece that I mentioned before, you talk about how critical thought spills over from the university. How does that spilling go on?

RO: Well, many people in universities are involved in organizations and activities that are not university based, so they carry ideas with them and come into some kind of contact with people who are not university members-that's obvious, but of course the spilling does go in both directions, like a tidal flow . . .

JW: I like the analogy. One question I wanted to ask you, apropos your minnesota review essay on PC, where you say that, "we're feminists; we're socialists; some of us are Leninists, not all of us; some of us . . . ." That's a line I try to remember when people ask me what exactly I am. It seems to me that you have a sense of coalition on the left, and you're certainly not doctrinaire, so how do you see the left?

RO: Um, coalitions . . . they can be very important to rebuilding left politics in the U.S. The self-conception of the left needs to be flexible, and I think we need to be open to thrusts and ventures in various directions, all the way from the New Party to whatever vanguard party starts up next, but you won't find me joining the vanguard party. In some ways, it's rather grand to be talking about the left as if it were a capital "L" and to be agonizing over which strategic turn would be just the right one for this moment. And it's clearly a moment of disarray, of regrouping, I hope, rethinking, reflecting on what did happen, the end of socialism and why, trying to understand what is salvageable from that historical project, if anything. I think we ought to have more of an open-mindedness and candor and admission of ignorance of a lot of these things. The world is not in great shape; certainly the left is not in great shape. I've seen some good theory about the things we discussed earlier in this interview-the movement past Fordism-but I don't think I've seen very many political practices out there that respond to that. I don't have very much to suggest of my own here. I wouldn't mind if we all said, alright, let's stop talking about socialism, and let's talk about democracy and equality . . .

JW: Kind of what Rorty would do . . .

RO: I wouldn't do it that way, but I would say, if it would somehow make a difference to fly the banners of equality, including gender equality, racial equality, equality of persons of all sorts, and the banner of democracy, which, needless to say, has never been tried any place in the world, then sure, I would say let's do it. I don't think it's going to work that way. I think we have to continue a critique of the bourgeois ideals, the enlightenment ideals of equality and democracy, even while defending them. Half of the world's population, a billion and a half, earn one dollar a day or less now, and that is comparable to situations in Europe two-hundred years ago, but of course far, far, far worse because at that time, so much was outside the market economy. In other words, the world's people are worse off now than they have been probably any time in the history of the whole human race, and a lot of people like you and me are better off than anybody but kings and princes two hundred years ago. There always is crisis, but it seems to me, towards the end of the 20th century, the crisis is pretty grave and it's global, and it not only covers starvation and epidemic, but the destruction of species and the threats to air and water and earth. And without being too dramatic or apocalyptic about this, these questions should always be somewhere in the margins of political arguments of all sorts, even arguments about how we teach in our classrooms. We shouldn't be carrying on arguments about organizing or pedagogies of composition without keeping in mind that we are in a very strange and very threatening historical time . . .

JW: As a closing question, I wanted to ask what you're working on. You had mentioned in a letter that you're finishing up a book. And I'm also curious to find out which books you haven't finished or had wished you had done, that you mentioned before.

RO: Well, I never wrote the one on stylistics. I was going to settle for good the question of form and content, but unfortunately the world will have to wait for my reincarnation to solve the problem of form and content. And then I was going to do a book on the culture industries, which was going to take off from some of the things that are in Politics of Letters, and I was going to theorize mass culture, or popular culture, which are basically the same, in the Gramscian mode. That book will never get written either, thank heaven. That would have been a terrible book! What I am doing now is something that I intended to be just one chapter of or essay in that never-to-be-written book, on the genesis of the mass-circulation magazine and the advertising industry. That carried me away and turned me in a different direction. Once the institutions and practices of a national mass culture are established, the situation is quite different from the moment when they are being created. Just for example, there are thousands of studies that say advertising in general doesn't make very much difference-that you have to do it if your company is efficient and have to do it to sell your product, but that it doesn't really make very much difference in total demand or in the demand for particular products . . .

JW: For Ivory Soap or something like that?

RO: Yeah, that's right. But at one time there was no image-filled, complexly interpellating, nationally-circulated advertising, and when that all happened within a decade or so, it made a hell of a difference. Dozens of products like Ivory Soap built major corporations at that time when advertising became a major force. So I'm trying to understand how, in a moment of rapid change in the U.S. in the 1890's, processes that later have become routine were inaugurated. What were the conditions of possibility for those processes then? Who were the multiple agents who, seeking aims of their own, managed an unintentional collaboration with themselves and the culture industry and with the bourgeoisie so that the hegemonic process was redrawn and redirected on a different plane from where it had been before. I hope to make a contribution to thinking about hegemony, as well as about culture and cultural process . . .

JW: That's a book? Where are you at with it?

RO: Well, it's close to the end. When I had to stop writing last summer, I was in the middle of a penultimate chapter, so probably another summer's work to do or more. It's probably about 550 pages of manuscript, and I never . . . this has gotten to be a kind of fascination and maybe an obsession. I never thought that I would be writing thirty pages on changes in the conception and use of the parlor in the late 19th century. There's all kinds of little byways that I've been carried into and I've learned a lot. We'll see if I can put it together as part of a master narrative or not. Is that work important to be done? Yes, I do think that cultural studies-the kind I like-is important, and its potential for reorganizing some of the intellectual work in the academy-making it more political as well as seriously inter-disciplinary-is great. The chances of that not happening are also great because of the imperatives and dynamics we all know about-professionalism and many of the eccentricities of university finances now, the things that we talked about earlier today-so I consider the question of cultural studies an open question. In the past, the question of pedagogy has been woefully under-considered in cultural studies, but when something new comes along most of the payoff is in the teaching. Anyway, those are directions; I want to finish this book and then I'm not sure what I want to do next personally. I think I've got three choices. Like in poker, you've always got three choices: call, raise, or fold. And I may, after a considerable amount of time off after I finish this job next June-I'll be on sabbatical-I may teach full-time in the English department; I may teach half-time for a while; or I may just stop altogether and do more writing . . .

JW: Kind of a clean slate. One other question. My interest has been to spell out the current scene and piece it together. What do you see on it? What do you see that's interesting?

RO: Well, we've mentioned a number of the names already, and I would want to add social constructionists of various sorts and feminists. Joan Scott's work, I think, is important, and there is also a stack of books that I want to read when I get my sabbatical. But I'm really not looking for sharp turns or new directions in theory. I think a lot of people have been interested over the last thirty-five years in reviving marxism, putting it into conversation with feminism and gender theory, but also adding much to them about the unnaturalness of everything that there is. I guess I don't look for any new paradigms or theory to come along now. Maybe in a sense I don't want one-I'm too old for one. Aside from the people we've mentioned already today, it's probably obvious that I learn a lot from historians. There's stuff by Stuart Blumin about the evolution of the middle class in the 19th century in the U.S. that's factually lavish and astonishing and theoretically strong. And it seems to me that some historians who have earned their credentials by getting into the archives and building specific arguments are also interested in cultural theory, and some of those people are helpful to me, so I'm turning your question away from the direction of theory to history . . .

JW: Fair enough. I think we've covered a good bit of ground . . .

[This interview took place on 22 December 1993 at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, and was conducted by Jeffrey Williams, editor of minnesota review. Thanks to Richard Ohmann for doing it and to Jan Forehand for transcribing it.]

Relevant works:

Crew, Louie, and Rictor Norton, eds.: "The Homophobic Imagination." Special issue. College English 36 (Nov. 1974).
Harvey, David.: The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
Jameson, Fredric.: Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
McAllester, Susan, ed.: [Special issue on the status of women in the field.] College English 32.8 (May 1971).
Ohmann, Richard.: "English After the USSR." After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s. Ed. Christopher Newfield and Ronald Strickland. Boulder: Westview, 1995. 226-37.
---.: English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. New York: Oxford UP, 1976.
---.: English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. Rpt. with a new introduction and a foreword by Gerald Graff. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1996.
---.: "Graduate Students, Professionals, Intellectuals." College English 52 (1990): 247-57.
---.: "On 'PC' and Related Matters." minnesota review n.s. 39 (1992/3): 55-62.
---.: Politics of Letters. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1987.
---.: "Thoughts on CS in the U.S." Critical Studies 3.1 (1991): 5-15.