A little while ago I was interviewed for the German newspaper taz. Some of my responses were incorporated in an article about Cultural Studies in Britain which German-speaking readers can find here. In the interests of not leaving any single shred of writing on my computer, though, here is the interview in full! Questions came from Christian Wertschulte, who also wrote the article.

Your writing oscillates between academic philosophy and more political writing on culture and theory. How would you describe the link between the two?

I am a strong believer in the notion that complex ideas can be explained to anyone, even oneself, given enough time and patience. This applies just as well to supposedly ‘academic’ philosophy as it does to more ‘popular’ ideas: one of the best things about the internet is that it has started to erode the idea that particular concepts or thinkers belong to any one category of people, or that certain discussions belong only to the university. The opening up of journal publishing online (open access) means that people can increasingly read articles that would have previously been buried away in university libraries or hidden behind passwords which are given to academics and students alone. To my mind, the best scholar is always the autodidact – within or outside the academy – as only he or she has the motivation to really understand anything. If you’re a lecturer it’s a question of accessing the will to learn in your students and ensuring that this interest in ideas doesn’t get crushed under the weight of the student’s own insecurity, which is often massive. I don’t want to see a separation between the academy and the rest of the world: the same goes for the kinds of writing involved. Too many academics lazily emulate a type of ‘house style’ which is incredibly dull to read and demonstrates nothing other than a kind of ‘secret boredom’ with regard whichever topic they happen to be writing about. This sometimes gets confused with a kind of profundity, but I am convinced that the best academics, and all good writers, really, will always be clear if they have something genuinely worthwhile to say.

Has the introduction of the RAE affected your capacity to publish outside academia? How?

Not really. Universities want you to demonstrate all kinds of contradictory things at once – in-depth scholarship yet accessibility, value-for-money yet long-term outcomes, and so on. The contradictions of the modern university are simply a microcosmic version of the bastardised form of neo-liberalism fused with state bureaucracy that characterises contemporary life. In this sense, universities love academics who can at once be ‘scholars’ and ‘populists’. They don’t even seem to mind if you write scornful pieces about the very nature of academia itself, so long as the journal you publish in has a high enough rating. The thing that should take up most time is teaching – yet this is the one area (unless it involves getting overseas or postgraduate fees) that universities are not really interested in. When the students find this out, they can’t believe it. We shouldn’t either.

Who’s the addressee of your political writing? Oliver Marchart claims in his book about Cultural Studies that a lot of the early research from the CCCS was conducted in the hope to exert an influence that would cause a political shift in the Labour party which would lead to a stronger recognition of questions of immigration and feminist ideas. Is there a similar agenda to your writing? How far does it relate to current struggles and social movements? Is this kind of left-wing “organicity” between writers and social movements something you might want to achieve?

I’m not sure I have a specific agenda in the sense you describe. The blog itself was begun in a state of despondency and isolation following a series of traumatic personal events – I never thought of it as being part of a larger picture, although I’m obviously extremely glad for all the things it led to, friendships, more writing opportunities, and so on. The tone on my blog is often a bit silly and I’m not a member of any political party, so I don’t feel like my writing seeks to influence anyone in particular. In the longer-term though, it would of course be desirable to achieve a kind of ‘organicity’ between writers and social movements: at the moment we feel like fellow travellers to an idea that has been more or less crushed to death. Politically, it’s a depressing time: the left needs to focus the anger, resentment and disbelief that many feel in the wake of the bank bailouts and job-losses into real action. There are plenty of people willing to challenge the increasingly damaged status quo but most of these actions and mobilisations (by the unions, by Climate Camp) are disconnected from one another. I don’t think we need public intellectuals in the older mode (Sartre, Bertrand Russell, etc.) but, on the other hand, they did manage to speak out about issues of general concern. Their contemporary pretenders, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and co. are pale, reactionary imitators. If bloggers can undermine the domination of the media by these apologists for war and bigotry (and at the same time try to reformulate what the media is), then all to the good. But things are not yet there, quite.

And as a follow-up question: How important is being personally involved in and being affected by actual political struggles for expression as a political writer?

As an activist, I am rather lacking. We have of course attended many of the marches and protests against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, been chased by cops protecting Bush when he came to visit and been kettled by police at the Bank of England, but this is pretty minimal stuff. Teaching at a university involves its own battles and conflicts, and I’m probably better at writing about those than I am about writing about politics more generally. K-Punk and Richard Seymour of Lenin’s Tomb are excellent sources for serious political debate outside of the mainstream media, and quite a lot of what I might say about any issue will be on these sites (and better phrased) before I’ve worked out how I might put it. Again, I think there needs to be a closer fit between what we’re writing and thinking about and what we do: I fear, however, that things will get worse before they’ll get better. Britain has become a fearful and heavily suspicious country, and the left needs to work out ways of dealing with the various kinds of resentment that currently dominate social and political life before it’s too late.

I must confess to not having read “One-Dimensional Woman” (but I’d really like to!), but from what I can gather, its critique seems to resemble what Angela McRobbie wrote in the ”The Aftermath of Feminism”, where she renounces the idea of “the subversion of the everyday” as a feminist strategy. What is your stance on that? And what do you think of current popular feminism e.g. Charlotte Roche’s “Wetlands” which was a huge success in Germany where it was praised as a hedonistic renewal of feminism as the Third Wave went by largely unnoticed here.

I interviewed Charlotte Roche earlier this year. I liked Wetlands, and thought it rather funny. Roche’s point is quite an interesting one: that actually for all the talk and practice of sex, women’s liberation hasn’t really happened, that women are still hugely embarrassed about their bodies, even as they feel no compunction about having sex with lots of people. I agree with Roche that the ‘liberation’ that glares down at us in the form of consumer sexiness is a joke. My book takes issue with, among other things, the kinds of contemporary feminism that swallows the idea that shoes, chocolate and ‘self-esteem’ are the keys to liberation. I’m clearly not the only one who has been thinking this: Angela McRobbie’s book is a much more rigorous attempt than my own to question the kinds of feminist politics (or lack thereof) that exist in contemporary female-oriented culture. Hester Eisenstein in Feminism Seduced seems to be making similar arguments, and Ariel Levy a few years ago was saying related and important things in Female Chauvinist Pigs. I do see hints of a better world in the everyday, but these hints come mainly from the ambiguity of relations with other people, and from older cultural forms, not from the tawdry image of what those relations are supposed to be according to some TV show or other. In lots of ways, I’m simply angry that the world is so stupid, that it treats people so stupidly. People aren’t stupid, but the world is a tiring place.

I’m also asking this because despite your criticism of consumer feminism you don’t really seem to want to give up popular culture as a field of feminist intervention, do you?

I don’t, no. Much of the book looks back to older models of political intervention, to ways of living life differently that we are supposed to think are failed and no longer possible. I argue, for example, that pornography in its earliest inceptions was comedic and witty whilst still being explicit: the porn we have now is as categorised as types of biscuits in the supermarket. I run the risk of being nostalgic, of course, but I think it’s impossible to think about the future without first trying to understand the past. Feminism, like pornography, constantly forgets its own history: at various points women were, according to the dominant culture, supposed to be irrational and hysterical. Today, young women are meant to be holding it all together – doing well at school, buying property, getting good jobs and so on. Obviously, on the one hand, this is the fruit of the liberation that women fought and died for; but if this liberation simply means accepting the world as it is, conservatively, never rocking the boat, then the battle, by being won, has in fact been lost.