the minnesota review n.s. 55-57 (2002)

Walter Benn Michaels with Jeffrey J. Williams

Against Identity: An Interview with Walter Benn Michaels

The author of The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (U of California P, 1987) and Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Duke UP, 1995), Walter Benn Michaels is one of the leading—and most controversial—Americanists of his generation. Beyond Americanist circles, he is perhaps most well known—or notorious—for the 1982 manifesto, co-written with Steven Knapp, "Against Theory." Originally appearing in Critical Inquiry 8.4 (1982), "Against Theory" incited a stream of responses, many of which are collected in Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell (U of Chicago P, 1985). Alongside The Gold Standard, Michaels also edited (with Donald E. Pease) the collection The American Renaissance Reconsidered (Johns Hopkins UP, 1985). He is currently working on a book, pieces of which include "Political Science Fictions," New Literary History 31 (2000), and "The Shape of the Signifier," Critical Inquiry 27.2 (2001).

Relevant to this interview, see also Fredric Jameson's "Immanence and the New Historicism," part I of chapter 7 of Jameson's Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke UP, 1991); and the New Yorker profile by Alexander Star, "Don't Look Back: A Proposal for Our Roots-Obsessed Culture" (3 Feb. 1997). The interview took place on 24 February 2002 at Michaels's apartment in Chicago. It was conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams and transcribed by Eric Leuschner.

Jeffrey J. Williams: It seems as if you have dual audiences. People like me, who were trained in the standard channels of British literature, which also meant theory during the 1980s, know you through "Against Theory." On the other hand, Americanists know you more through The Gold Standard and Our America. One big change that I've seen is that American literature has become more central, and you're a key figure for all the young Americanists I run across.

Walter Benn Michaels: When I was in graduate school, no one with any intellectual ambition would have wanted to become an Americanist. God knows I didn't. There were some good things I've discovered retroactively, but it was not a high-tech field in the 60s and it was not (in my view anyway) an intellectually ambitious field. I became an Americanist by accident; I was trained as a modernist, which was to me much more attractive. I was trained by Hugh Kenner, who was certainly influential and whose writing was ambitious, interesting, and brilliant literary criticism. I became an Americanist just because I went on the job market and there was a job at Hopkins and I was working on Henry James. But the James I was working on was the James out of modernism. I actually started reading Henry James because of my work on Pound—Pound had written a very important essay on James—so I thought I'd sit down and read through James. I thought this would be a good thing to do over the summer, which was no way near long enough. I got much more interested in James than I was in Pound, but it was still in the context of modernism, of European modernism. But the job at Hopkins was for an Americanist, and at one point the then-chair Ronald Paulson called me up and asked me, "So is your Henry James Hawthorne's James or Turgenev's James?" Well, it was obvious what the right answer for that job was—"Hawthorne's James." In fact my James was Turgenev's, but I said Hawthorne.

Williams: I was fascinated to learn, when I did the entry in the Norton theory anthology on "Against Theory," that you went to Santa Barbara, and that you worked with Kenner. You were one of the few people I worked on that didn't go to an Ivy. To fill in some of the timeline, what year did you first start teaching?

Michaels: I started teaching at Hopkins in the fall of 74. I graduated from high school in 66.

Williams: As you said before, over lunch, that was in New York?

Michaels: In New York, yes, at a small, private high school. The not-Ivy part is in some sense true, but it would be deeply misleading for me to claim I had a kind of "people's background." I went to a private school in New York; I went to public school, the University of Michigan, completely out of rebellion; I went to City College in New York out of intensified rebellion; I went to Santa Barbara to be with my girlfriend. At no point was I trying to make a statement about my commitment to public education.

Williams: Was it unusual then for someone from Santa Barbara to be hired at Hopkins?

Michaels: Oh, yeah—are you kidding? It was Hugh, who had gone to Hopkins. I don't think I simply got the job because Hugh was there, but I absolutely got my work looked at because he was there. It would have otherwise drawn a pass. It wouldn't have simply been implausible then; it was implausible before then, since then, and at every time in our lives. It was blind luck that got me a job out of Santa Barbara. I would never recommend to anyone to go to a graduate program where there was so little sense of how to run a program. Of course Santa Barbara is a much better graduate program now than it was then.

Williams: You graduated high school in the late 60s and you mentioned before that you were affiliated with the New Left.

Michaels: I went to the University of Michigan in 66. SDS was very active at Michigan, and I went to a bunch of meetings. I was very interested in that set of issues. But I was even more interested in philosophy, and Michigan had a very distinguished philosophy department. I actually loved Michigan; if I had stayed I'm sure I would have majored in philosophy. For personal reasons, I wound up back in New York. At City College, there was still a lot of political stuff going on, and I was involved in that, but City College was not an interesting place for me to be academically. I was on academic probation virtually the entire time I was there—which was highly justified. And the political stuff was in the end, for me at least, not that intellectually stimulating.

Williams: Why not?

Michaels: I was interested in certain kinds of problems, certain kinds of theoretical issues, which don't come up that often as part of political battles. If I'd ever been at a place where there was a good program in political philosophy or political theory, I might have done that. At the time I had a job as an apprentice editor for TV stuff; if it hadn't been for the war and the draft I would have quit school and just gone into that. I don't know how good I was, but I liked it a lot and it wasn't that hard to learn, and it was interesting.

Williams: You said before that your father worked as a TV executive—

Michaels: My father was in the TV industry, but it had nothing to do with my job.

Williams: That makes it a much more imaginable career path if your father did it, and it also seems a more New York life choice.

Michaels: I've never thought for a second that I should have done that; it probably wouldn't have worked out. But at the time I had no idea what an academic career was; I had no desire for one.

Williams: So then you went to Santa Barbara?

Michaels: I went to Santa Barbara, following my girlfriend. And then I thought I wanted to go to graduate school in English, but I knew nothing.

Williams: You were reading mostly in high modernism?

Michaels: Whatever Kenner was reading was what I was reading. He was at that point working on The Pound Era.

Williams: So you went through all the Pound stuff? You don't write on poetry, though, at least that I know of.

Michaels: Now I mainly don't. I started out that way and I never made a choice not to. It's just the way it worked out. At that time, I thought I was going to write a thesis on The Cantos. I applied to Princeton for graduate school because Hugh said it was a good place to do work on Pound, because somebody there had published a good book on him. I applied to Princeton, but saying I want to have my dissertation directed by Hugh Kenner. I thought it was a clever idea, but Princeton, oddly enough, rejected me.

So I was staying at Santa Barbara and didn't know what to do. Herb Schneidau, who was also a Poundian and had been at SUNY-Buffalo, was a lifesaver for me in the sense that he knew what was going on in the academic world. He showed up in 1970 or 1971 and he had a hardcover book called "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," which was later retitled The Structuralist Controversy. He had been blown away by Derrida's piece in the book ["Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"]. Herb didn't speak French and hired me as his research assistant to read this book, De la grammatologie, and to write up a synopsis of the argument. I spoke French and had made a living off doing translations from French. Well, writing a synopsis of the argument of Grammatology is not that easy. It took me a long time, and I really got into it.

That was the moment that made it clear to me that there was a kind of writing that I could do that I was attracted to. First Hugh had been an interesting example of what a literary critic might be, and I imitated him for a year or two, but I could never do what he did. So reading Derrida at that point made it clear there was a whole set of issues out there that I was very interested in. It took me a long time to learn, and Santa Barbara was not very good at teaching you how to do dissertations. Hugh was kind of remote from all that, and Herb was less remote and really important to me but still in a way too close to my work to be altogether useful.

Williams: I was struck, when I was looking at the introduction to The Gold Standard last night, with how much you talk about "writing" in a Derridean sense, but this explains it. Then you went to Hopkins. We usually think of graduate education as a one-time deal, but I think one's first job is frequently as or more formative.

Michaels: I agree with that. My being at Hopkins was fundamental first of all because Stanley [Fish] was there, and he was doing a set of things I was interested in. He was tremendous. Frances [Ferguson] was doing things about which I knew nothing—she had been at Yale and learned a set of de Manian arguments (that she was actually in the course of distancing herself from). I had heard de Man speak when I was in graduate school; I went down with Herb to UCLA, and remember it very vividly because he was so into selling an audience. Michael Fried always says de Man was the best salesman in the world. The effect on his graduate students was very real; the effect on the audience was real.

I've always found de Man's work extremely powerful and provocative, even though I fundamentally disagree with him. The book I'm working on now begins with a theoretical introduction on Susan Howe's The Birth-Mark and de Man's Aesthetic Ideology. What I've always liked about him is that he takes his position as far as it is possible to go. In the end I think that position is completely mistaken; nonetheless, it is important to have it out there. De Man, for me, is a tremendously important figure.

Williams: I'd always thought of Hillis Miller as the indefatigable salesman for deconstruction, as Pound was for modernism, as a kind of popularizer, getting the word out there.

Michaels: But de Man was not so much selling it to a larger audience, he was selling it to the people in the room. In seminar, by Michael's account, he was basically at work the entire time; he did everything but put the mustard on the hot dog. I actually admire that. It was justified by the fact that there was a really serious commitment to a certain theoretical perspective.

I started to do deconstructive stuff out of Derrida when I was still in graduate school, and continued at Hopkins, where people there were very involved in it, especially those in the Glyph collective.

Williams: What year did you move to Berkeley?

Michaels: In 77. I was only at Hopkins for three years.

Williams: Is that when Fish moved to Berkeley too?

Michaels: Stanley and I went to Hopkins the same year, in 74. He had been at Berkeley for many years before. And then I left Hopkins in 77. Stanley and I only worked in the same place, before now, for three years. He and I taught together when we were in Baltimore and were thinking of writing stuff together. Then Michael Fried showed up after a year; he was a fundamental figure for me. So Kenner and Schneidau at Santa Barbara, and then Frances Ferguson, Stanley, Michael Fried at Hopkins—working with all these people was tremendous. There's been no intellectual growth since! That's not quite true: meeting and working with Steve Knapp at Berkeley was the last influence. And, in a different way, Sharon Cameron.

Williams: When you went to Hopkins, you were a Jamesian. What happened then?

Michaels: I wrote this terrible dissertation on James. At Hopkins I had to teach the American literature survey course. My TAs included, among other people, Ross Posnock and Eric Sundquist, both of whom knew way more about American literature than I did, and still do. I had to learn a lot fast. So I wrote something on Walden which was a theoretical piece, basically a semi-deconstructive reading and a critique of Stanley Cavell's famous book, The Senses of Walden. I wrote a piece on Eliot and James. Those two were really apprentice pieces, learning how to do academic writing and to figure out what I wanted to do. The first thing I wrote that was part of what I consider my writing was a piece called "The Interpreter's Self: Peirce on the Cartesian 'Subject'." It was a serious theoretical piece, and it was published in The Georgia Review. Georgia Review at that time was by far the best journal in the country. John Irwin edited it, and it published Miller, Derrida, Bloom. You wanted to publish there; it was very visible.

Then I went to Berkeley, and Berkeley had no one doing theory, at least like poststructuralism. Stanley had been there, of course, but he was gone. The year I went they hired me, Frances, Joel Fineman, and David Miller, and we were all doing theoretical work of one kind or another. By that time I had realized the things that had most influenced me—Derrida and de Man—were things I also thought were in crucial ways completely mistaken. So I spent a lot of my time trying to explain why I thought they were mistaken, but nonetheless I was very much, and still am, in that orbit.

And at Berkeley there was Steve Greenblatt, who was doing more social-historical stuff. Foucault also had a connection at Berkeley, so he was there a lot and people were already beginning to produce Foucauldian work. I admired Foucault and I've read accounts of my work which talk about him, but I was completely uninfluenced by him, whereas Derrida was central to me. Steve Knapp came a year or two later, and he and I started teaching together and writing "Against Theory."

After teaching American literature courses, I started writing on the texts that interested me, which turned out to be not the high-ranking American Renaissance texts but the naturalist texts of Dreiser and Norris and other writers around that period. This is what the essays in The Gold Standard came out of. The core of Sister Carrie is this obsessive spending, spending more money than she can make, and then making more and spending more again. She's lured on by all the things she sees (like here in Chicago) and wants. You read that novel and it's like reading about your life. So the question was how in a capitalist economy that structure of desire and that structure of feeling made sense. When I read the "Academostars" volume I opened this piece by David Shumway who's complaining I'm a famous person but no one believes what I say. He says, "No one has ever believed Michaels' reading of Sister Carrie," because, after all, Dreiser said he was on the left. But I think there's a way in which Dreiser's self-description is almost completely beside the point. I was overwhelmed by the sense in which Sister Carrie could not but emanate from a world, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in which someone felt the structures of capital so intensely that, even if he disapproved of them, they were in fact his emotional life.

The essays in The Gold Standard weren't really meant to be a book. It became a book because Steve Greenblatt said, "I've started this New Historicism series—why don't you just collect the essays?" I said no. I had no interest in a book; I got promoted without a book. Then Steve had a really good idea, which was to ask what would make me to want to do a book. I had just started seeing some photography in New York that I really admired by Jim Welling, and I thought, if the University of California Press would give me a thousand dollars to commission a cover for The Gold Standard, I would write Welling to see if he would do it. I thought that would be very, very cool to have a book with a cover that was a piece of art. So they did, and he did, and I did. I just wanted to have a book that looked like that.

Williams: I usually read theory in terms of allegorical moments, and "Against Theory" seems to mark a particular turning point when theory changed during the early 1980s, and The Gold Standard the start of a certain strand of New Historicism. You also mentioned "structure of feeling," which I take as a deliberate reference to Raymond Williams. I guess what I'm asking is, could you put a name to what it is that you do? In a certain way you might be seen as announcing a historicist turn in literary study, but on the other hand you're seen as anti-Marxist.

Michaels: I actually was not thinking of Raymond Williams, but I take your point. My interest in Marxism has never been in Marxist literary criticism or theory. I do have a strong interest in certain Marxist ideas about class, about the irrelevance of identity categories like race, and about the ways in which class is not really an identity category. And I definitely am interested in deploying Marxist arguments against so-called post-Marxism and its interest in cultural identities.

But, to go back to what you were saying about "Against Theory" and the beginning of the New Historicism, "Against Theory" was not written to produce or mark some new turn. It was written as a statement of traditional problems, with the answers to those problems. Theory there was not a discourse but a certain set of arguments, and "Against Theory" was meant to be an argument against those arguments. People would say, in a "gotcha" mode, but isn't "Against Theory" a kind of theory? I always thought that was one of the lamest remarks. "Against Theory" didn't mean against thinking; it didn't mean against thinking about the ontology of the text; it just meant being against a whole set of positions which the first paragraph names. That was the only paragraph that either of us wrote alone—Steve wrote it—and it begins "By theory we mean . . ."

From our standpoint it had nothing to do with historicism; it had nothing to do with the move to social theory; it had nothing to do with being interested in practical thought as opposed to more abstract thought. On the contrary, no one could be less interested in pragmatism than Steven Knapp, except maybe me.

Williams: The Gold Standard is usually labeled a New Historicist text.

Michaels: The Gold Standard was just a bunch of readings of novels in conjunction with a set of social phenomena which seemed to me to have something deeply in common with them. It wasn't meant to say, "now we should write about history." The New Historicism did one really good thing: it made it possible to talk about other things in addition to literary texts and pay to them the same kind of attention as a close reading paid to a literary text. But I don't think it was methodologically innovative at all. Our America is certainly not methodologically interesting. No one, for example, would ever argue that the Immigration Act of 1924 was irrelevant to those texts. Maybe no one had noticed it before or paid the right kind of attention to it, but the oldest kind of historicist would acknowledge it.

The central issue in all of these is the opacity between what you intend to happen and what actually happens. I was interested in what an action seemed to be to people at the turn of the century in a wide range of discourses. If you think of it that way it's old-fashioned history of ideas—a history of theories of action. There are literary versions of it and there are economic versions of it and there are photographic versions of it. And I think it's useful to think of it that way because it gets you out of a lot false problems about how we connect literary texts to the real.

I've always been interested in art and literature, but I've rarely written about great works of literature. For me, the world in which an incredible amount hinges on how much better we like Hawthorne than Maria Warner is a world that I just don't have a lot invested in. I never thought Hawthorne was the world's greatest writer, and I'm perfectly happy to write on Maria Warner. What was interesting to me was a set of problems, especially about the ontology of texts, about what a text is, which emerge at interesting moments in turn-of-the-century texts and reemerge in a different way in the 20s and in fact are very central to contemporary writers, as we were talking about before, like Bret Easton Ellis and Kathy Acker.

Think of the importance of blood in Acker's and Ellis's writing. Acker actually at certain moments insists that writing is a form of bleeding. That's a strong theoretical claim—it's not a metaphor about how it wounds someone to write, but it's a description of what writing is, that it's a kind of body transfer. The claim is widespread and in the end it's a de Manian view. If you think of "The Purloined Ribbon," the moment in which the text ceases to mean and becomes nothing but body, it becomes nothing but "Marion," an empty sound. De Man tended to rescue himself from what he would have called sentimentalism by identifying that moment with the mechanical, whereas someone like Acker isn't interested in the mechanical but in the actual presence of the human body. But the difference doesn't matter. What's fundamental to both is the opposition between the text which is understood as something you interpret, and the text as something which you feel or you're splattered with—literally a transfer of bodily tissue. Even DeLillo, whom I loathe, has an interesting moment in his terrorist novel when the writer talks about the page having bodily tissue on it. Moments like that are fundamental to a whole literary tradition and to literary criticism since the late 60s.

Williams: I'm especially interested in the thread between your books. I can see how they're linked by a theoretical bearing. Another is that they seem to turn on a contrarian impulse. To me it seems very self-conscious how you pick certain issues at particular times.

Michaels: Well, you don't pick issues; they sort of occur to you. To me, The Gold Standard is really out of a set of interests rather than an organizing idea, yet those interests do overlap with "Against Theory." If you think of the title essay to The Gold Standard, it's about the difference between objects which are representations and those that aren't representations, which is the whole debate about the "gold standard." So "Against Theory" takes a certain position on the gold standard. The Gold Standard also—and this is the contrarian side—has a polemical aspect, against people talking about the subversiveness of literature. That was just out of irritation, but it was never the main point. I got irritated and wanted to stick it to somebody; that is a character weakness, which is with me to this day.

In Our America, it's not just irritation. I have a lot more at stake in issues of race and the problems that go along with the idea of identity and culture more generally. But in a certain sense, Our America came by accident. I read a copy of Thomas Dixon's The Clansman—it was lying around the house—and the idea occurred to me that the most important thing about the clansman's sheets in that book was not that they hid people's identities, but they somehow emblematized for Dixon their souls, the whiteness of their souls. I had to teach a summer class at Berkeley; I was teaching The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises back-to-back, and it's impossible to read The Great Gatsby and The Clansman at the same time without thinking about the idea of identity, which was identified with the soul and expressed in the body, and fundamental to both these texts. So I wrote an essay called "The Souls of White Folk" about that and didn't have any plans to do more, but I was talking to Michael Fried—Michael and I were teaching an NEH summer institute together—and he said you ought to read Willa Cather's The Professor's House, which I had never read. I read it and all the rest came.

Williams: In Our America, you take apart the current concepts of difference and cultural constructionism, or the implication that those concepts create a better world. It's a similar move to The Gold Standard, where you take apart the argument that texts under capitalism are subversive.

Michaels: The difference is that I think in the end the subversion-containment thing is not a real argument—I don't have a lot of stake in it, and I just got sucked into it—whereas the commitment to difference that dominates certain postmodern or historicist discourses, that commitment is real and is bad. It's bad in two ways. One is it's just theoretically confused. The other is it's politically bad. It makes you think everything in the world is organized around identity groups, however constructed (socially or anti-essentially or whatever), and thus that the crucial thing to do is to respect them. Whereas the whole point about class differences was to get rid of them. Race-gender-class is a false trilogy. Race and class or culture and class don't work the same way. One reason is that class is not something we think of as worthy of our respect, whereas the whole point of cultural difference is that you're supposed to respect it. What we have now is a commitment to redescribing everything in our world as if it were a form of cultural difference.

Or in Empire, which I've just been writing about, you get Hardt and Negri, who are not interested in culture but who ontologize the world the same way that cultural identity does, so they reach a point where they have this kind of paean to the poor, as if poverty were a culture. You want to say it's not the point to admire the poor; surely the point is to get rid of the fact of their being poor. The difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich, as Hemingway kept saying, have more money. When you start treating the poor as an identity category, what's left of your Marxism is precious little.

Williams: You make this distinction in "Political Science Fictions," where you say that class is a separate category from identity.

Michaels: I'm saying class is not an identity category. The point about the newer work would be to get past identity categories and the whole set of questions about whether they're essentialist or anti-essentialist and pay attention to difference and disagreement. Say you and I are playing chess. That's a real difference—we occupy different subject positions but we don't disagree, we don't have different ideologies. I've been interested in the way in which posthistoricism or postmodernism seeks to redescribe all differences on that model, and seeks to deny there are differences as disagreements. And that seems to me to link a lot of people who otherwise aren't alike, people like Judith Butler on the one hand and Samuel Huntington on the other—surely two people who aren't thinking of themselves as sharing the same political or moral position, but who nonetheless offer similar accounts.

Williams: Does this parallel Nancy Fraser's distinction between a politics of recognition versus redistribution? And you're weighing in on the redistribution side?

Michaels: Absolutely, I would be on the redistribution side of that, and the recognition side is fundamentally irrelevant.

Williams: Many people would be surprised that you've just identified yourself on the left.

Michaels: It doesn't matter so much, from my standpoint, whether I'm on the left. Being on the left is not an identity—holding beliefs is not the same as having an identity. That's the whole point of these essays: the point of posthistoricist identity is to try to anchor your beliefs in your identity so your beliefs become epiphenomena of your identity. I think that's completely mistaken. The two things are deeply separable; it's not an identity to be on the left and not an identity to have a religion.

Think of the attack on the World Trade Center—I'm writing about it now for Radical History Review—in which the function of the word "terrorist" is to get everyone to believe that these guys are bad without actually being interested in what they believe. Think how different it would have been if communists had done this twenty years ago. The Cold War was imagined as a war between two different conceptions of what was right, whereas the discourse of terrorism is precisely the discourse which imagines the irrelevance of different conceptions of the right. It turns these guys not even into Muslims, but into perversions of Islam or in Bush's inimitable phrase, "evil," precisely because we want to think of political actions as having been somehow separated from the beliefs that produced them. They don't have an ideological position. And that's true on the left and on the right. The enemies of liberal capitalism don't have an alternative ideological position; they're just criminals and they should be tried as criminals.

What I'm interested in here is the distinction between people's bodies and their ideas, between identities and ideologies, and in resisting the widespread impulse to try to convert the one into the other. So I don't see being on the left as an identity, and the truth is I don't think my politics are relevant to the analysis.

Williams: But if politics are a question of beliefs, not identity, aren't they precisely relevant? I think that people, particularly those who are on the left, would press you to answer what you would do to effect, for instance, redistribution.

Michaels: Ever since I started doing Our America, people have come along and said, maybe on some level your argument against identity is right, but practically speaking, shouldn't we recognize our identities are in fact important; even though they're in some deep sense wrong, they're socially-constructed; we have them with us, we just can't wish our way out of them? But it's not as if accepting these identities is making things better. I mean, I'm interested in the political consequences of these ideas, but I have no idea of how you go about making the world more consonant with my ideas. Somebody who can actually make things I imagine happen would be a far better person than I am. I'm always struck by people who think, just by saying the opposite of what I'm saying, they're really doing political work. They're English professors too.

An example of this is the way that a lot of people in the academy have made racism our great problem and therefore anti-racism the solution. I just think that's deeply mistaken. What people like about racism as the problem is that the solution is tolerance or the celebration of difference. In effect, you've got people teaching kids who are privileged, whether at Berkeley or at Hopkins, or even kids who are less privileged, as at UIC, that the fundamental thing for them is to respect difference, not to eliminate inequality. And if you're from the right, that's good news for you!

Williams: You said, "They're English professors too." Fair enough. But people who are English professors do other things too. One could say this is not properly in their professional domain, which is Fish's argument in Professional Correctness. But I would say there is actually a cluster of effects that go with being an intellectual, and I don't think saying it's not in your job description is quite true. We're obviously in this business for that cluster of intellectual things, not just, say, teaching a survey course.

Michaels: I don't disagree with that. All I want to say is that, as you write, your academic work is not identical to political work. There's a tendency for people to think their academic work and their political work are virtually the same thing; it's not necessarily incompatible with it but it's by no means identical to it. Someone like Said has a political presence, but his important political presence doesn't demand he write Culture and Imperialism or Beginnings; he could have written those books without that presence. Those two things need not go together. I have a lot of respect for some of my current colleagues who actually do serious political work, and I think that work is often compatible with their writing, but, again, their work is not identical to their political work.

Williams: Before you mentioned that you were for redistribution. That might not be an identity, but it is a belief. So what are your beliefs? I guess what I'm trying to do is out your politics.

Michaels: In terms of my intellectual work, it's really important for me at this point to be making this argument about the relation between identity and ideology. And I think my political beliefs beyond that with respect to my academic audience are immaterial.

Williams: Why? Isn't it a part of being an intellectual?

Michaels: Is part of being an intellectual having a particular political point of view? Everyone gets to have political views whether or not they're intellectuals, and lots of intellectuals don't have any more interesting political views than anyone else. I think that in the academic world politics tend to be treated as a kind of test of acceptability, so if you give the right answer, people will forgive your stuff they don't like. I'm not interested in giving the right answer or the wrong answer. The arguments that I'm making in my writing stand on their own, regardless of what my political beliefs are. I think it's important rhetorically if not logically to insist on their independence.

One of the reasons I've always been unhappy about the idea of giving interviews, especially when Our America came out, is because I precisely didn't want to be talking to the world about my politics, and I didn't think I had very much to say to a larger audience about my actual work. For this audience, my actual work matters.

Williams: To shift gears then, to literary studies, how do you see your relation to the New Americanism? You're sometimes linked with it, and you edited a volume with Don Pease, American Renaissance Reconsidered, that was a kind of announcement for it.

Michaels: The New Americanists are rapidly graying or balding, so we're not so new. I don't actually think that there was a kind of coherence; I know there were a ton of anthologies. Don and I edited that volume because it was originated by the English Institute; we had no particular agenda. I never saw myself as part of that group—it's not that I haven't read the work of people involved in those anthologies, but I don't have a coherent sense of what New Americanists would want.

Williams: One way to put it is that we think we ascribe our own views, whereas frequently our views are ascribed to us. Once it's out there and published, you might be defined as part of a group or movement . . .

Michaels: That's true, but I've never seen myself as a New Americanist. We're all the same generation. New Americanism just meant when baby boomers started writing their first books. That's what it was—I don't think it meant much more than that.

Williams: I like to call it "the theory generation," and the generation thereafter "the posttheory generation." You had mentioned before about being at Berkeley and part of the group that formed Representations. That might be accidental, but that's what formed the New Historicism.

Michaels: I think that is true, but even within the Representations group there were lots of different people who had very different sets of interests. My interests were very close to Frances's and Steven Knapp's and to some extent Joel Fineman's. I was very much interested in and admired Steve [Greenblatt]'s work, and Cathy [Gallagher]'s work, which was core new historicist work, but it was not the kind of stuff I myself was doing. So even within that group, there was a lack of unanimity, and I was surprised it got labeled. Jameson wrote about that—you're a new historicist if you're called a new historicist—which is funny for me, because of course I ended up attacking that whole notion of identity. Well, people can call you whatever they want, but that doesn't mean I agree with it.

Williams: The Jameson essay certainly seemed to canonize you. What do you think of it?

Michaels: I haven't read it for a long time and I don't remember the argument about my relation to the relevant stage of capitalism; what I remember is that he commented about the writing, about things like transitions. I don't know how it is for anybody else, but I know in my writing, especially then, I was completely obsessed with the transitions, how you got from one part to another. All the work and most of the pleasure was in producing what seemed like a seamless transition. I remember seeing Jameson say that and thinking, thank god somebody noticed this; I put a lot of work into doing that.

Whoever reads the writing, people get fantasies about it, then you become a figure for them. And Jameson probably contributed to that. People have their fantasies about what you stand for, but the truth is that's not so interesting. It's no way near as interesting as when someone like Jameson figures out what you were actually trying to do.

Williams: We talked about the politics of Our America, but I want to ask you about how it fits in terms of literary history. I was struck, after finding out about Santa Barbara, that it was an answer to a version of literary modernism that came from Hugh Kenner. In what way does it answer the views of modernism that you were trained in?

Michaels: It definitely is a different modernism than Kenner's. I don't really know what to say about that. Kenner produced a brilliant account of a generation of artists and writers like Pound and Eliot, and he was really interested in that generation. The core for me for Our America was the next generation, so in a way it's a modernism, but what I call nativist modernism. It's not the same thing as international modernism. I don't know if it's completely incompatible with Kenner's view; if you were doing a micro-history, it would be interesting to explain how you got from A to B, but that kind of history, which is the causal account, I have no idea how to write. I've always been more interested in figuring out how things at a certain moment fit together.

In terms of what I'm doing now, the core is a bunch of poems and novels and theoretical writings from about 1985 to 1992–93, but it really begins with a set of writings and works on art from the mid-60s, minimalist to post-minimalist stuff, early deconstructive stuff. De Man is fundamental to that; the opening section is on how de Man is constructing the ontology of the text.

Williams: So first you did late nineteenth-century American literature, then you moved to modernism, and now you're doing contemporary lit?

Michaels: Well, the current stuff came out of both the identity argument and the "Against Theory" intentionalist argument. The core of it is the question of the status of the text. An easy way to put it is to say that the minute you stop thinking texts mean what their authors intended them to mean, you're required to think of texts as nothing but their materiality. That's why I'm interested in de Man, because de Man actually did this.

Williams: You're thinking of de Man on "intentional structure," in "Form and Intent in the American New Criticism?"

Michaels: I'm thinking of the hardcore de Man of "The Purloined Ribbon" and Allegories of Reading, which I've read about a trillion times now, and Aesthetic Ideology. The minute the work, the text, is reduced to its materiality, then the primary question about it is an experiential one about the reader's relation to it. It's at the moment the text becomes meaningless that the identity of the reader becomes essential, so my argument here is in effect that the high theory version of this (in de Man) is completely compatible with what used to be thought of as the low theory version of identity politics. And that this double-gesture, the gesture of turning the text into an object on the one hand, and of producing the primacy of the subject position on the other, are really the same gesture. You can explain and understand a great deal of the last twenty years in terms of those double gestures. That's why Acker and Ellis—it's all over their writing—think of writing as an extension of the body. Another way to put it would be in old-fashioned terms: the minute you think that the intentional fallacy is a fallacy you are required to commit the affective fallacy.

Williams: In other words, if you reinstitute the idea of intention, then you have beliefs over which you might agree or disagree, and a culture of disagreement is where the action is rather than a culture of difference?

Michaels: I don't think you have to argue for a culture of disagreement. I'm not arguing the world would be a better place if we had more disagreements or cultivated a kind of Graffian world in which disagreement is possible. Disagreements are taking place all the time. The crucial thing for me is to make a distinction between differences of opinion—where it doesn't matter who you are—and differences in subject position—where who or where you are is all that matters.

I'm also interested in certain writers and photographers and painters who, in a kind of de Manian way, tried to push the limits of this kind of ontology. I have a couple of things about photography in the book, and about Susan Howe's work as well. I don't know if you know Howe's work, but Howe is completely committed to the idea that you haven't read Emily Dickinson unless you've read the manuscripts. The Johnson edition and every edition except facsimile editions distort what the text is. But she has a certain conception of the text such that it's impossible for it to continue to be a text. She begins to imagine the spaces between the words are fundamental to what the text is.

Williams: That would be considered part of the intention . . .

Michaels: She gives two different accounts of that, but you're on the right track. One account I find theoretically defensible, and that is, hey, if it mattered to Emily Dickinson how far apart these words were and what they looked like, then you haven't got her text unless you've got the way she did her "i's" and "t's." But Howe, half the time, is saying something else which is more radical, at least in a de Manian sense: it doesn't even matter what mattered to Emily Dickinson, what matters is what this object is. Unless you're seeing that object, then you're not seeing the object Emily Dickinson produced. And she identifies that in a de Manian way, with what she calls "gibberish": it's precisely the moment when the thing becomes meaningless that it becomes an object.

Williams: That's the moment of intentional structure?

Michaels: That essay is also fundamental for me. It's a very early essay, pre-deconstruction, pre-everything. De Man makes a distinction precisely between objects which he thinks of as intentional objects and natural objects. He criticizes the New Critics for treating the poem as if it were a natural object, an object of perceptual experience instead of understanding. What's interesting is that de Man's entire career becomes devoted to figuring out more radical and ingenious ways to make a statement he accuses the New Criticism of making, so that he becomes the primary theorist of precisely that moment in which the object of understanding will be turned into the object of perception. That I think is fundamental to a lot in the last twenty years. I think it's mistaken, but that doesn't mean it doesn't produce interesting work by poets and artists.

This book is very polemical, and it's probably true that de Man and even Howe are in a certain way an object of the polemic. But there's no one writing today whom I admire more than Susan Howe.

Williams: To close, I want to ask you about UIC. You've been here less than a year, and it's obviously a much different school than Hopkins. You're going to be head shortly; what will you be doing at UIC?

Michaels: UIC is a university with a lot of interesting work already going on. The English department is a really interesting, strong department in a lot of different areas, that has to figure out what it is and what it wants to do over the next three or four years. We don't want to just make ourselves a second-rate version of Hopkins, in a private model, or Berkeley, in a public model. It's expensive and hard to do, and the world doesn't really need that anyway. What we have the ability to do, I think, is to make ourselves really interesting in certain areas, while at the same time understanding that our desire to make the school stronger is the desire above all to make it better able to teach the students we have. On the undergraduate level especially, we are committed to teaching these students, and, it seems to me, they have the potential to be as strong as anyone. What we want to figure out are ways to teach them better and ways to bring them into the academic world. We don't want to make it so that people from California want to come to study as undergraduates at UIC; the goal is to deal with the kids, many of whom are first-generation kids from Chicago or from Illinois, and make sure they're getting as good an education as possible.

For me that's like CCNY in the 20s and 30s. They were dealing with those kids, and it was a first-rate university where people were thinking the hardest things. I teach a literary theory class to twenty kids at UIC, basically sophomores and juniors. Those kids are as bright as any kids I taught at Berkeley and Hopkins. They are as interested in the issues. They are not as sophisticated in certain ways, but that's your responsibility to teach that. We have our work cut out for us, but in a really attractive way. The trick is to make our faculty both stronger and better able to deal with the students we have.

The graduate program is more complicated because it's plausible to think, as the program gets more visible, we'll want to recruit different kinds of graduate students. But we want to figure out how to take the graduate students who already come to UIC and make them more able to function in the academic and intellectual world as it works today. What the trick is, I don't know.

We're recruiting heavily, despite the current recession. We have offers out to some very bright young people who work in Asian-American literature; we're involved in a serious African-American search; I believe that UIC can be very strong in those areas. We can be very strong in twentieth-century American; we've been strong in Renaissance for some time; I think we can build that back up. In the end, the trick is to create an English department that will do what it does as well as possible and will not do what Hopkins or Berkeley does. That sounds open-ended.

Williams: Don't you think one problem is that the professional imaginary that most people have is focused outside their departments, whereas this would require a different kind of commitment or professional feeling?

Michaels: I don't think it really does. I think it requires that the things you're most interested in are things you should be able to explain to everybody at every level of your program. Obviously, in some respects, it's easier to teach to some than to others, and it's true that there's certain kinds of scholarship that probably can't be made interesting to everybody. I've always taught in very strong graduate programs, and I've known a lot of very good students, but I don't think there's ever anything I've said to those students that I couldn't find a way to say to the sophomores in my UIC English class or to the students in my graduate class. And if I'm not successful in being able to explain what I'm interested in and why they should be interested in it, that's my problem, not theirs. I've got to get my act together and make it better. And that's actually been what's fun about this, because if you stay in one place a long time, if you have the same students, you get into routines. My beliefs haven't changed much, but the ability or the necessity to try to make them feel central to people whose academic lives are different from not only my own, but from my previous students? That's an interesting challenge and that's fun.

Williams: That sounds surprisingly altruistic.

Michaels: It's fun for me. I'm doing it because it's really interesting to me.

Williams: The other thing I know about UIC is that there are a whole slew of adjuncts and graduate students who don't get paid very well. One gripe I've heard is that they're hiring people like you, Sander Gilman, and others, for high salaries, thereby strapping the rest of the budget.

Michaels: It is important to say two things about this. One of them is if the university weren't paying me the money, or paying Sander the money, or paying Lenny [Davis] the money, it's not like they would be giving it to the lecturers. That isn't necessarily a good thing, but it's a fact of life that people need to recognize. At the same time, it is absolutely true that the lecturers are exploited, and, although the graduate students get a reasonable amount of money, they do way too much teaching for that amount of money.

Williams: What do they teach? 2-2?

Michaels: Our graduate students currently teach 2 and 1. Lenny got them moved back from 2-2. Hopkins graduate students taught 1 and 1 and didn't teach at all their first year or their fourth year. We have some scholarships like that, but not too many.

It's really not just lecturers and graduate students, but faculty too. There are tremendous inequalities in the way people in the English department are paid. It's not as if anybody can easily rectify those. Anything we do is going to have to take into account the sense that, if you're going to be asking people to work hard, not only to publish but to make their publication matter to their students, they have to be rewarded for it. It will certainly be crucial to me as head to make it clear to the dean, the provost, and the administration in general that the more effective the department becomes in doing this, the more appropriate it is that faculty get paid to do it.

Beyond that, the question of lecturers: right now, one program that has been floated is simply to get rid of all lecturers. No one thinks that really can or should be done, but right now the Governor has actually forbidden us to hire any new faculty next year; it's not clear whether lecturers fall under that, because they're on year-by-year contracts. On the one hand, that will solve the exploitation problem, but not in the way that any of us would find desirable. What we're going to do is try to get lecturers more money and maybe diminished teaching responsibilities; right now they teach too much. And we're going to try to bring lecturers more clearly into the intellectual life of the department, in part by thinking of them more like post-docs, which gives them a chance to work with more senior people in the field. We want our faculty to take responsibility for the lecturers. This doesn't solve all the problems, but, if your labor is going to be exploited anyway, it puts you in a position where you are better able to do the kind of work you came into this profession to do and to get a better job. So it's not a structural solution, but it is a way to begin thinking about what it means to be a lecturer; a lecturer becomes, in effect, another step on the road to a full appointment, instead of a half-way house. From that standpoint, it actually helps them to have so-called star faculty brought in—that is, people who can figure out ways to help them, to make their work stronger and more visible, and that way they can get something out of it.

Walter Benn Michaels, professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago, is the author of The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (1987) and Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995).

Jeffrey J. Williams is editor of the minnesota review.