Dear All,

A lot opf people wanted to see the interview and the easiest (and potentially most paperless) way to distribute it is to attach it to this message; which i will now try to do.

thanks for your interest. comments of course welcome. 


Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; name="Smith_interview_CS.txt" Content-ID:  Content-Description:

Williams/Smith @ minn rev ns 43-4 1


Jeffrey Williams

Questioning Cultural Studies:
An Interview with Paul Smith

[This interview with Paul Smith took place on 20 June 1994 at the MLG Institute for Culture and Society at Trinity College, Hartford, CT, and was conducted by Jeffrey Williams, editor of minnesota review. Special thanks to Jan Forehand for transcribing and preparing the manuscript.] 


JW: In 1984, you co-wrote an essay called ³The Need for Cultural Studies.² In a way, it was a manifesto for cultural studies and how cultural studies could reform literature departments or, more exactly, de-form disciplines. So, after ten years, what¹s your take on the current formation of cultural studies? Has the charge in that essay been borne out?

PS: Well, the short answer is no. But the longer answer involves talking about what that article actually was, when it appeared, and in what context. We actually wrote it in 1983, at the beginning of the importation of cultural studies into the American academy. Cultural studies was still pretty much an empty term for a lot of people, and for us it seemed like an opportunity to politicize whatever that importation was going to be. We wrote it for the first issue of Cultural Critique, but, in my understanding, it was not published there because the editors decided that it was too radical, at least for their immediate practical concerns. That¹s to say they expected to get various kinds of grants, so they wouldn¹t publish it.

JW: Really? It seems almost tame in the current moment. 

PS: Well, yeah. But that¹s what I¹m saying. In that context, it was an attempt to politicize something which had no shape or form in the American academy. And lo and behold, the first thing that happened to it, its purview was called too political. So that set a certain tone, I think. But the article itself was concerned largely with the question of cultural studies as an opportunity for what we were calling ³resisting intellectuals²‹intellectuals taken in the broadest sense of the term, we were very Gramscian in that moment‹resisting in terms of not just the institution, but particular disciplinary productions of knowledge. For me, one thematic form cultural studies has taken in the last ten years has been the critique of particular disciplinary productions of knowledge and therefore of the institutions which produce those knowledges, in such a way that some of the divisions between disciplines, between knowledge and politics, between professors and students, between the university and what people call the public sphere, could get reconvened or rethought. And to me, that¹s still the main advantage in principle.

JW: Before I said it was tame. Actually, it¹s probably more a question of its being a manifesto, and manifestoes don¹t quite sound the same after the fact . . . 

PS: Certainly. But it also seems tame because since then there¹s been a lot more rhetoric or noise about those very issues, and I think that the stakes increase perpetually, that cultural studies has the potential to transform both knowledge itself or the forms of knowledge production, and also the institutions in which they¹re produced. Cultural studies could do something to the disciplines, could reform, de-form, or in some ways alter our sense of disciplinary knowledge.

JW: On the other hand, there¹s a certain way in which cultural studies has been absorbed into the institution. 

PS: Not necessarily. I think that the noise has been large, but real absorption hasn¹t actually happened. If you were going to look into the future of the cultural studies movement, one of the big tasks would still be to think about how we can do the kind of critique of knowledge production such that it will be in our own terms. I¹ve always thought of cultural studies as perhaps a way of making some moves against instrumental rationality in the university and in other institutions. I still like to think that¹s what it could do. 

JW: It¹s being absorbed or assimilated in various programs around the country, like the new one at Stony Brook. It¹s being slotted into the humanities there, but it¹s just another component, like one has women¹s studies programs, one has . . .

PS: That¹s perhaps how it now appears, but I don¹t think that¹s what we were hoping in our ³manifesto.² But if that¹s what it¹s going to be‹another mailbox in the university‹ then I think its task can still be to struggle against positivism, empiricism, the instrumental rationality of all disciplines, the structures of knowledge which are taken for granted in most of the academic disciplines, especially the social sciences, which seem to me at this juncture to be the enemy in very real ways.

JW: Why is that? Your Carnegie Mellon experience? 

PS: Well, it¹s certainly influenced by my Carnegie Mellon experience, where even in the English Department there¹s that kind of social science ethos. But I think it¹s not just that. I mean, it seems to me that the assumptions which are, again, for shorthand called positivism and empiricism, the assumptions of most of the social scientists in this country, are dangerous because of the way in which they have credibility in and access to policy-making in public, governmental, and administrative circles. And such a lot of the money which is spent on R & D in this country goes straight to the social sciences for particular kinds of projects which I think we ought to be still critiquing‹critiquing not just because of the politics of their involvement with government agencies or corporations, but critiquing them for the assumptions about knowledge, their epistemological status, if you like. That¹s something that cultural studies could still do, even if it were just another mailbox. But that wasn¹t entirely what one started out hoping for it to do. 

JW: What do you think of the current strand of cultural studies, really the dominant line of cultural studies in this country, as represented by the leviathan volume, edited by Grossberg et al., from the famous conference at Illinois? And there have been a whole bunch of cultural studies readers spawned from that. I¹ve also noticed in the MLA Job List, there are now even some cultural studies jobs. 

PS: Well, far fewer than our graduate students might hope for! I¹m not sure there¹s anything like a coherent image of cultural studies being presented anywhere. I don¹t especially want to critique the volume Cultural Studies, but I don¹t believe that the lack of agreed methodology, the lack of conventions across whatever cultural studies might be, is at all a good thing. I don¹t think, in the kind of institutional settings that we¹re in, that we can afford not to say, ³These are our methods and assumptions. These are the ways in which we conduct ourselves.²

JW: Would it then become as a discipline, though, or . . . 

PS: Certainly, but I thought we were starting from the proposition that ³if we are going to be a mailbox,² which I would be hard pressed to argue isn¹t the case. That¹s really where cultural studies is, I think‹even though it doesn¹t appear in all the universities all over the place and even though it¹s very scattered. But there¹s also another sense in which it¹s been institutionalized; it¹s become a huge boon for academic and Routledge-like publishers, a hot material for purveyors of particular kinds of commodities, and I think that that¹s not inarguably good for cultural studies at this juncture because that kind of market competition encourages‹I hate to sound old-fashioned and even Frankfurt Schoolesque‹a lack of rigor. And I think for cultural studies to survive institutionally, even as a mailbox, some kind of rigor is always going to be needed. It¹s certainly going to be called for by the other disciplines with whom we would be in struggle.

JW: So some sort of department . . .

PS: Or some sort of ³center,² perhaps. If we¹re talking about cultural studies and its survival in a university context in this country, every form of knowledge production needs to be able to point to its assumptions and its conventions, its methodologies, its procedures, and I don¹t think cultural studies does that at this juncture.

JW: Right. And for you, the unified image you would see for a program would obviously be a left or marxist one? 

PS: Not obviously. This is a ³discipline²‹we have to put that in quotation marks at least‹which is yet to come. It really hasn¹t happened yet, at least not in the American context. And I think that the situation of marxism vis-à-vis cultural studies has actually come a long way, which is to say that I think the various practitioners of cultural studies can learn a lot from marxism. But I don¹t think that marxism has such a lot to learn from cultural studies in the variegated mode that it¹s now in, given that marxism has, however you cut it, produced an agenda, which cultural studies may or may not have yet. If I were given the facilities to set up my ideal cultural studies program at this point, it would be necessary to have people who could, if not agree precisely on particular methodologies and assumptions, at least recognize the need for that. And perhaps the only place in the humanities where you see people arguing those things through is within marxism. So the likelihood is that if I were given those resources, then a kind of marxist cultural studies program would be one I would try to build up, but of course I don¹t get that opportunity. Those who do get that sort of opportunity . . .

JW: I see what you mean. To press you further, how is cultural studies informed by marxism?

PS: What I¹m saying is that the particular attention that marxism has paid to all realms of the cultural, the social, the political, the economic still in some ways constitutes a more advanced project than the vague thing called cultural studies in the U.S. I think that the current state of cultural studies is actually bewilderingly diffuse and suffers because of that diffusion. Whereas I¹d say that marxism is not diffuse, but varied, variegated. Maybe that¹s not quite the way to say it, but marxism has grown from something which can be looked at and can help you remind yourself what your agenda is, what you want it to do. I¹m not sure cultural studies has ever had that kind of desire or the possibility of that desire.

JW: How would you succinctly define what you take as cultural studies? I know that¹s a nearly impossible question, but . . .

PS: Well, I¹m going to fall into a self-serving proposition because it is very close to the best kind of marxism, I suppose, where the kind of interrelations between various elements and registers of the social totality (if I can risk the word) are considered as a dialectically interconnecting whole. This is one of the reasons I still like to think about the Frankfurt School. There¹s a sense there that, if you¹re looking at culture, whether you want to define it as television or high art, a sense that culture is not in any sense autonomous. Rather, it¹s part of a totality. It¹s a part of an interconnected set of things, which are contradictory, problematical, perhaps almost impossible to analyze. But that nonetheless seems to me the task. I¹m not saying succinctly what would be an ideal form of cultural studies, but I am saying that there are various places that you could look for clues and hints about what it might look like, and one of them would still be, to me, the Frankfurt School. And I suppose various other kinds of disciplines approach that way of working‹like certain kinds of historiography, some kinds of anthropology‹thinking about the social totality with all of its contradictions. But the important thing to me is the impossibility of thinking about any kind of cultural form or any kind of cultural artifact as autonomous. And for me that necessarily brings in all kinds of issues about civic life, about the economy, about production, and so on. 

JW: I see what you mean. There isn¹t any such thing as those good, old great books of and in themselves. 

PS: Precisely. Of course not, and so much the better for that. But neither is there a television program. 

JW: So how do you feel in a literature department? I mean, do you feel out of place or an imposter? 

PS: Well, I¹m not really in a literature department‹though I am leaving Carnegie Mellon to go to George Mason University where I will be in a more recognizable English department. But the history of the Carnegie Mellon English department is complex. Currently, B.A. students there don¹t get a degree in English, even though it¹s an English department. They get a degree . . .

JW: In cultural studies?

PS: In ³Literary and Cultural Studies,² it¹s called. Or they can go elsewhere in the department, and get a degree in professional writing or rhetoric or those kinds of things. It¹s a complicated set up.

JW: There are only a few other cultural studies programs aside from CMU‹I think there¹s one at Brown in cultural studies now, and Syracuse has textual studies . . . 

PS: As far as I know, Carnegie Mellon¹s the only place where there¹s actually a B.A. degree in cultural studies or literary and cultural studies. I may be wrong about that, but I think it¹s true. And so in that sense, I haven¹t felt like an imposter because the program was set up precisely to do what it has been trying to do. The problems there, again, have mostly been institutional problems.

JW: How long has the program been in place? 

PS: Well, let¹s see, ten years.

JW: How long have you been there?

PS: Eight.

JW: I know that you¹re fairly instrumental in the program, personified by some of the students I¹ve talked to as the program . . .

PS: Thanks. But the basic setup of the program was done before I worked there. But it¹s fallen into various kinds of difficulty. Perhaps it can be characterized in two ways. There¹s a kind of double pull. Certainly, there¹s a contextual pull, which is that the whole of Carnegie Mellon is this quite forbidding‹and purblind‹nest of instrumental rationality, technocratic and empiricist in character; and the cultural studies program was really the only place where anything that most people would recognize as the humanities was played out. But then there¹s another pull which is also internal, but from the older humanities tradition, which says that cultural studies is all well and good, but what about the great books? You know: ³How can you give people a degree in literary and cultural studies when they¹ve never read a novel?²

JW: Still, for the jobs they go to, your students might well have to teach a series of them.

PS: No, I¹m talking about the undergraduate level. The graduate program¹s another issue altogether. So there are those two pulls towards some kind of conformity, either towards the social sciences image of knowledge or knowledge production, and/or towards a more traditional humanistic discipline. So it¹s been a very fraught situation, and one which, at this juncture, has become untenable, I think. That¹s to say, I think that the cultural studies program as such will be made to disappear fairly soon. It¹s already become very frail. Or it will be altered into something we¹d not recognize as cultural studies (the current Dean has the bizarre idea that anyone who looks at cultural phenomena in any way at all is doing cultural studies). But that¹s my best guess for it. One of the reasons that I¹m really sad about it is that the undergraduate program had been in certain ways very successful. 

JW: Did you produce a lot of students?

PS: I can¹t tell you the exact figures, but it varied each year. And also there were a lot of double majors within the department, and people would take things like literary cultural studies and rhetoric or literary cultural studies and creative writing. In fact, there were relatively few pure literary and cultural studies people. Maybe half a dozen will attend a year, but it¹s a small school, so that¹s not altogether a bad number.

JW: How does the program there work?

PS: Well, I¹m saying it doesn¹t anymore. 

JW: I¹ll put it two ways. How was the program set up that you think showed a possibility for working? Or how would you set it up? I mean, what did you actually do? 

PS: Well, again, I prefer to talk about the undergraduate level . . .

JW: Why?

PS: Well, because of the uniqueness of that program. If allowed to flourish, it would have been a radical departure in the humanities. It had its moments, but that¹s finally not what happened.

JW: It¹s more possible on the undergraduate level, because the graduate level in a certain way reduplicates, or . . . 

PS: You¹re already so much more engaged in the process of professional reproduction at the graduate level. It¹s very difficult to persuade an administrator that there might be some other reasons for going into a Ph.D. program than getting a job in that field, teaching in that field. But as far as the undergraduate program is concerned . . . 

JW: To say how it works would be useful, I think. 

PS: Okay. Initially, there were three core classes for all majors in the department, so even if you were not an LCS major, you would take these three courses. And they constituted, I think, a radically new kind of core for an English department. One was called Discursive Practices, one was called Discourse and Historical Change, and one was called Reading Twentieth Century Culture, and every person who took a B.A. from the English department had to take those. Discursive Practices was fundamentally an introduction to semiotics. Discourse and Historical Change was what it sounds like; it was designed to provide a historical perspective which, as we all continue to bemoan, American students lack. And Reading Twentieth Century Culture was supposed to do that as well, to give some historical sense of what constitutes the twentieth century, but also to allow for the introduction of other objects of study‹ones that, unfortunately, some people think of as constituting cultural studies per se: basically television and film, advertising, and so on.

JW: Ironically, you can almost justify cultural studies by a return to the basics‹history and such‹although it¹s a bit different direction I would imagine than somebody like William Bennett would prefer.

PS: Cultural studies seems all too willing to slide off into the study‹by which most people seem to mean either the interpretation or the celebration, or both‹of popular cultural forms. So it becomes basically some kind of popular culture study, and I don¹t think most of us at CMU ever thought of it like that.

JW: I have colleagues who show movies and tell me they do cultural studies . . .

PS: One way of addressing that would be to say precisely that it¹s not the object that counts; rather, it ought to be the methodologies and assumptions that are paramount. And that includes the assumption I was referring to earlier‹thatthere can be no autonomy for the particular object you choose. But what those course descriptions or those course titles also indicate is that at CMU we always thought that cultural studies should be intimately involved with history, that it had historical work to do as well as contemporary . . . 

JW: So you could do eighteenth century as well as . . . 

PS: Of course. Cultural studies can be done in some way with any kind of object or any given time, so you could do good cultural studies about eighteenth century France as well as you could do good cultural studies about ancient Rome.

JW: Or about ancient Greece. The difference between William Bennett would be that he wants us to dust those monuments rather than think about how they were produced and the circuits of power . . . 

PS: Yeah, precisely. Someone like William Bennett would object to the very questions that cultural studies would ask about all those monuments.

JW: You know, why are men and women represented a certain way on the basis of sex . . .

PS: For us, gender issues are really crucial and have been throughout the whole program. Most of our courses have some kind of feminist component. At least, I¹ve learned from feminism.

JW: Which is clear from your work, in Discerning the Subject and in the Men in Feminism project. 

PS: One can always wish that one had learned more. Anyway, after those core classes, people took a variety of different kinds of courses, but they were all slightly untraditional in the sense that even if they were called ³Nineteenth Century²‹even if they were periodized, that is‹ they were all types of literary and cultural studies. The assumption was that the literary text should not be privileged. That¹s not to say that it disappears, but it won¹t be the only thing. The only other thing to say about the courses is that they all included theory. They were theoretically informed, and indeed we did actually teach theory courses to undergraduates. We had courses like Feminist Theory, which was quite popular, or we¹d have survey courses of marxist criticism and theory. 

JW: It¹s interesting to me to hear you talk about theory. It seems to me that there¹s a certain move on the left, that there¹s a condemnation of postmodernism or poststructuralism, whereas what you do is imbricated in theory or it learns from the lessons of poststructuralism. 

PS: Yeah, I don¹t think much was ruled out‹except that we didn¹t seem to have any deconstructionists in the program! I mean, there were various concepts, various schools of interests among the faculty, so they got represented in the curriculum obviously, but the cohesion was around the broad rubrics of the core courses. One of the delights and frustrations of being in that program for so long‹eight years‹is that so many decisions about the curriculum were up for grabs. That¹s not to say it was a volatile curriculum, but it was a changeable curriculum, and so many decisions made about it used to get made only after three or four hours of wrangling among the faculty, and in conversations which you could only call intellectual.
But the kind of efforts that the university has exerted, especially over the last three or four years, has been to move us in one direction or another and sometimes both, in terms of those pulls on us that I mentioned. At promotion and tenure time, we¹re held to the standards of the social sciences in terms of proof and evidence and documentation, that sort of thing, even though part of our job is, I think, to critique those things, to interrogate those kinds of evaluation and argumentation. By and large most of the people around us have chronically made little effort to understand or be open-minded about cultural studies‹ they¹ve preferred to say that we¹re incoherent and that we don¹t make the effort to make ourselves understood, even though some of our faculty have contributed a lot towards the understanding of cultural studies in the broader arena. And so that makes life very difficult pragmatically because we are literally a minority in the school. The other pull is to turn us back into a literary department which would cover the English literary periods. And, again, we¹ve obviously got our own kind of critique of that built into the program. So, for instance, one of the things that students would be introduced to is the idea that there¹s something fishy about the fact that you learn English literature. Now, why? Obviously, there¹s other kinds of literature, but fundamentally the tone and standard for literature departments is set as ³English.² So what does that mean? Those are the kinds of questions we¹d ask straight away on the undergraduate level, getting people to try to rethink assumptions about the system we¹re supposed to be in. So it¹s a bit awkward when the administration comes in and says, Well, you¹ve got to start teaching more literature. Which isn¹t to deny that you can teach the literary against the grain, in some sort of radical way, but that wasn¹t what most of us were interested in doing in the first place, and some of our faculty aren¹t even trained to teach literature. We never thought of ourselves as taking literature as the privileged artifact.

JW: I wanted to ask about about how you might set up a cultural studies course, to give some tips, as you do in the essay in the Berlin collection.

PS: Actually, that particular course was developed because of one of the negative things which has happened to the department. The three core courses have been disbanded, and you know that really was like cutting a leg off the program. And it was very deliberate, of course. One of the attempts to reinstall what we were trying to do there was to offer a course called What Is Cultural Studies?, which would be not just for English majors but for other majors as well. 

JW: In that essay, you mention that you use Barthes¹ Mythologies, which I use in composition courses and think is a wonderful text to use, particularly since it shows how to read signs, whether it be the face of an actress, whether it be steak and fries or wine, furniture . . . 

PS: It¹s still necessary to take the notion of systems of meaning and discursivity very seriously, and Mythologies was there for me because I was wanting to offer some sense of how you might (even if Barthes failed in some ways) go out and try to describe a system of meaning which wasn¹t literature. It needn¹t have been Mythologies; it could have been other things.

JW: It gives some handy examples.

PS: I agree. Also, one way in which we might be considered old fashioned as a group is that the notion of ideology appeared a lot in what we did, and that¹s a big part of Mythologies.

JW: Actually, Barthes is interesting in ³Toys,² where he talks about how toys teach boys to act one way and girls to act another way. I mean, it¹s essentially an ideological analysis. So, what would be a quick sketch of a course that you might think of now?

PS: Well, actually, that one. One would always want to kind of sift through the actual syllabus each time. But I do find it useful to have some Frankfurt School in almost any course that I do. There¹s always some Marx. It all depends, but increasingly over the last few years I¹ve been teaching a lot of the British cultural studies people.

JW: Like Hall, Hoggart . . .

PS: Well, I was going to amend that to say the progenitors, so I teach Hoggart, Thompson, and Williams quite a lot. That¹s always kind of useful; it always produces some sense that what we¹re talking about is a complex whole. When we¹re looking at culture, we¹re looking at a complex whole which doesn¹t open itself immediately to the divided forms of knowledge that other disciplines represent. In some ways this may not be ambitious enough for anybody who might read this, but if I can produce the sense in a student that those disciplinary knowledges do not cover this object and give them some sense that it¹s precisely the totality, the contradictions, the overdeterminations that are important, then I think I¹ve done my job.

JW: Tell me about some of the other courses you teach. 

PS: One of the courses that I¹m finding myself increasingly drawn towards (for obvious reasons!)‹I¹ve taught it a couple or three times now‹is about post-war England. And I mean England, not Britain. It¹s an interrogation of the construction of Englishness, English identity and so on, and I focus on the immediate post-war moment, really the early fifties. I try to talk about the necessary relationships between that big chunk of history, which is the war, and the reorganization of the world, at all kinds of levels‹economic, political, civic‹ immediately after the war, and the beginning of a certain kind of American cold war imperialism and how that shows itself in a British context. I find Dick Hebdige¹s book, Hiding in the Light, quite useful for that, even though I don¹t quite agree with all of it, but he brings the objects out and helps give a sense of, again, the interconnectedness and their meaning within that particular frame.

JW: Give me an example of how you¹d deal with one of the objects.

PS: Well, I mean some of the things that Hebdige talks about; he talks about waves of consumer items which come into the British context as a result of the massive over- capacity of American industry after the war. So, everything from washing machines to new cars, and what they mean. You can go at it in all kinds of different ways. You can say, okay, If you have this particular historical formation, what does that mean in terms of economics? What was the particular face of a country like Britain with a depleted economy after the Second World War? What did America do to it? Or you could go at it from the other end and say, Here¹s this object, like a washing machine or a television, so what and how does this signify? Part of the effort is to get people to think about totalities and interconnections, but also actually going and looking into the library. An old kind of pedagogical dream, to get them to look around there, at things which are readily available‹newspapers, magazines, books of the period, as well as the objects . . . 

JW: So it¹s a kind of deep historical immersion? 

PS: I hope so. It¹s hard to talk about courses as such, I mean just off the cuff. But one of the reasons I like that particular course is because the whole idea of ³Englishness² was put to the test in the public discourse at the time, under the influence of what people called the Americanization of Britain at the time. So in certain conventional and traditional ways Englishness is juxtaposed with the Americanization of the culture. But it was clear to everyone that Americanization was embodied in all kinds of different commodities, objects, and cultural practices. It¹s not just a question of American movies, which is an obvious importation. It¹s also things like what people wear, what kind of cars they drive, and so on. So it¹s a particularly good moment to use to show how national identity is constructed through material practices, commodities, and culture. 

JW: One other question about teaching. One thing that I noticed in that particular essay is that the final projects were much different from the final projects that most of us usually give. When I get back tomorrow, I have to grade a set of 18 papers from a course on modernism. What kind of things might you elicit?

PS: Students can make certain kinds of logs and journals that are analytical and descriptive, that might include pictures from magazines, articles from newspapers and stuff like that, which they can use to produce a description of the cultural milieu‹as long as there¹s some kind of analysis of those things beyond the description of them. I often let people make their own videos, or they¹ll do various kinds of‹what shall we call them‹analytical artworks. For instance, recently a student from the art studios got a collage of images from different kinds of magazines with a commentary, a verbal commentary, but framed in such a way that it looks sort of like a Barbara Kruger. That kind of thing can happen. I¹m not worried about how people display their learning, I¹m just concerned that it be there. I¹m almost indifferent to the form in which it comes. 

JW: The last topic I want to talk about is your own intellectual formation. It seems to me that part of the point of being an oppositional intellectual is trying to figure out how you were formed as a subject in the first place. 

PS: Well, there are two main things that I would think of as provisional origins of where I am. One is having a particular kind of quite highly disciplined, British post-war education, I¹d say fairly traditional and quite rigorous, and certainly very wide ranging . . .

JW: Where was this?

PS: A grammar school in a town called Winchester. The kind of education that was available then is probably not available any longer in many kinds of schools‹mostly because of the assault on the public education system that Mrs Thatcher carried out in her anti-statist zeal. But I happened to be there at the right moment. And that rigor was carried through as an undergraduate at Cambridge and a Ph.D. student at Kent. I finished my dissertation in the first years of the Thatcher era, and I do think in that sense, I am a representative of a peculiar generation, or a generation which won¹t get repeated.

JW: An English diaspora?

PS: No, I didn¹t mean that, even though there probably has been that sort of ³diaspora² (though my impression is that it¹s people slightly older than me who make up the biggest part of it). No, I just meant that the whole structure of education in Britain changed radically with Margaret Thatcher, and I think it¹s no longer available in the form that I got it. That was the first component. The second thing I ³got² was politics.

JW: At Cambridge or as a teenager?

PS: As a teenager.

JW: Was your first interest in literature? 

PS: At first. Politics was something separate, in a way, through school. I was a member of a particular political organization for some years when I was a teenager, and the mixture of that and a certain traditional English education was important. I¹m floundering because I don¹t know how to narrativize this exactly. I was interested in languages‹in French and Latin‹and that¹s what I started off doing at Cambridge. At Cambridge I came across all kinds of new ideas which could be characterized as structuralist or poststructuralist and that started the big struggle of my intellectual life, I suppose, for the next ten years. After that, it was how to square the kinds of structuralist and poststructuralist stuff that I was getting with my self-taught marxism, as it were, and my politics. And in a real sense that issue has been the crucial one for me; it was the germ of my intellectual development. And that¹s not uncommon probably, but now what¹s most important to me is the rigor and the knowledge of marxism‹which, the older I get, the more valuable I find in relation to other kind of theoretical things.

JW: I take your point. For me, it¹s strange teaching literature because my project now is trying to figure out why I was taken with this delusion called literature in the first place. Anyway, how did the cultural studies come in? At Kent?

PS: The live intellectual issue while I was a graduate student was a version of what I just said. That¹s to say it was the standoff between the Birmingham Cultural Studies Centre and the Screen group. That produced the central texts for me. It wasn¹t so much the Birmingham school of the time that became important, but their progenitors. It was Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and associated people like Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill, that kind of British historical work. And by the same token, on the other side, it wasn¹t so much in the end Derrida or Foucault who became important, but the people they were all in a sense working out of, basically the tradition of Euro-philosophy‹ Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx and Freud. So in some ways the progenitors to that struggle became mine as well. And maybe one way in which I¹ve managed to resolve the kinds of issues of structuralist/poststructuralist theory in relation to marxism of any kind is by recognizing that the progenitors in some way have as much to do with the politics of intellection, the politics of everyday struggle, as their offspring do.

JW: One more question. What are you working on now, what project interests you? And, as a corollary, are there any people working now or particular texts that have struck you or that you feel go in particularly fruitful directions? 

PS: In terms of the first bit, I¹m now working on a book called Bearing North, which is in a sense about the New World Order. It¹s about what I¹m calling the unification of capital in the North. I¹m focusing upon Britain, Germany, and the U.S. I¹m having to educate myself in political economy in order to think more about the relations and determinations between economic structures and cultural formations in those countries.

JW: A departure from the Eastwood book, certainly. 

PS: It¹s closer to what I was trying to do in ³Visiting the Banana Republic.² The big issue for me is the place and role and usefulness of political economy, within the frames of cultural studies. That¹s my current concern. In terms of the second question, I¹m finding myself increasingly drawn to the kind of work that¹s going on in Rethinking Marxism. I don¹t agree with it all by any means, but it seems to me there¹s an effort there to do exactly what that sobriquet says, rethink marxism. And at its best it can be very productive. I also think there¹s a lot of good stuff going on in what you might call the dispersal, at this point, of what used to be feminism‹its dispersal into various kinds of feminism, and into lesbigay studies. At the same time, there¹s a lot of posturing going on there too. In an abiding kind of way, I owe tons to the work of Jameson and Spivak. My view of Jameson¹s work used to be very sceptical, but it¹s been becoming a lot more positive than it used to be (though one has to regret the idiosyncratic ways he pays attention to the work of other and younger colleagues). Spivak¹s work is always provocative and stimulating‹ wonderful stuff. But perhaps the most important arena for looking at new work for me is the Marxist Literary Group. Maybe it¹s just because I help run the organization, but I¹m continually amazed by how much high quality and interesting work is going on there. But I¹ve got to run. 

JW: Okay, thanks.



Relevant works:
Giroux, Henry, David Shumway, Paul Smith, and James Sosnoski. ³The Need for Cultural Studies.² ³After Theory.² Ed. Paul Smith. Dalhousie Review 64.2 (1984): 472-86. Jardine, Alice, and Paul Smith, eds. Men in Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1987.
Smith, Paul. Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
­­­. ³A Course in ŒCultural Studies.¹² Cultural Studies in the English Classroom. Ed. James A. Berlin and Michael J. Vivion. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1992. 169-81.
­­­. Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
­­­. ³Visiting the Banana Republic.² Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism. Ed. Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. 128-48.