Many people argue that the jargon-rich language of the academy is more obfuscating than illuminating for those outside of the specialized area of academic work. Yet you write in Between God and Gangsta Rap, “The language of the academy is crucial because it allows me to communicate within a community of scholars whose work contributes to the intellectual strength of our culture. . . . The language of the academy is most important to me because it provides a critical vocabulary to explore the complex features of American and African American life. The language of the academy should never divorce itself from the politics of crisis, social problems, cultural circumstances, moral dilemmas, or intellectual questions of the world in which we live.” You continue, “As a public intellectual, I am motivated to translate my religious, academic, and political ideas into a language that is accessible without being simplistic.” How do you see the transition between academic discourse and more public discourses affecting your work? Are there problems of translation when moving between discourses?
I see the transition from the academic world to the world outside of the academy as a self-conscious decision to intervene in debates and conversations that occur in public spheres (a different public sphere from the academy because I consider the academy a public sphere) and have enormous impact on everyday people’s lives. The transition, however, is not smooth. The demands for rigorous debate within the academy are much different from those demands in the public sphere beyond the academy. There are huge and heated debates going on right now about the function of academic language. I’m not one who, for obvious reasons—self-interest being the primary one (laughter)—jumps on academics because they don’t speak for a public audience or because they cannot speak in ways that are deemed “clear” and “articulate.” Those are loaded terms: clear, articulate. Scholars like Henry Giroux and Donna Haraway have reminded us that language has multiple functions, even within a limited context. To understand that is to acknowledge that there are a variety of fronts upon which we must launch our linguistic resistance to political destruction and moral misery on the one hand, and to narrow conceptions of what language does and how it functions, on the other hand.
Because I was reared in a black church in a “minority” linguistic community that had rich resources that were concealed, and obscured, for a variety of reasons, I think that I’m sensitive to the claims against academics that their languages are simply incomprehensible, impenetrable, perhaps even ineffable. I empathize to a degree with academics who are defensive about such matters, who say, “We’re writing for a specific audience.” That to my mind is a perfectly legitimate, though not exhaustive, mode of self-defense. If an academic writes an article that will be read by a thousand people, and those thousand people gain something from it—if there’s an exchange of information and ideas, if there’s a sharpening of debate and a deepening of understanding of a particular subject—that’s a marvelous, worthy achievement. There’s no reason to be apologetic for that because that’s a very specific function within a larger academic enterprise that needs to be undertaken.
If, for instance, somebody writes an essay on a specific aspect of Foucault’s appropriation of Benthamite conceptions of the prison that first clarifies the exact relationship between Bentham and Foucault, and then rearticulates and historicizes our conceptions of the panopticon, and how surveillance operates as it is extended into the black ghetto, that’s all for the good, even if only a thousand people understand the language and ideas of the essay. That means that some advance in understanding and exchange of information has occurred, and that’s wholly defensible on many grounds, from the intrinsic value of knowledge to its application to contemporary social problems involving the justice system and the prisonindustrial complex. Think about it; we don’t have a problem with brain surgeons who speak a language that only a handful of people, mainly other experts, can understand. Our attitude is—and, I think, rightfully so—if the man or woman can save your life, speak the jargon, do what you’ve got to do, operate! So I don’t have a problem with a similar kind of precise, rigorous use of language that occurs in academic circles. But a major problem often arises when hostility is directed against those who are able to take the information, to take the knowledge, to take the profound rigor that is often suggested in such exercises, and make them available to a broader audience.
It is unavoidable that an academic surrenders depth for breadth in making many public forays into television, radio, or the popular press. But that doesn’t automatically overrule the usefulness of such pursuits. I’ve written for venues such as Cultural Studies and Cultural Critique, journals that four to five thousand people may read, and I have found it intellectually rewarding. On the other hand, I’ve written for newspapers and magazines where millions of people have read my words. And that has been extremely satisfying. In a word, we have to respect the genre. The academic community, generally speaking, has a deep hostility to those who are aggressively public. Those scholars who are labeled public intellectuals are viewed as sellouts. We have our own version in the academy of the hip-hop mantra, “keeping it real,” which in this case means the authentic scholar who is strictly concerned about academic matters, betraying a claustrophobic view of the life of the mind.
Interestingly enough, despite the sketchy, almost nonexistent treatment found in books like Russell Jacoby’s influential The Last Intellectuals, the recent debate about academic authenticity has largely centered in the plight and predicament of black public intellectuals. Some of that hostility may be racially coded, but a lot of it has to do with rigid visions of academic propriety grounded in territorial disputes. A geography of destiny is shaped by parochial views of the appropriate intellectual terrain one occupies, and that usually means valorizing the university as the exclusive site of legitimate academic work. We in the academy, especially on the left, love to talk about transgression, speaking of it in intellectual and symbolic terms, but we don’t want to engage in such transgression literally or epistemologically.
We resist the critique of being in an ivory tower, but then we’re the ones who insist on putting ourselves there.
That’s right. We want to attack the ivory tower from the ivory tower. What’s interesting is that these assaults resonate with a punishing paradox. We celebrate transgression, hybridity, migration, and mobility, but when people actually do these things, there is incredible resentment against such movement.
In Professional Correctness, Stanley Fish argues that as academics we cannot be public intellectuals, and as public intellectuals we give up our roles as university scholars. In essence, he argues that Michael Eric Dyson cannot simultaneously be an academic and a public intellectual. Your critique of the university sees the academy as inseparable from the “real world” and that our roles in the university are as important as any other vocation outside of the academy. How do you respond to Fish’s critique? As the university becomes more interdisciplinary, do you see (as Fish does) prisonindustrial as a threat to universities or as having potential to intervene in public policy and the larger culture?
Stanley Fish is a really smart guy. I always listen carefully to what he says. Many of his criticisms are right on target, but on this point, I will disagree. He’s right to challenge academics to rethink the relationship between what we do and what we say. Even more poignantly, he’s forcing us to take seriously the idea that serving on a committee in the academy where you deploy Marxist language to demythologize class relationships is not the same as being involved in a labor dispute in the local AFL-CIO, or engaging the interests of black workers on the assembly line in Detroit. There’s little doubt that he’s absolutely right. But we’ve got to avoid a logical fallacy here: Just because Fish is right doesn’t mean, therefore, that the function of the intellectual deploying Marxist language to demythologize class relations is not an important one. It simply possesses a different kind of importance. As a black person in the academy, I don’t have the luxury of deciding that one kind of importance is more crucial than the other, or that one kind of work—say, rigorous academic analysis—excludes the necessity for its complement, the application of knowledge to ordinary folk and circumstances. To phrase it differently, there are multiple sites of intervention in academic and public spheres in defense of various, even competing, political interests. In the Fishian cosmology, there’s a radical bifurcation between the “real” world—in which people operate with political interests at hand and deploy specific vocabularies to defend those interests—and the academy, which is a different sphere of knowledge production and consumption, with its own political interests.
However, the academy and the public sphere beyond it are both defined by interests that need to be taken seriously. I say this as a member of a group— African Americans—who have often been the object of intellectual inquiry within the hallowed, and often biased, halls of the academy. So most blacks have always known that, protestations to the contrary, what goes on in the academy always spills beyond its ostensibly hermetic seal, bleeding into everyday life with languages, grammars, and vocabularies that have often done great harm to black life. Even when blacks were closed out of the mainstream academy through segregated practices, we understood that what was going on there was important. For instance, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein— although they were dealing with reductionist and racialist scientific theories of the genetic inheritance of intelligence, ideas that were deconstructed by reputable scientists twenty years ago—sold 400,000 copies of their book, The Bell Curve, in hardback alone. We can safely say, without great fear of contradiction, that most people didn’t read the entire book. The very existence of that book was a phenomenological weight to systematically justify cultural prejudices about the inherent inferiority of black intelligence. But the ensuing and bitter public debate occasioned by the book’s publication reflected in part the belief held by many blacks that academic debates profoundly impact the material interests of black culture. We already see the connection between the academy and the “real” world because the real world looks to the academy to justify its prejudices, to dress them up in scientific discourse that grants them legitimacy and power. We have understood all along that even though twelve people may be reading a book, one of the twelve could end up being a congressman, a policy maker, or the director of an institute or governmental department with the ability to distribute or divert resources for black people. We have to deconstruct and demythologize this radical bifurcation between the academy and the real world, since both are defined and driven by ideological and intellectual interests. Truth and politics are deeply united in a fashion to which Fish, in this case, has not paid sufficient attention.
To my mind, Fish gives eloquent but problematic expression to a more narrow vision of the life of the mind than I favor. He warns us that thinkers who make Marxist or progressive analyses of forms of oppression are substituting such analyses for the real work of political action. But we don’t have to subscribe to such a literal view of the work of politics. Creating discursive space in hegemonic academic culture is a specific kind of work that should be valued, even if it is rightly not confused, better yet, conflated, with traditional politics. Such activity has an empirical effect on the concrete political interests of folk outside the academy. Before I entered the academy, I was a teen father who lived on welfare, hustled on the streets of Detroit, and later worked full time in two factories. Scholars and intellectuals at the University of Detroit and Wayne State University who were thinking about the relationship between labor and commodity and wage alienation encouraged us autoworkers to engage in political resistance and to take intellectual work seriously as a weapon to defend our interests.
At its core, interdisciplinarity threatens academics who construe their interests narrowly and seek to preserve their intellectual bailiwick. Interdisciplinarity is not merely an index of the postmodern moment when we acknowledge the multiplicity of ethical ideals and claims to knowledge. More heady questions are engaged, such as who gets to control knowledge, for what purposes is it being deployed, and whose interests are being protected in the defense of narrowly conceived academic disciplines that pay no attention to what other thinkers are doing beyond the pale of one’s intellectual orientation. To a large extent, the segregation of knowledge along disciplinary boundaries is an artificial division of intellectual inquiry that counters the most liberating traditions of African American studies in particular, and Western learning in general. Such academic segregation, like the social policy it mimics, should be corrected by the integration of intellectual inquiry that rests on robust interdisciplinary impulses.
In Race Rules you write, “The anointing of a few voices to represent The Race is an old, abiding problem. For much of our history, blacks have had to rely on spokespersons to express our views and air our grievances to a white majority that controlled access to everything from education to employment.” You discuss who gets to be black public intellectuals, who chooses them, and why they receive the attention they do. In contemporary America, there are relatively few black intellectuals. This suggests that the intellectual/academic world—which is still made up primarily of middle-class Anglo males—has constructed methods of gatekeeping (for example, graduate school entrance requirements, hiring practices, tenure, publication, speaking engagements) that “select” particular leaders to serve as “representative” voices. More exactly, having only a few black intellectuals is a product of the kind of oppressive strategies of management and containment maintained by the academy. What does this say about the small numbers of black public intellectuals and the possibility of the “radicalness” of public intellectuals such as yourself? Can you really be radical and effect change from the inside when the institution has in fact sanctioned your radicalness? After all, you are a high-profile, well-paid member of the academy.
You’re exactly right. It’s a very difficult circumstance in which black intellectuals discover ourselves. I think that it’s necessary to not only acknowledge the accuracy of the critique but also extend its political efficacy by being self-critical. There’s always a dimension of hubris in self-criticism because when you’re pointing to how self-critical you can be, you appear to be saying, “Look how critically engaging I can be about my own position even as I consolidate my interest as a high-profile, well-paid black intellectual.” I face that problem head-on, even though it’s very difficult. And you’re absolutely correct about how the radicalism that we express is sanctioned: such radicalism is being deployed within a larger narrative of cooptation promoted by the American academy that we criticize, and, paradoxically, it is from that base that we articulate our conceptions of the world. But this is the present condition under which we live and labor as we fight for change from within and beyond the academy. Black public intellectuals must certainly question our subject positions and our professional status within the hierarchy of privilege and visibility that we presently enjoy. The trick is to scrutinize the ethics of our participation in the academy as a part of the regime of anointed black intellectuals while maintaining enough visibility and influence to have our voices and work make a difference.
As a practical but principled matter, black public intellectuals must examine whom we refer to in our work. It is telling to me, in reading the interviews of high-profile black intellectuals, that we repeatedly get the same names. There’s a narrative re-inscription of notoriety, and a hierarchy of citation among public black intellectuals, where praise is heaped on a narrow range of novelists, artists, scholars, and intellectuals, who, although certainly deserving of the acclaim they receive, are increasingly viewed as the only important voices that merit attention. One of the most just and egalitarian gestures we can make as highly visible black public intellectuals is to throw light on figures whose work is important but not widely known.
You’re leading into my next question. You write, “We don’t speak for The Race. We speak as representatives of the ideological strands of blackness, and for those kinships we possess outside of black communities, that we think most healthy . . . We ain’t messiahs.” At the same time, though, you also write, “Equally worrisome, too many black public intellectuals hog the ball and refuse to pass it to others on their team. Many times I’ve been invited on a television program, a prestigious panel, or a national radio program because a white critic or intellectual recommended me. Later I often discover that another prominent black intellectual, when consulted, had conveniently forgotten to mention my name or that of other qualified black intellectuals. Ugly indeed.” Do you think this is because those black public intellectuals who now have the spotlight actually do want to be anointed as spokesperson to represent “The Race”? Does the cult of celebrity, the protection of position as black intellectuals, work against a sort of “hand up for someone on the rung below” attitude?
There is no question that many black intellectuals do want to be what is known among blacks as the HNIC, or the “head nigger in charge.” We do want to be the most visible, or as I say in my book, Race Rules, the “hottest Negro in the country.” It is dizzying to attain a certain form of visibility in American culture as an intellectual. There is undeniably a narcotic effect. When people like Oprah or Charlie Rose or Montel Williams call you up, or when you are invited to write op-eds for the Washington Post or the New York Times, or when you’re referred to as one of the leading voices of your generation, or in my case as the leading young black intellectual, that is very seductive. It can be a powerful trap. First, it encourages us to read our own press. Second, it encourages us to believe our own press. Third, it encourages us to reproduce our own press—even if we consciously deflect our self-anointment through the rhetoric of humility, or if we assign our coronation to onlookers or sycophants who believe in the absolute integrity of our intellectual celebration. Celebrity is a temptation among scholars and especially among black intellectuals, given the relatively small numbers of us who are able to survive and thrive in the academy. There is a barely suppressed impulse among some to be the person, or as Zora Neale Hurston said, “the pet Negro.” We have to constantly resist that temptation by making relentless forays into those base communities for which we claim to speak.
There is no question that one of the most dispiriting things that I’ve witnessed among black intellectuals, and not just those who are publicly inclined, is cruel verbal sniping and behind-the-scenes pettiness, none of which, of course, are endemic to black culture. I have in mind Henry Kissinger’s quip that the politics of the academy are so vicious because there is so little at stake. The topography of black intellectual space in the academy is so constricted that we are indeed fighting over a narrow terrain of resources and interests. The consequences of such infighting are not good for those moral and intellectual constituencies we claim to represent. The unregulated pursuit of visibility blocks the moral imperative that has circulated among various black communities of “each one teach one” or “each one reach one” or “lifting as we climb.” There ain’t much lifting as we climb, unless you count our self-promoting career ascension. We do not often lift others or carry them on our rhetorical and intellectual backs. Our failure to do so creates a multitiered hierarchy of black intellectuals.
You’re critically conscious of your role as black public intellectual. In Race Rules you offer a critical series of awards you call the “Envys.” Your purpose is both to critique black public intellectuals and to answer critiques leveled by black public intellectuals. Though many of these critiques are unrelenting in their criticism, you don’t leave yourself out of your own attack, and you award yourself “The Spike Lee/Terry McMillan Award for Shameless Self Promotion” for your lobbying for publicity for your work. Nonetheless, you are critical of how other black public intellectuals use the role of public intellectual and what they promote in that role. In light of your comments regarding the “lone black leader, and the “ugliness of not nurturing other black intellectuals’” careers, is such criticism helpful?
It certainly can be construed as self-congratulatory self-flagellation in public view that only reinforces the visibility that I claim has been unequally cast on some intellectuals, including myself. More charitably, my remarks and awards can be taken as tongue-in-cheek. Partly what I’m saying is “lighten up,” and that the world’s progress doesn’t depend on our individual flourishing as black public intellectuals. As intellectuals, we talk about being critical, and I was attempting to cast some of that critical light on ourselves. In effect, I was saying, “let’s raise questions about the nature of our work, about its limits, and about how and why we make the political and rhetorical interventions that we do.” At the least, we should be more conscious about the need to include other qualified but overlooked intellectuals in the debates we engage. The positive effect of my prodding black intellectuals to be self-critical can be that it will create a larger discourse space, with critics saying of my awards, “That was funny, but . . .” Or they can say, “That wasn’t so funny because these charges are on target for the following reasons. . . .” Or they can say, “Well, even though Dyson is trying to promote himself again, what’s important about his critique is that it does raise very important issues, such as how we confer the ‘voice of the Negro’ to a very few black figures, even as the bulk of intellectuals and academicians have no access to the media or publishing outlets.”
Thus my bestowing of awards, and my critical inventory of black intellectual life, can prove helpful if black intellectuals interrogate our own practices, especially the cultural habit of anointing and saluting a few voices in the enterprise of examining and representing the race. If nothing else, I want to question why a select few political and intellectual figures are empowered to determine what other black people receive. One of the propitious consequences of the rise of black public intellectuals is the questioning of cultural and racial gatekeepers. One of the benefits of a class of public intellectuals gaining visibility and voice—which is why such a class must be as democratic and diverse as possible while providing opportunity to those who are skilled to take up the role—is the ability to thwart the rule of academic Booker T. Washingtons who are able to dole out punishment or reward based upon their often narrow understanding of the political efficacy of a particular work or a particular career. We must relentlessly resist such gatekeeping if we are to enliven the prospects of egalitarianism, excellence, and expansion among black public intellectuals.
In April 1996, Harper’s published a conversation on race between Jorge Klor De Alva, Earl Shorris, and Cornel West. In this discussion, West argues, “When we talk about identity, it’s really important to define it. Identity has to do with protection, association, and recognition. People protect their bodies, their labor, their communities, their way of life; in order to be associated with people who ascribe value to them, who take them seriously, who respect them; and for purposes of recognition; to be acknowledged, to feel as if one actually belongs to a group over time and space, we have to be very specific about what the credible options are for them at any given moment.” De Alva later says, “All identities are up for grabs. But black intellectuals in the United States, unlike Latino intellectuals in the United States, have an enormous media space within which to shape the politics of naming and to affect the symbols and meanings associated with certain terms. Thus, practically overnight, they convinced the media that they were an ethnic group and shifted over to the model of African American, hyphenated American, as opposed to being named by color. Knowing what we know about the negative aspects of naming, it would be better for all of us, regardless of color, if those who consider themselves, and are seen as, black intellectuals were to stop participating in the insidious one-drop-rule game of identifying themselves as black.” You’ve written quite a bit about identity politics. How do you respond to this exchange between West and De Alva?
West is absolutely right to focus on protection, association, and recognition, especially as these three modes of response to the formation of black identity have played themselves out within historically constituted black communities. It is an implicit rebuttal of Paul Gilroy’s belief that any notion of ethnic solidarity means the hard purchase of a backward view of black identity. Gilroy has been especially critical of black American intellectuals for what he considers our essentialist treatments of racial identity. Interestingly enough, many of these same intellectuals have written powerfully about hybridity and transgression in black culture, and the need to pull into full view what Stuart Hall calls postmodern identity, which is a very complex navigation of a variety of possibilities and subject positions within a narrative of racial recognition. So West’s notion that black identity includes protection, association, and recognition is, in part, an attempt to root black identity in the specific context of how African Americans have contested the erosion of, and attack on, their identities. It is also a political acknowledgment of how identity politics, at a crucial level, is a response to the vicious stereotypes imposed on black culture from outside its cultural authority.
Jorge’s belief that, by considering themselves black, African Americans are surrendering to the “one-drop rule” misses the point of history and the context of culture. History suggests that there are criteria that are objective— if by objective we mean actually existing material, cultural and political forces independent of the subjective perceptions, wishes, or views of individuals or groups—that shape the lives and destinies of black life. There are socially constructed norms—which, contrary to popular misperception, makes them no less concrete or influential in their impact than if they are conceived to be permanent, necessary features of the social landscape—that mediate the relations of race, norms that help determine how black people are seen and judged. So even if black identity is up for grabs—a statement with which I largely agree, although with decidedly different political resonance, since I’ve argued in my work about the fluidity of the boundaries of black identity—it has real historical and cultural limitations.
Jorge is extricating a phenomenological analysis of race from its genealogical roots in politics and history. He is also entangled, perhaps, in a naively literal interpretation of the symbolic power of identity’s flexibility argued by postmodernists. Saying that identity is a moveable feast of self-reinvention is not to say that there are no backdrops or hard grounds. To paraphrase the poet and essayist Elizabeth Alexander, one may subscribe to the nonessentialist racial politics of identity, but there has got to be a bottom line. The bottom line is composed of the material effects of historically constituted notions of blackness, both within and beyond African American culture. To give a brief example, you can tell the policeman that race is a trope, but if he’s beating your head, such behavior won’t be stopped by you proclaiming: “Listen, sir, this is a historically constituted, socially constructed reality that has no basis beyond our intellectual assent to its existence, and without our ideological agreement, there can be no consensus about its social effect in American culture.” That’s a deft bit of ideological maneuvering, but your head will still be bloodied by the battering you endure. So the concrete effects of the association of race with black identity or, more viscerally, with black skin has to be acknowledged as a material factor in the social perception of blackness, and in shaping our views of how race signifies and operates.
In the exchange between West and Jorge, West understands the need to ground the politics of black identity in cultural specificity, and in racial particularities that acknowledge the force of kinship, psychology, and sociology, even if we seek to question just how determinative they are in constructing blackness. Jorge appeals to a language that, on the surface, is more inviting of the postmodern interrogation of blackness as a socially constructed reality. Ironically, however, he does not pay sufficient attention to how blackness signifies in multiple ways in the public sphere. One of the most powerful and determining ways it signifies, however, is as a descriptive term to name people of color who have been historically constituted as black, and whose identities are invested at once in protecting and probing the boundaries of blackness.
Composition, like many intellectual disciplines, has been engaged in its own version of the “theory wars.” You are very careful in your writing to acknowledge the importance of academic theories—particularly postmodernisms. You write, “At its best, theory should help us unmask the barbarous practices associated with some traditions of eloquent expression. But like a good sermon or a well-tailored suit, theory shouldn’t show its seams.” You write in Between God and Gangsta Rap, “With some adjustments, I think theory may help to explain black culture.” What role do you see theory playing in race issues? And would you describe the “seamless” theory?
There are several roles for theory in black culture. First, theory should help us clarify the relationship between theory and practice. All practices are in some way theorized, and many theories are practiced at a certain level, even if it’s not always apparent. The first function of theory in the hands of seasoned critics is to help us see that practices are shot through with intellectual and theoretical elements that are sometimes obfuscated or concealed. Theory is sometimes obfuscated because attention is paid by the advocates of one practice or another to how such practices are rooted in experience, underplaying the role of critical scrutiny in shaping and understanding the practice. Theory is sometimes concealed for no other reason than some advocates of a given practice shun the stigma of abstraction and irrelevance that a priority on theory has sometimes brought. Second, theory helps critics make the point that black culture is much more difficult, much more complex and densely layered, and much more combative, even within its own boundaries, than has sometimes been acknowledged. Theory is needed to name the various elements that constitute such a difficult, dense, and combative culture.For instance, theory helps a critic like Henry Louis Gates talk about how signifying practices are glimpsed in rhetorical devices that have been deployed in black culture, ranging from blues music to literary expressions. But theory might also help us imagine the relations and discontinuities between the signifying practices of agrarian and urban blues, and those of hip-hop culture.
Theory, then, can help us identify cognates and contradictions in black cultural expression, even as it helps us isolate structures and registers of articulation that evoke the broad reinterpretation of received ideas about black life. Theory in the hands of a cutting-edge critic can help us pay attention to historically and socially neglected elements of black culture, and to how ordinary views of black life are already theory laden. We never begin in a pretheoretical density in the interpretation of black culture. We are already theorizing, even if we do not have the official language, the academic prose, to express that theory. Everyday people who interpret, analyze, and reflect on black culture are already working with a theoretical base, no matter how inchoate, poorly conceived, or unclearly stated. Theory simply forces the process of critical scrutiny to become explicit, and at times, systematic. Whenever people make the attempt to understand themselves, especially in relation to their culture, they are engaging, at even the most basic level with the most elementary vocabulary, the larger concerns of theory. Theory simply takes such questions to their most sophisticated expressions and to their logical, if surprising, conclusions.
For me a seamless theory is one that does not always have to display the most egregious forms of jargon-ridden discourse to make the critic’s point. The occasion should determine usage. If one is engaging interlocutors with commensurate interests, training, and vocabularies, as I am in this interview, then by all means one must stretch the seams of the discourse to its breaking points, forging new discursive combinations out of the rhetorical shards and linguistic fragments that break along theory’s ends—in terms of both its purposes and its limits. But for secular audiences, so to speak— those who do not belong to one’s community of discourse, even if they belong to professions with their own rhetoric—and for civilians in the theory wars, one must employ a seamless theory. I think seamless theory permits one to intelligently express complex ideas in language that is easily accessible to a general audience. Of course, I can hear someone asking why can’t we just do that in general, even for members of one’s own profession? Of course, one should often make the attempt. It is a necessity if one regularly teaches undergraduates. But there are trade-offs: depth for breadth, complexity for comprehensiveness, and clarity for certain kinds of rigor that demand difficult ideas to be parsed in the languages of their theoretical birth. Still, it is good to have to translate one’s ideas to a public beyond one’s normal pitch—and the pun there is deliberate—and to rearticulate one’s theoretical musings.
A seamless theory may at times have minimal jargon, but only when absolutely necessary; even then, one must provide context clues that help bring the message home. Some concepts are simply hard to express. Sometimes, as when translating words or phrases from one language to another (for instance, is there a French word for the hip-hop term “phat,” a word that might take a couple of tries in English to clarify its meaning to those outside of the linguistic limits of rap culture?), one must keep the word in the original language but provide enough surrounding verbiage to clarify its meaning. The beauty and advantage of a seamless theory is that we cannot rely exclusively on the old habits of thought that jargon signifies, forcing us to break new ground by saying what we say in ways that a geologist may understand, as well as a literary theorist who has training in the field. However one speaks, whether in the theoretical cadences one learns from one’s field, or in a tongue for the noninitiated, one gives up something of importance to either the expert or the layperson. For me, the effort to be as theoretically sophisticated as one can and to be as clear as one can is determined by the audiences to which you speak and the purposes for which your work exists in a given moment. The best use of seamless theory is to show people things they did not know before in ways that they understand.
For many theorists, notions of disruption become critical in the critique of traditional power structures. You write of black public intellectuals that they are “leaders of a particular kind. We stir up trouble in broad daylight so that the pieties by which we live and the principles for which we die, both as a people and a nation, are subject to critical conversation.” However, in many of your discussions of black political figures and movements you are also critical of how disruption gets used. For instance, you juxtapose the militant disruptiveness of Malcolm X and the assimilative nondisruptiveness of Colin Powell. Would you speak to the idea of disruption in the role of racial matters?
Disruption is a primary prerogative of those of us, especially cultural critics and black intellectuals, who are paid pests. We are not only trying to point to the emperor who has no clothes, but we are also trying, through theory and rhetoric, to disrobe well-dressed imperialisms. I think our function, in part, is to intervene in conversations in disturbing ways, a disturbance that forces people to reflect on why they ask the questions and make the analyses they do. Disruption as I mean it is not simply chaotic interruption for its own sake; it is not intellectual anarchy that has no substantive effect. Disruption has a political goal: to force us to evaluate beliefs and social practices through a new lens, or to see these beliefs and practices differently through the same lens. For instance, race may be the lens through which many of us view reality, but if the folk who read or hear us begin to see race differently because of the questions we raise, we have exercised a crucial function of the paid pest, or, as it were, the critical disrupter. We don’t always have to destroy the lens through which our readers view the world, a point eruditely and exhaustively made by Martin Jay in Downcast Eyes, his encyclopedic 1993 tome that provided an analytic genealogy and defense of ocularcentrism.
At other times, we must shatter both the lens and the very conception of knowledge through a visual, or ocularcentric metaphor, a project, for instance, that Richard Rorty has been eagerly pursuing since he published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in 1979. Rorty’s work has in part attempted to historicize the regulative metaphors that ground epistemological claims within philosophical discourse, including what Dewey termed the “spectator theory of knowledge.” In short, we must provide a moral psychology of the linguistic choices of interlocutors in the debate over what constitutes authentic and appropriate knowledge. The disruption of business as usual within the epistemic order can have a profound impact on racial claims: what can be said, by whom, under what conditions, and with what authority. Thus other metaphors within racial epistemologies may be placed in the foreground, so that, taking a cue form feminist theory, we can speak of hearing, for instance, or listening, as crucial means to knowing the world. What we have to do is create a string of metaphors that give us a different interventional possibility into the terrain of knowledge, politics, and culture. Such disruption is crucial to expanding our understanding of the fully embodied—or, better yet, full-bodied— ways of knowing the world that privilege experience, struggle, and religious belief as the structuring processes, perhaps even the catalytic agents, of epistemic quests in historically constituted black communities. In such communities, questions of morality often fused with epistemic interests: one’s understanding of the world, especially its necessary composition, was in large part driven by what was good and just to know.
Questions of racial justice, then, were never completely divorced from questions of how and why we know the world we do. That is a critical disruption of Kantian or Cartesian epistemological claims that rest on the belief in transcendental grounds, mediated, as Rorty argues, through the metaphor of a mirror or glassy essence. In black religious cosmologies, for instance, epistemic warrants are grounded in the social and moral telos of knowledge: what will we do with what we know, and how do we know it is true, apart from its rooting in the social meanings we inherit, and the kind of world in which they make sense? Thus pragmatic interests, which ground knowledge and truth claims in explicit evocations of community, open up vistas of interpreting the world that are different in important ways from the interpretations generated in many white mainstreams. I am not arguing on behalf of a racial ontology or skin epistemology that rests on an essentialist conception of identity, truth, and knowledge. Rather, I’m referring to historically constructed and culturally mediated ways of knowing the world that generate their own discursive and ethical formations. There is little question that the very existence of such an alternative to business as usual disrupts the epistemologies and moral psychologies of hegemonic culture.
Intellectually speaking, disruption is not only important for resisting the paradigms, metaphors, and theories of the dominant culture, but it applies as well to thinking critically in-house, so to speak, and freeing ourselves from restrictive orthodoxies that police innovative thought within black culture. In many ways, disruption is quite unsettling because we can never be finally settled in a position from which we would defend certain visions, or attack certain versions, of black identity for the rest of our intellectual lives. Disruption concerns the perennial possibility of migration and mobility in black culture and identity, which is why the responsibility for its enactment can never rest in the hands of one set of intellectuals, whose definitions and defenses of black culture are hegemonic. It has to be constantly changing hands. It’s not that one can’t have a career in disruption, in its most edifying sense, or in interrogating the meanings, significations, and practices of race. It simply means that there must always be other voices that disrupt our paradigms and practices of disruption.
Interview by Sidney Dobrin
Durham, North Carolina, 1997