Published Spring/Summer 2008
 
The Labor of Culture
An Interview with Michael Denning
by Victor Cohen | ns 70
The 1930s are often considered a dull, didactic time in art and culture—falling off from the height of modernism as the US was mired in the Great Depression. Michael Denning's The Cultural Front: Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (Verso, 1998) corrects that view, exploring how the period produced thriving art and culture related to the labor movement. It was not just doctrinaire, didactic art, but heralded what Denning calls a second "American Renaissance."
A student of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Michael Denning has illuminated modern mass culture and its politics. His first two books, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (Methuen, 1987) and Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture (Verso, 1987), study those lesser, popular genres. More recently, his book Culture in an Age of Three Worlds (Verso, 2004) looks at globalization and takes stock of cultural studies.
Born in 1954, Denning attended Dartmouth College (BA, 1976). After working in New York, he heard about the Birmingham Centre and went there for a master's (1979). He returned to the US to earn his PhD in American Studies at Yale University (1984). He taught first in Columbia University's English Department (1984-89) and then returned to Yale's American Studies program, where he has worked since, and where he is currently William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American Studies.
This interview took place 28 April 2007 in Michael Denning's office at Yale. It was conducted and transcribed by Victor Cohen, an independent scholar in Los Angeles. He was managing editor of the minnesota review in 2004-05 while he finished his PhD in literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University. An extended interview, with additional coverage of Denning's involvement with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, appears in a special issue of the online magazine Reconstruction, on "Class, Culture and the Public Intellectual," edited by Graham Barnfield, Joe Ramsey, and Cohen.
Cohen: How do you feel looking back, twenty years from your first book, Cover Stories?
Denning: It feels odd to think of it. Really I think of it as thirty years since the 1977 summer session of the Marxist Literary Group (MLG), which got me to the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the fall of 1978. My first two books, Cover Stories and Mechanic Accents, both of which came out in 1987, were the product of those ten years of thinking about popular fiction, thinking that had begun as a project in Marxist literary criticism. That was my initial interest, to follow the models that Fred Jameson and Terry Eagleton developed in the 1970s: could one take that kind of Marxist literary criticism and bring it to the analysis of popular literature? I was involved in the MLG's first summer institute in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in the summer of 1977, which was taught by Fred Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and Stanley Aronowitz, and various other people would give presentations in the afternoons. I think I was the most junior person there, the only person who wasn't a graduate student or a faculty member.
Cohen: How did you end up there, if you weren't part of an academic program?
Denning: I had been working in Boston, as a museum guard and as a package wrapper, for the Museum of Fine Arts. I was right out of college, trying to make it as a freelance writer, and trying to get a job of some sort in what was called "the movement." But the movement was disappearing. There were no funds or anything, so I was doing volunteer work for DSOC [Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee] and the War Resisters League. I was trying to see whether there was some way of hanging onto the edges of one or another of those organizations, while at the same time trying to make it as a freelance writer, sending out reviews and stuff to the alternative weeklies that had emerged at the time, like the Boston Phoenix and The Real Paper. I was entirely unsuccessful at all of that. I discovered that everything I wrote was too long and involved for weekly journalism. But I saw a little advertisement for the Marxist Literary Group in the back of The New Republic, which was, strangely enough, not a neoconservative journal back then. So I sent in for its newsletter, and the newsletter said there was going to be a summer institute, and I took what I thought of as my Michael Dukakis fellowship, unemployment insurance (Dukakis was the governor of Massachusetts at the time), and went out to Minnesota for this three week session. It was just amazing. It was there that I heard about the Birmingham Centre from Eagleton.
So I was in Birmingham in 1978-1979, and then came back to graduate school at Yale to work with Jameson. I was first in English and then in American Studies, and it was in those years that I was trying to put together a Marxist approach to popular literature. In some ways, the Birmingham half of that project ended up as the book on British spy novels, Cover Stories, and the New Haven half ended up in the book on dime novels, Mechanic Accents. Even though they were written together, Cover Stories was conceived first and was imagined as a genre study; Mechanic Accents came out of what I felt were the limits to genre criticism. By that point I was getting more interested in thinking about labor history and the place of popular fiction in working-class culture. So by 1987, when those two books came out, it felt like a decade of thinking about popular fiction was over, and I'd had my say about it, for better or worse.
Cohen: So when you went to Columbia from graduate school at Yale, were you hired as a Marxist literary critic?
Denning: That's a good question, and I don't really know the answer. I think the reason I got that job was that they wanted someone who did enough literature to fit into an English department, and yet was coming out of an interdisciplinary American Studies program. I think it was more my particular focus on popular fiction, which was literary enough since I did a kind of narrative analysis, and less the Marxism, which made it seem that this was a kind of cultural studies work that was still amenable to an English department. At that point, it was still a department where virtually everyone was working on literary texts, even as they were moving in different theoretical directions.
Cohen: Was that Lionel Trilling's stamp on the department?
Denning: Yes, though Sacvan Bercovitch, Werner Sollers, and Ann Douglas were among the Americanists then, and were trying to move the department in a kind of American Studies direction. Bercovitch and Sollers left for Harvard almost immediately after I arrived. I was at Columbia for only five years, and after I left, they began to hire more Americanists, but those five years after Bercovitch and Sollers left, the Americanist wing of the program was much smaller and less lively that it might have been.
Cohen: Before you went to Birmingham, where did you do your undergraduate work?
Denning: I was an English major at Dartmouth, probably because I thought it was the easiest major to complete. I put together what they called a "modified major," which was a mix of the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the poetry of the English Romantics, and a little Hegelian philosophy. I ended up writing a thesis on William Blake. It was the issues, not the field, that drew me in. Then I spent a couple of years working and trying to freelance in New York and Boston. When I got the one-year fellowship to study in Birmingham, it was a revolutionary, mind-altering year, both in doing the collaborative work and being a part of this socialist-feminist research institute.
When you got to the Centre, you normally joined one group, sometimes two. I only had money for the one year, so I did the master's courses in theory and history, and joined the English Studies Group. Hazel [Carby] was in three groups, if I remember correctly, while she was there: the English Studies Group, the Media Group (which never did publish its work), and the Race and Politics group, which put out The Empire Strikes Back. But she was there for the whole doctoral program. So people who were there for a number of years would end up joining a number of groups.
And then I went to Yale to do the doctorate. Intellectually, it was an exciting time to be at Yale, less because of the actual curriculum than for what was happening on the fringes. Because Fred [Jameson] was here, there was a chapter of the Marxist Literary Group, and one of the key parts of my graduate education was being in that group and, a little later, the New York Social Text collective. The other part was the New Haven MARHO collective (MARHO was the radical historians' organization), which met and edited some of the issues of Radical History Review. I was in both collectives, and my first New Haven years were shaped by the dialectic between the two. That's when I began to think of myself less as a Marxist literary critic than as some kind of cultural studies person, which for me meant doing a mixture of Birmingham Centre work, the MLG literary criticism, and radical history.
I also can't underestimate the impact that labor historian David Montgomery had on me (he arrived at Yale from Pittsburgh during this time). Even though he was probably not particularly interested in the kind of literary and theoretical things that the others were doing, for me his approach and focus were the elements that were necessary to a Marxist literary and cultural analysis.
Cohen: What drew you to popular fiction in the first place? Were you always interested in it?
Denning: No, on the contrary. Like a lot of a New Lefties—and I always felt like a young member of the New Left, since I was fourteen in 1968—I was entirely taken by the avant-garde and by experimental arts. Of course, it was always a pressing question whether or not a political art, a cutting-edge avant-garde art, could also be a mass art. But as an undergraduate in college, I was reading Joyce, the classic modernists, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, the novelists of the Latin American boom.
I got into popular fiction while working in Boston because, like everyone else that works for a living, I was reading all these popular novels on the subway going to work. I began to get interested in the ways they were so much a part of relaxation, narratives that just accompanied the commute to work, books that were passed around the office. When I got to the Birmingham Centre, where there was a real interest in popular fiction, the English Studies group decided to do its collective project on popular fiction. We were sitting around the table dividing up popular fiction, and someone said I'll do romance fiction, someone else said I want to do detective fiction, and I, not knowing much else, thought, I'm kind of interested in the spy novel, so I'll do that. Eventually that group project resulted in the volume Rereading English, though I was no longer at the Centre when it was completed. My part grew into Cover Stories.
Cohen: Given that you were a member of DSOC and the North American New Left more generally, what was it like going to the Birmingham Centre, which was very much a part of the British New Left?
Denning: DSOC, with all its strengths, had absolutely no cultural politics whatsoever. It wasn't the least bit interested, and I always felt like there was this absolute gap between my political activity and my cultural interests. I was active in DSOC, particularly during the years I was in Boston and New York, because those were active chapters, but no one was interested in the politics of culture, either avant-garde or popular. I remember meeting a DSOC member who was an English professor someplace, and I went up to him and said I was really into Marxist literary criticism and Jameson, and he was like, "Oh, that stuff is worthless!" He was an amazingly active socialist, and the most conservative literary scholar you could imagine. That split was there, and it wasn't that surprising. He was a comrade you could count on for doing all kinds of political things, but when it came to thinking about Dickens or whatever his scholarship was, he was just an ordinary literary critic. And he was the only person I ever met in DSOC who had any interest in literature, except for Michael Harrington himself. Harrington was very interested in culture, theory, and European Marxism, and it came through in his writings and in informal conversation. He had that wide-ranging interest, but frankly that was not true for most of the DSOC membership.
In fact, one of the political strengths of DSOC was that it was a socialist organization without being Marxist. People in it were Christian socialists, laborist social democrats, anarchists, various forms of populist socialists, and politically that was great. I never thought that a political organization should depend on everybody being a "Marxist" in some kind of philosophical way. But it did mean that Marxism was rarely part of the dialogues or discussions inside the organization. The American New Left had certain deep anti-intellectualist tendencies in it, which I shared in my early days. I remember taking part in a debate where I took the anti-Marxist side on the grounds that there was an American radical tradition that we could build on, that we didn't need any of this Marxist stuff. I was probably seventeen at the time, and I remember making the anti-Marxist left-wing argument.
Birmingham was a radically different kind of thing. It had a much deeper sense not only of the politics of culture but of the connections to those longer left-wing traditions. And it was a completely different theoretical landscape. I remember the first day I arrived, I was told, "Well, if you read Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, Althusser's Reading Capital, and Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital, you'll be right up to speed," because those were the three books which were the basis for the debates and arguments at the Centre. I arrived full of Frankfurt School theory. The first piece I wrote that was published was a review of Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man. Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin: those were the figures who seemed essential to Marxist literary criticism, and the Birmingham people were not interested in any of that. The Frankfurt School was considered surpassed, old hat, passé, and they were on to other things.
Cohen: Is that because the Centre was more activist in its approach to doing academic work?
Denning: No. I'm very reluctant to see choices of theoretical models as political progressions or regressions. I think that Frankfurt School theory had meant something to the Birmingham people at an earlier moment, and it was just that they had felt they had settled their accounts with it. When I arrived there, there was a sense that they wanted to move away from high theory and re-engage in the concrete analysis of concrete situations. One reason Gramsci's work was beginning to displace that of Althusser was that his "Notes on Italian History" looked like what they wanted to do. They wanted to do "Notes on British History." In fact, that year Stuart Hall was writing his influential essay on Thatcherism, "The Great Moving Right Show." The books that came out of that—The Empire Strikes Back, Unpopular Education, Remaking Histories, Rereading English—were an attempt to make that move. It was also the moment of E. P. Thompson's attack on Althusserian theory in The Poverty of Theory; the Birmingham Centre was trying to make a synthesis of Althusserian theory and Thompsonian history writing, a combination that didn't please either side. I remember Thompson coming to the Centre and giving a version of The Poverty of Theory, and it was very controversial. He was in a take-no-prisoners phase; if you were even interested in reading Althusser, you were suspect.
Cohen: What was it like coming back to the US academic world from that environment?
Denning: Academically, Yale seemed the most conservative place in the world. At Birmingham, where we had no resources, the very first day we arrived, they taught us all how to use the mimeograph machine, because they said, "Everything you write, everyone else is going to want to read, so you have to type it on a stencil and mimeograph it off." So every morning when you got there, in your pigeonhole would be these one- or two- or three-page manifestos that people had written. I remember someone read The History of Sexuality in French when it was first published and immediately wrote up a four-page single-spaced précis of the book for those who didn't read French. And I remember coming to Yale and suggesting to other graduate students that we start circulating each other's papers and reading each other's stuff, and, well, that was just not what was done at Yale at the time. On the other hand, because there were these genuine, voluntary collectives of radical historians and Marxist literary critics on the side, I did find people to read stuff with and talk to.
Cohen: Where did cultural studies fit into that mix?
Denning: At that point, cultural studies was not visible in the US. It's not until much later that it began to emerge here, and when it did, it began by taking a disciplinary route, through communications departments where New Left communications scholars wanted to create something that wasn't just the study of the effects of television violence on children. So cultural studies was first imagined as radical communications or media studies, which was important and powerful but in some ways a narrowing of the Birmingham cultural studies work, which was not just a radical version of the disciplines. Without being overly romantic about it, I think cultural studies in Birmingham did imagine itself as this interdisciplinary socialist-feminist whole, rather than as a kind of radical craft unionism. And it may be because the disciplines didn't have the same kind of overwhelming professional structures in British higher education that they did in the US.
Cohen: Is it fair to say, then, that in the Birmingham Centre environment there was a sense that the forms of study were a part of the production of a socialist culture?
Denning: Absolutely, though we would have said a socialist-feminist culture. It was often said that cultural studies was the name created in order for the university to allow it to exist; if they had named themselves, they wouldn't have named it the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, but the Centre for Socialist-Feminist Research. And that's why there were constant debates over the question of what an organic intellectual might look like and the relation of intellectuals to movements. There was no unified position. While virtually everyone at the Centre had some relationship to the British left, some of them came out of Trotskyist traditions, some from Communist traditions, others from feminist traditions and New Left formations; there were people drawn to the strategies of the Italian CP and others attracted to the Italian extra-parliamentary left. One of the best early books on Antonio Negri and the Italian New Left was Bob Lumley's Cultures of Revolt, a book that came out of the Birmingham Centre. So there was a tremendous variety of positions on what the relationship of intellectuals to the movements might be.
Cohen: What led you to switch from literature to American Studies in graduate school?
Denning: I started in English because I still imagined that I was a Marxist literary critic. Once I arrived at Yale I discovered there was this space called American Studies, which I'd never heard of and which seemed weirdly parallel to what cultural studies was doing. It even had a certain New Left politics, though a much quieter one because American Studies had been developed by left-wing scholars in the 1950s who tended to downplay, given the Cold War context, their politics. So a year after I arrived at Yale, I transferred to American Studies, and have been more or less in that intellectual space ever since. However, I never really thought of myself as an American Studies person, first and foremost, but rather as a cultural studies person, after I made that switch from being a Marxist literary critic. For me, American Studies was a terrain in which one could practice cultural studies.
Cohen: Is that when you began taking up the project that became The Cultural Front?
Denning: Yes, The Cultural Front comes out of the next ten years, the decade between 1987 and 1997. I'd always wanted to do a book on the 1930s and the Old Left. The very notion of a New Left involved a settling of accounts with the Old Left; at the simplest level, it was figured in the relationship between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. That symbolic genealogy had attracted me since I was about eleven years old, when I started listening to Guthrie and Dylan. I was fascinated with the 1930s, sensing both a kinship with and a distance from the Old Left world.
In addition, when I finished the books on popular fiction, I felt that one had to place fiction in a much wider field if one was looking at popular culture in the twentieth century. So The Cultural Front was really an attempt to mix what I had learned about working-class history and culture, about movement cultures of one sort or another, with forms other than fiction, with theatre, film, music. It began as a small project—I thought I was writing a little book on Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater. Welles was a fascinating figure because he didn't fit the standard notion of the political artist. He wasn't a political person who became an artist, but an artist who was drawn into the gravitational force of this social movement, that enabled him to do this extraordinary work in several mediums—theater, radio, and film. Halfway through, I decided I had more to say about the social and cultural movement than just Welles, so Welles shrunk into just one chapter of a larger book. It took longer to do, but I'm much happier with the result.
In a sense, it was my Americanist book. For me, the great problem with the writers of the 1930s left is that they were seen, in the crudest sense, as puppets of Soviet Communism, or even in a less crude sense, as a reaction to European politics. The history of the US left was a series of echoes of the splits among the Bolsheviks, the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi-Soviet pact—not that those foreign policy issues weren't important, but it struck me that most of the books on "writers on the left" paid little or no attention to the central story in the US, which was this amazing emergence of working-class militancy which gave rise to the CIO. It was quite evident that the tensions thrown up between black and white workers, between men and women workers, as a result of the transformations in the workforce in the 1930s and 1940s, were at the heart of these stories. The Citizen Kanes and "Strange Fruit"s were not being made about the Hitler-Stalin pact. Sure, there were a few movies like Mission to Moscow, but they were minor; the great movies and songs were dealing with central issues of North American society, so I wanted to bend the stick the other way and Americanize the way we saw the Popular Front of the 1930s.
I might have gone a little overboard in that way, and part of my post-Cultural Front work has been to try and correct this over-emphasis. The chapter on "The Novelists' International" in Culture in an Age of Three Worlds is an attempt to argue that Popular Front culture was not simply an American culture, but a very powerful international culture that you can see versions of around the world.
Cohen: One of the great things about The Cultural Front is its scope; even its critics admit that it provides a tremendous map to the cultural and political networks of that decade, beyond the proletarian literary movement. Were there people writing about this world who helped you put these various pieces together? Or had you always been reading Mike Gold and been curious about what lay beyond him?
Denning: Because I'd had this long interest in the culture of the 1930s, I'd been collecting 1930s material for years—all the old proletarian novels and political pamphlets, the paper legacy of the 1930s left that you could find in the 1970s in the stretch of used bookstores that lined lower Broadway in New York. But being a member of DSOC meant that one heard stories of the battles between the Schactmanites and the Cannonites from people who had been part of them. The left-wing organizations one ends up in are often not so much a product of one's ideological position, but rather of the accidents of one's own biography—which city you are in, which people you meet. So I ended up not in one of the more-or-less New Left groups with people of the 1960s and 1970s generation, but in one of the older formations, DSOC, which had many veterans of the Old Left—old, bitterly anti-Communist Trotskyists, old Social Democrats who remembered the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas. Its usefulness was not necessarily adopting their old battles as one's own—though sometimes there was a danger of that—but of learning this internal history in ways that can only be told. It doesn't turn up in books.
When the merger between DSOC and the New American Movement [NAM] took place, forming Democratic Socialists of America, some of the people from the Communist Party traditions who had been closer to NAM ended up in that circle as well. I absorbed much of this history in late-night conversations among different generations of socialist activists. That encounter between old radicals who were interested in telling their story in their own way, and the new generation who were trying to figure out that history, was behind The Cultural Front.
The other thing that made the book possible—and I cannot underestimate this—was the appearance of several rich and carefully researched biographies, among them Martin Duberman's biography of Paul Robeson, Eric Gordon's biography of Mark Blitzstein, and Arnold Rampersad's biography of Langston Hughes. The biographies let you see the day-to-day personal connections of the movement and gave texture to the pamphlets and manifestos. One could see a person moving from one organization to another; and that led to the argument that these were not separate worlds but were interconnected around some key figures.
Cohen: In terms of methodology, how do you see your work in relation to other historians of the period? Alan Wald describes what he does—focusing closely on the relation between biography and text—as creating a "humanscape" that can illuminate the tensions that enabled and constrained radical cultural production from the 1930s through the 1950s.
Denning: That's a good comparison, because Alan's wonderful work has tried to recapture the lives, the humanity, of the individuals that were part of this movement. As a result, he did many interviews with people and builds his work on those interviews. Though I did a few interviews, I never felt like that was my project. From the beginning, the theoretical model that really held The Cultural Front together was Raymond Williams' notion of the "formation," the combination of a particular social location and a particular aesthetic form. For Williams, the project of cultural studies, the way one could move away from close readings of individual texts, was to use the intellectual imagination to see how individual texts and lives came together in specific formations. Formations, not individual texts, are the basic units of our cultural traditions. The first third of The Cultural Front was imagined as a kind of overview, but the second two-thirds are an examination of a number of those formations.
Cohen: You've said you've thought of The Cultural Front as an "American Renaissance" book, by which you mean along similar lines as F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance. Is that the kind of impact you wanted The Cultural Front to have?
Denning: I was thinking about American Renaissance as a model—the heft of it, the ambition of it. I still have the hardcover copy of it I bought back when I was scuffling as a freelance writer during the 1970s. But it was a negative model as well: it seemed finally to me to be too formalist a book, it didn't situate those writers enough in that historical moment, and there were ways in which his resistance to the Marxist tradition, though being a socialist and an activist, meant that I was never interested in being a Matthiessenian critic. But I did want to make a different claim than I had made in the dime novels book. In Mechanic Accents I wanted to capture something of what working-class culture was like in the late nineteenth century by going through this strange kind of evidence, dime novels. But I never had a sense that people should be re-reading those dime novels, that they should be reissued in paperback or whatever, whereas with Billie Holiday or Duke Ellington or Orson Welles or Carlos Bulosan or Woody Guthrie, I wanted to illuminate the power and meaning of works that should be re-issued and re-experienced. The paradox at the heart of The Cultural Front was that everyone despised Popular Front culture and said it was just Stalinist kitsch, and yet the great works of that generation came out of that social movement. It couldn't have been as ridiculous a culture if it produced the most interesting works of American culture at that time, which I think it did. That's why it feels to me now very much an Americanist project and a canon-making project, for better or worse.
I would not want to call it a canon, because that has the biblical connotation of sacred books. I'd prefer to recast "the canon" as "common readings": there's a cultural commons to which we all have right, one which neither Disney nor Gates has the right to copyright and own. In fact, I like the notion of "common readings" better than Williams' notion of the "selective tradition." I wanted to say that these works of the 1930s are part of the cultural commons that we have in North America, that they come out of the struggles in North America, they're very contradictory, some of them are failed works, but, as Dylan says, "There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all." And there's a great line from Fred Jameson as well, that it's better to think of Brecht and Lenin as failures than to think of them as some kind of plaster bust on the shelf. The sense that this was a failure but a productive failure that becomes a kind of cultural commons, that was the project of the book.
Cohen: Were you surprised when critics said you should have adjudicated more between forms, or that you were too general in your descriptions of the social movements?
Denning: No, aside from a couple of instances, I thought the critics were generous. I remember Michael Rogin saying it was the consensus version of the history of the American left. And he meant that as a compliment, I think. We've had so many histories of the 1930s left that emphasize the kind of internecine, sectarian debates and divisions, that we've lost the sense that there actually were things held in common. That's why I've found Jameson's argument about three different horizons in The Political Unconscious so powerful; it seemed to me that The Cultural Front worked largely at the horizon where there are certain ideologemes that are held in common, even by people who imagine they are antagonists in other kinds of ways.
There are weaknesses in the book; I can tell you a whole bunch of them. There's a genre of fascinating CIO novels that nobody had looked at, and I had intended to write a whole chapter about them, to complement the chapter of the traditionally-recognized proletarian novels. So it's not like there aren't limits to the book.
Cohen: What did you think of Alfred Kazin's reading of the book in the Intellectual History Newsletter issue devoted to The Cultural Front?
Denning: It was what you'd expect. He was a participant in many of the conflicts, and for him the hostilities of that moment between the CP and the Socialists were a genuine part of his life experience. He basically said that I made it seem like a much happier time and that he remembered it as the bleakest kind of time. He mentioned when the Young Communists in 1934 came and broke up one of the meetings of the Socialists, and I'm glad that he put that on paper.
There were other people that did feel—and I think I got this across—that it was a moment of tremendous optimism. I remember one person I interviewed said to me, "I have to apologize for this, because I've been a pacifist all my life, but the war years were the most exciting years. We really felt like we were on the verge of creating a new world, and that after the war there was going to be this new world. It really wasn't until 1947-48, when the Cold War comes in, that it really became bleak." Now, whether Kazin's version is right or this person's version is right is neither here nor there—that's what the memoirs are for. There is a necessary tension between memoir and history. I was not trying to write a book that would capture Kazin's memories; he may not have been aware of some of the formations I was researching. I was trying to write a book that captured a sense of what that era and its culture had come to mean in subsequent US culture.
I think my book probably over-accents the cultural politics of the 1930s because of the cultural politics of the New Left. I remember when we interviewed Ring Lardner, Jr. and I asked him what were the most important kinds of cultural things that the left did during the period, and his answer—this was a guy who was a screenwriter—he said, "Well, The Grapes of Wrath was really important," and mentioned a few other things, but he went on to say, "We didn't think that much about culture—it was really all about politics!" I don't remember if I put that in the book, but it does illustrate the way the book is written by someone with a different conception of the relationship between culture and politics, who came out of the mass culture of the 1960s and 1970s. And that's what made it impossible for me to finally be a person of the 1930s.
So the fact that the people of the 1930s might see this differently is not surprising, though I was as encouraged by the fact that Tillie Olsen really thought it captured the movement as I was unsurprised that Alfred Kazin thought it didn't capture it. What I wanted to do was clear the ground so that other people could think about more interesting questions than "was she, or wasn't she, a Communist?"
Cohen: To shift to your latest book, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, how do you see the difference between what you call "the laboring of American culture," which is a key term from The Cultural Front, to "a labor theory of culture," which is one of the central concepts in the recent project?
Denning: I think that the "laboring of American culture" argument is a specifically historical argument: in many ways a rhetoric of labor, a concern with labor and work, powerfully inflects American culture in the middle decades of the twentieth century, partly because of the trauma of the Depression, partly because of the migration of huge numbers of people to this amazing Fordist industrial world, and partly because of the creation of new unions of the CIO. Indeed, as I hope to show in a book I'm working on right now, the US working class becomes a much more significant part of the world working class in the 1930s and 1940s, partly because of the destruction of the organized working classes by fascism in Europe. In some ways, the US working class has a disproportionate world position once the German working class is smashed by Hitler and once the Italian working class is smashed by Mussolini. So the notion of the laboring of American culture, and the subsequent destruction of that laborist culture, particularly in the 1980s under Reagan, is an important historical argument that I would stand by.
The other argument, "the labor theory of culture," is part of the larger theoretical issues that came out of my early Marxist literary criticism project, which is just trying to figure what a Marxist cultural theory would look like. That was half of the work that dominated the next decade, 1997-2007, some of which is captured in Culture in the Age of Three Worlds. I think of this work as moving in two directions. The first is to make more explicit some of the theoretical arguments and directions that were there in the earlier historical studies, and the second is to bend the stick against the Americanism of that work and to think US culture in a more global frame: what it would mean to think through a world Popular Front? What is the place of US workers in a world labor force? What are the specificities of US development in terms of the Americas or in terms of settler colonial regimes around the world?
I've been working on a book tentatively called The Accumulation of Labor, which is on workers in the twentieth century, but also on how we have conceived of work and labor as categories. Oddly enough, the Marxist tradition has undertheorized labor. There's a tremendous theorization of capital, and labor is in some ways nothing but the inverse of capital; nevertheless, the accumulation of capital has been more written about than what Marx called the multiplication of the proletariat, which was the other half of the accumulation of capital, or what I'm calling the accumulation of labor. And in cultural studies, culture has more often been seen through the lens of the commodity—through reification and fetishism, themes that come out of Lukàcs and Benjamin and go right to Jameson—than through the lens of labor. So culture has more often been seen through the lens of politics, from Gramsci's theorizations of culture and its role in hegemony and Trotsky's theorizations of cultural revolution and the place of culture in daily life up to Stuart Hall and the Birmingham work on the connections of culture and hegemony. One of my long-term projects has been to figure out whether there is a labor theory of culture, whether culture could be seen through the lens of work, something suggested in the common American idiom of "making a living," a phrase that means what your job is, but is also a good definition of culture. So the labor theory of culture is really a theoretical reflection rather than the specific historical argument of the laboring of American culture.
Cohen: In Culture in the Age of Three Worlds you say that cultural studies comes out of the "three worlds" moment, and that the global forces which produced cultural studies have shifted. In a way, it seems like you're saying cultural studies is dead and alive at the same time. Or is that a bad reading of your argument?
Denning: No, I think that's a reasonable reading, but I want to respond with an analogy. I always thought that tendency journals should have an expiration date—maybe ten years—because most of the great intellectual journals became much less interesting than they were at the beginning. Their tendency becomes a cliché rather than a new metaphor. That's what I would say about cultural studies. On the one hand, because of my own biographical limitations—I'd love to make myself twenty years younger and twenty years older at the same time—I will always be a cultural studies person. On the other hand, I'm extremely reluctant to argue that this ought to be the banner under which we do our work—the moment when it was the slogan on the banner has passed. I was never driven by the desire to institutionalize cultural studies, in part because the name itself was in some way a euphemism for the real slogan, which I remain committed to, the larger tradition of historical materialism.
Cohen: Earlier, you were talking about how crucial the people you met who came from the Old Left were to your own intellectual formation. Do you see yourself as one of those people from the New Left now informing another generation?
Denning: Absolutely. But I was just young enough never to feel like I really was of the New Left. One of the differences between me and the 68ers is that I never shared the revolutionary optimism of the New Left. The coup against Allende in Chile made a greater impression on me than Fidel marching into Havana. For me, it was not a revolutionary moment but a moment of defeats; the much more chastened hopes for a Euro-communism and Euro-socialism in the 1970s lent a much more social-democratic accent to me than to people who were ten or fifteen years older.
But there has been a remarkable new generation of the left that has emerged out of the global justice movements—out of Seattle and everything that meant, out of the anti-war demonstrations right before the war. It's a much bleaker generation because its touchstones are Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and the lack of a real mass movement against this war. One of the key contributions that a cultural analysis of the left can give is the sense that left-wing political life is not a set of different issues, causes, and campaigns; it's actually a long-term culture, often accented regionally, by religion, race, ethnicity, by different migrant communities. If one thinks of the Debsian Socialist Party, the figure of Eugene Debs held together Oklahoma populist socialists, New York Jewish immigrant radicals, German-American socialists of Midwestern cities like Milwaukee—all of whom had very different kinds of ways of living socialism. Any kind of left is actually the putting together of those very different left traditions.
In some ways, that's what The Cultural Front was for the Old Left of the 1930s. There was the official recognized cultural front of the New Masses that had been written about. But because so much more material had been put together as that generation grew older, I as a historian was able to see that there were these other cultural fronts across the continent that weren't necessarily visible in the New Masses in New York.
A real history of the New Left in the US has yet to be written, because the New Left is still seen as essentially the white, college-educated, Ann Arbor left. The impact of the Asian-American, semi-Maoist New Left is still hardly visible. Similarly we don't have full accounts of the various forms of Latino New Lefts that emerged from experiences of different struggles in Latin America as well as in the US.
Cohen: I know you've been involved with the graduate student union movement at Yale. How has that played into your experience here?
Denning: The Yale labor struggles have been a constant education since I arrived here in 1979 as a graduate student, in the midst of the organizing that led to the creation of the union of the clerical and technical workers following the long and bitter strike of 1984. Though I didn't realize it at the time, the union struggles of the clerical workers were to become one of the significant struggles in the emergence of a new kind of service sector unionism. Obviously it had predecessors in the public sector going back to the 1970s, and in that sense, Yale was well behind as a private university. But the form of unionism that the Yale locals of HERE (the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, which later became UNITE-HERE) were developing was innovative and more democratic, not driven by professional organizers from outside but by organizing committees within the bargaining unit, using tactics often taken from the civil rights movement, and making connections with the community. This eventually was a key part of the shifts in leadership in the AFL-CIO in the mid-1990s. It felt like we were seeing the invention of a service-sector-based unionism, and I participated in some ways as a faculty supporter.
As the graduate student union took off, I think I went through many of the same stages the graduate students were going through—the arguments over whether graduate students were teachers or students, over the kind of work teaching was. The graduate student teachers unions were supported and nurtured by the other unions who had a visionary sense of an industrial unionism for the education industry. And remember, most educational unionism, which doesn't go back that far, still had a craft model; in many universities, professors had their union, and they didn't really have much connection to the workers in the dining halls and the electricians and the maintenance people or the clerical workers. The exciting thing at Yale through all of those years was also very difficult, because it was not clear to any of the workers in the university that they had anything in common with the graduate teachers, or that the graduate teachers thought they had anything to do with the people in the dining halls. Forging that alliance was, and is, a continuing effort because, of course, workforces change. New people are hired, old people with memories of earlier struggles leave or retire, so it's a continual political project to forge a sense that we have things in common in this huge educational plant with eight to ten thousand people working for it. And so for me, for anyone teaching at Yale, even if you've had tenure for fifteen years like I do, GESO is my union. I don't technically pay dues because I'm not a graduate teacher, but in many ways GESO has been the one organization to place issues of teaching, of the casualization of teaching, of the inequities regarding the way teaching is done in the university, on the table. It has been tremendous to watch and to be involved in that struggle, and to see the ways the unions connected their struggle to politics in the city, campaigning for a living wage ordinance and for community benefits agreements, and trying to cross the divides which are so powerful in this apartheid town of New Haven.
Cohen: Were there tensions between the faculty when the graduate students were organizing, as opposed to when the clerical workers were unionizing?
Denning: If you ask many faculty, they'd say, "Oh yes, we supported the clerical workers because obviously they deserve a union, but we don't support the graduate students because they're not really workers." But if you were around, as I was, from 1982 to 1984, that's not the case at all. The same people—the same individuals or their institutional equivalents—who oppose the graduate student union opposed the clerical workers union, too, for largely the same reasons—"Oh no, it'll destroy the collegiality of the department; they're not really industrial workers. Unions are alright for the maintenance workers, the blue collar guys, but not for the women, because they're not working in some kind of industrial environment, they've got a nice relationship with their supervisor, who's not really a supervisor but just a professor." Exactly the same kind of nonsense about how the union will destroy the graduate school was said about the administrative people in departments, and how organizing them would destroy the life of the department. Back then, it was a relatively small minority of faculty who stood by Local 34, and it's still a relatively small minority of faculty who have stood by GESO.
Cohen: Did participating in and witnessing these local labor struggles influence the conclusions you came to in your latest book about the relationship between unionism and democracy?
Denning: Oh, yes. It has shaped much of the work of the last fifteen years. When I was a graduate student, few activists were thinking about graduate teacher unionism. The radicalism of the craft—being a radical historian—was what dominated. As I began working on The Cultural Front, my imagination of radical culture was still shaped by the old model of "Writers on the Left." For most of the time that I was writing it, I didn't think that the essay I had done with Holly Allen, an early GESO activist, on the Disney cartoonists was part of the book. The idea that culture industry unionism was a central part of the cultural front was something I came to by seeing the GESO organizing. That allowed me to see how it was not only the struggles of the CIO industrial unions that so deeply influenced the writers and screenwriters and cartoonists, but also the struggles for their own unions. It recast the way I understood the parameters of The Cultural Front.
The essay on democracy which ends Culture in an Age of Three Worlds was delivered as part of a Yale celebration of its three centuries; they wanted a series of talks on democracy, and my reflections grew out of the GESO experiences. I wanted not only to think historically about democracy as a social movement, but also to reflect on what democracy meant in the workplace.
Cohen: You mentioned during an earlier conversation that you'd changed the way you teach, that you'd moved away from the graduate seminar format. Could you talk about that?
Denning: Yes, and this goes back to one of the earlier things we were talking about. One of the things the Birmingham Centre had attempted was to reconceive how work at the research level could be done in the humanities. They had these collective sub-groups that wrote books together. In part, it was easier to do this in England because graduate work was relatively unstructured—people just went and wrote a dissertation. They didn't have orals, they didn't have classes. I remember the Centre faculty saying at the time, "Well, we thought that if you're here writing your dissertation, we could meet together and do something." The very lack of structure in British post-graduate education (as they would call it), which was often a very isolated and isolating situation, led them to create these collaborative spaces.
But in the US, graduate education had a structure of coursework, oral exams, comprehensive exams, all these different stages and steps. In the midst of this, I would sort of wax nostalgic about the Birmingham model, while teaching inside the structures of an American graduate program. So about four years ago, I decided to try and put my money where my mouth was. Without trying to change the whole program into the Birmingham Centre, I created an ongoing collective research group that would not be the spectatorial thing that a seminar is—you have the syllabus, people come if they like, and it's all over at the end of the semester. Instead, we sit down at the start of the year as a group of people that want to do something together. We come up with the questions we are interested in, the books and essays we want to read together, the project we want to research and write together, the ways each individual's writing connects to that project, and the way we will present that project to others. Over the past four years we've done four of those projects. Some people have been in it all four years, others have gone off and taken jobs in other places; we've taken new people each year, and there's usually some core that continues from year to year.
The graduate working group has drawn in people from a number of different disciplines—anthropology, history, music, American Studies—and part of working together is everyone bringing their own disciplinary skills and chauvinisms to the table, because we all imagine that the techniques of analysis that we learned are the best techniques and the most interesting ones. So that's been very effective and powerful for me—I've learned a lot. And one of the elements has been, and which Birmingham taught me, is that I write as much as they write, and that changes the relationship between us. Even though obviously I've written and published more than they have, nonetheless I'm not in the position of simply teaching the course, reading what they write, and evaluating that. I'm putting my new writing on the table at the same time they are, and getting the feedback and arguments. I can remember going to Birmingham and within two months I was part of a group that was supposed to write the introduction to a collection of the Centre's work, the volume Culture, Media, Language. I remember Stuart Hall bringing in a draft, and he said to us, "Okay, what are your suggestions and criticisms?" Seeing how he moved from one draft to another was as instructive as any kind of comments he could have written on my own drafts.
The other source was the overall experience of GESO, which led me to change my attitude toward "graduate students," indeed not to think of graduate students as "graduate students." Particularly after the first year, people in a graduate program are part of the profession, they're part of the industry. They have exactly the same day-to-day concerns as I do: how do you manage teaching on the one hand, and getting your research done on the other, which is the central structure of the research university. That's why I don't really think of this as graduate training. The question was how can we work collectively, develop a large project, say on audiopolitics, and yet enable an individual who wants to work on global advertising, or somebody else who wants to work on this form of music, to do that kind of project and be able to write that in your own voice and get that published in their own name.
The first year we studied the commodity chain of the cell phone; the second year we did a project on the politics of the neoliberal university (we were one of a number of groups who came together on this at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre). The third year was on the practice of transnational history, which we presented at the Tepotzlan Instutute in Mexico, and this past year we did a project, "Audiopolitics: Measures of Global Soundscapes."
Cohen: You're obviously thinking about more global and more current issues in your teaching. Would you say that still resonates with the moment of the CIO?
Denning: No. I was powerfully attracted to that moment, that movement, so I wrote a book to settle my accounts with it, but I haven't even taught a course on the age of the CIO in a number of years. I do think the moment of the CIO is part of our cultural and political commons, so one would be ill-advised to ignore the history of the CIO, the history of the Popular Front social movement, but I'm not sure that it's any more necessary than the history of the women's movement of the 1960s or the Debsian Socialist Party or the Abolitionist movement. In fact, the recent taking up of Du Bois' notion of "abolition democracy" and the return to the moment after the Civil War and to the hopes of Reconstruction may be more important right now than dealing with the Old Left and the CIO.
I will say that one of my inheritances from the moment of the CIO is a persistent leaning toward what might be called the syndicalist tendency. Right from the beginning of the Marxist and socialist tradition, there's been a conflict between those who felt that the political party was the key institution, and those who felt the industrial unions were key—a party tradition and a syndicalist tradition. I have come to realize that, without consciously deciding, I have acted more or less like a syndicalist. I've always been less interested in the party, in developing or thinking about parties, than in working in the line that runs from the Wobblies to the CIO to the new service unionism. I guess I'm more workplace oriented and feel that what people do at work shapes much of the way they think about things. Questions like "should it be a mass party or a vanguard party?" have been less important to me than the organization of the workplace, and that may be my inheritance from the moment of the CIO.
Cohen: Do you think you're able to get across these things, or your notion of the labor theory of culture, in your classes?
Denning: I hope so. But I tend to have modest aims in teaching. Most American leftists are Deweyite liberals when it comes to education: they think education changes minds and society, and the reason they teach is to teach critical skills that will change students. That has always seemed odd to me. Coming out of the Marxist tradition, and particularly out of Gramsci, I've always had a much more modest approach to teaching than most of my radical teaching colleagues. Teaching, and going to school, does not shape people's ideas. People's ideas are shaped by the material circumstances that they come out of, the material situations they find themselves in, by "making a living." It's not that people can't change their minds and ideas—you're not set by where your family came from or what you learned in your formative years, because you've got new challenges. You may come from a family with money and now you have no job, or vice-versa—a lot of things can happen. Moments of crisis change people's thinking.
As a teacher, I'm simply trying to give people some of the resources, the cultural commons, that may be useful when those moments of crisis hit. I've always thought that if anyone became a socialist after taking my class, well, they'd be a neoliberal next semester after taking somebody else's class. Sometimes radical teachers over-estimate the power of teaching and have too-high hopes for what they can accomplish. After all, the great majority of what I do is to pass people through a stage in the labor market. Many of the students are not going to remember a thing that I said, just as I don't remember most of my undergraduate teachers. I took more than thirty different courses, and I probably couldn't tell you the names of fifteen of those teachers, let alone what it was they taught. Three of them changed my life—Lou Renza, Peter Bien, Marlene Fried—and I could probably tell you the kinds of impact they had. The others, I just zipped through.
I do know that there are a few students who come through my class, and because of where they are at that moment, this is the resource they need to think through the issues in their lives. And they may argue with me, as I did with Marlene Fried in her Marxism course. I still recall arguing the anti-Marxist position in that seminar. Many years later, I saw her and told her how much I had learned in that class, and how it had a long-term effect. Even though I was this obstinate student, I was fighting through those things, and even though she didn't persuade me, it was a resource. As I continued as an activist, and learned more, and read more, and went to England and began to think about the left in a more international way, those things that Marlene had taught about Marxisms in other parts of the world—which I wasn't even interested in—became a resource.
But for most students, I'm giving them a grade and a credit, and they're moving on in their own lives. We shouldn't over-invest in the power of teaching; it's just one part of a vast cultural industry that a lot of other people are involved with as well.
|
