Undisciplined: An Interview With Andrew Ross

Jeffrey Williams and Mike Hill Undisciplined: An Interview With Andrew Ross Jeffrey Williams: How would you define yourself? Your work has been associated primarily, I guess, with pop culture. Andrew Ross: Well, actually, this is a misconception, in fact, it's something of an unearned reputation. Especially since my last two books, and the next one, are about science and technology studies, and environmentalism , and No Respect, which certainly deals with popular culture , is more a work of intellectual history than anything else. And I had an earlier career as a poetry critic and as a psychoanalytic critic of sorts ... JW: I was going to ask you about that, your relationship vis-à-vis literature , as evidenced by your first book. There's even a piece in an old minnesota review about the Language poets. AR: Yes, I spend some time hanging out with the Language poetry community in the Bay Area. In essence, that actually was what brought me to the U.S., quote-unquote "the love of poetry," and contemporary poetry in particular. JW: Oh really? So it was the love of literature after all? Mike Hill: That's one for the record. It wasn't glossy magazines? AR: Well, it was the love of living literature. JW: I had wanted to ask you about your intellectual formation. Where did you do your graduate work? AR: Primarily at the University of Kent, which at the time, in the late 1970s, was a center for film theory. Many of the Screen group were teaching there. That was after a rigorous training in the legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment as an undergraduate—high moral seriousness —philosophy, Leavisite literary criticism, and social anthropology. When I went to graduate school in England, I was very much committed to the avant-garde idea, both politically and culturally, and in retrospect this tradition, to which the Screen school adhered, was very much at loggerheads with the more populist cultural studies tradition that had been active in Birmingham for some time. My chief focus 78 the minnesota review turned out to be in poetry, however, and since the contemporary poetry scene in Britain was somewhat moribund in comparison to North America, I started coming over here to teach and to study, completing my graduate years at Indiana University and at Berkeley. After that, I was based in Champaign-Urbana for a couple of years, where folks were pioneering the U.S. interest in cultural studies in the early to mideighties . And that's the point at which, really, my work began to be associated with cultural studies. Not because of some academic change of habit, but because it was at that time that I realized I was going to stay in the U.S., and cultural studies for me meant learning what it would be like to behave like a citizen—i.e. researching the traditions of cultural citizenship and the like . . . MH: How did that mesh with the love of poetry? Was it an easy transition? AR: I really can't remember. But I suspect that it's always been easier for Americanists, from the point of view of disciplinarity, to broaden their scope as cultural critics. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of American Studies the literary critical tradition has been a little less formalistic than in the case of British literature. The more difficult transition was in the area of theories of popular culture. Among the folks who were versed in critical theory at that time, when it came to thinking about commercial culture, they would simply reach for their Frankfurt School readers, which struck me as not at all the best way of looking at the issue from an American angle. So that's why I began to research the history of the relationship between American intellectuals and popular culture, and that led to No Respect. It was written to try and fill an existing gap in cultural history and theory, and to bring some of the European work to bear upon the American history without doing it too many injustices. Subsequently, the questions raised in the book about institutional authority and expertise and populism spilled over into the work on science and...