enterwiew with paul willis

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DOI: 10.1177/1368431009106205 2009 12: 265European Journal of Social Theory

Roberta Sassatelli, Marco Santoro and Paul WillisReproduction

An Interview with Paul Willis : Commodification, Resistance and

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V I E W P O I N T S

An Interview with Paul WillisCommodification, Resistance andReproduction

Interviewed by Roberta Sassatelli and Marco SantoroUNIVERSITY OF MILAN AND UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA, ITALY

As a major contemporary figure in sociology and cultural studies, Paul Willis isbest known for his rich ethnographic studies of working-class youth culture from Learning to Labour to Profane Culture to Common Culture. A prominentmember of the celebrated Birmingham Centre for Contemporary CulturalStudies, Willis is the joint founding editor of the journal Ethnography. Translatedinto many languages, his work is widely read in sociology, anthropology andeducation. His insights have informed much contemporary work on topics suchas socialization, consumer culture, music and popular culture. Theoretical reflec-tion is in many ways central to Williss work, thriving on field experiences andthe intimate portrayal of peoples everyday creativity. His studies are instructiveexamples of what has recently been called peopled ethnography (Fine, 2003), atype of fieldwork-based research that not only provides thick descriptions sensi-tive to the peculiarities of individual subjectivities, but also offers theoreticalinsights on broader socio-cultural dynamics. They have been drawn upon by anumber of social theorists, including Giddens (1984), to capture human agencyas both productive and bounded, as embodied and discursive consciousness whichproduces and reproduces given social structures.

This interview takes the reader on Williss intellectual journey to insist on themain theoretical thrust of his work. Since Profane Culture (Willis, 1978), Willishas shown that mass commodities may become occasions for popular resistanceand catalysts of cultural innovation. With the backdrop of a Gramscian perspec-tive, he has emphasized the symbolic work performed on commodities in ordinarylife, which may help marginal groups explore alternative ways of imagining them-selves as against dominant classifications. Even though consumerism has oftenbeen a whipping boy, youth cultures since the 1960s have been cultures of con-sumption the motorbikers and the hippies studied by Willis appropriated masscommodities as elements for the constitution of the group. Willis notoriouslycharacterized hippy culture as an immanent critique of the Protestant ethic: thehippies celebrated the natural through mass commodities in a hedonistic but cere-bral search for pleasure that transfigures dominant values and creates new values:

European Journal of Social Theory 12(2): 265289

Copyright 2009 Sage Publications: Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC

www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/1368431009106205


These cultures work through profane materials: simple functional commodities, drugs,chemicals and cultural commodities exploitatively produced by the new consciousnessindustry. And yet from the rubbish available within a pre-constituted market thesegroups do generate viable cultures, and through their work on received commoditiesand categories, actually formulate a living, lived out and concretized critique of thesociety which produces these distorted, insulting, often meaningless things. (Willis,1978: 3)

As he acknowledges in the following pages, Williss work can be traced back toboth E.P. Thompsons and Richard Hoggarts concern for the capacity of sub-altern groups to constitute themselves within capitalist power relations. Theconcept of homology, which he draws from Lvi-Strauss classic structuralistwork, has remained central to his intellectual endeavours from his first book tohis recent The Ethnographic Imagination (2000). Close to de Certeaus (1984)view of consumers as bricoleurs operating in the gaps and the contradictionsof dominant consumer culture, he has lingered on the margins of the post-structuralist and post-modernist turn in cultural analysis. His proclaimed human-ism stands at a distance from thinkers such as Foucault or Derrida who inspiredStuart Hall and British Cultural Studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Through hisremarkable prose, he has remained truthful to his original desire of taking seri-ously the aesthetic qualities of popular and mass culture, exploring the symbolicas an ordinary practice accomplished by common people rather than a system ofsigns pre-determined by capitalist relations. While the latter determine the con-ditions of the process of commodification, the meanings of commodities are inmany ways reconstructed by people in everyday uses. Although the commodityform may have alienating effects on consumption:

Commodities can be taken out of context, claimed in a particular way, developed andrepossessed to express something deeply, and thereby to change somewhat the veryfeelings which are their product. And all this can happen under the very nose of thedominant class and with their products. (Willis, 1978: 6)

Certainly, as suggested by Baudrillard ([1970] 1988), capitalism is fuelled by itsvery critique, which it internalizes and transforms through the market logic. Alsocertainly, imagining a very powerful consumer may remove all too readily theneed for political regulation of commodity chains (Sassatelli, 2006). Yet, as Willisproposes in Common Culture (1990: 135), messages are not so much sent orreceived as made in reception and a grounded aesthetics testifies to sub-versive, undisciplined renderings of commercial culture. Once removed from themarket, especially in so far as consumed by marginal or subcultural groups, com-modities are arranged as part of a profane creativity which may be the only wayto radical cultural change.

While clearly passionate about his subjects, Willis no longer reads such creativ-ity through the lenses of British Cultural Studies heroic moment: human cre-ativity is a humble necessity, rooted in the contingencies of communication,which entail both the ceremonial manipulation of signs and the ceaseless deploy-ment of bodies. It is a sensuous human activity that emerges everywhere and

European Journal of Social Theory 12(2)2 6 6


yet may quickly be subsumed by power structures: commodity flows take theshape of never-ending spirals, with peoples meaningful, sometimes subversive,practices of appropriation being monitored, mimicked and reworked by thecultural industry. The cultural industry has long deployed professionals whosetask is to fuel commercialization by incorporating all that is cool, subversive oralternative with the view of infusing yet again some sort of authenticity in capi-talist production (Frank, 1997; Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999). Capitalism thusprefigures a continuous dialectic between ordinary, profane, common culture, onthe one hand, and commercial culture, on the other a dialectic which can begrasped neither by a blind critique of market capitalism nor by the triumphaladvent of a sovereign consumer. While he appreciates the political potential of sub-altern cultural practices, Willis suggests in the interview that symbolic resistanceis short-lived. Still, it may be favoured as well as undermined by structuralconditions, including public policies.

Willis keenly stresses that structural conditions constrain symbolic work withinrather rigid boundaries, and in particular an ever-shifting, but unrelenting classstructure. However, he looks at how such structural conditions are worked uponand translated into practical everyday activities. The enduring relevance of classin its cognitive and symbolic dimension is the thrust of Williss renowned bookLearning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Published in1977, it has become a classic of ethnographic research, a founding book of theBritish Cultural Studies tradition and a model for empirically grounded researchilluminating the mechanisms of social reproduction (Bessett and Gualtieri, 2002;Dolby and Dimitriadis, 2004). This book grew out of a desire both intellectualand political to grasp from within, through the understanding of peoples owninterpretation (their penetrations in Williss words), the deep cultural processeswhich make marginality, discrimination and humiliation acceptable, even normal,to working-class youth from one generation to the next. Williss hypothesis anticipated by the studies by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (1964;1970) on the French educational system is that it is the very same system ofschooling, its social organizational principles and its cultural classifications thatgenerate the conditions for the definition of working-class subjectivities as distinctand opposed to middle-class ones. In contrast to the French scholars, however,Willis is not content with theoretical architectures emerging from the analysis ofofficial statistics or institutional documents. He wants to look at mechanisms ofreproduction through agency, stressing the active collaboration of working-classyouths in their subjectification/subjection. Spending over a year with 12 teenagersin a Midlands school sharing their musical passions and sport activities, joiningtheir discussions, recording their verbal expressions, jokes and complaints bothin class and during breaks he reconstructed their subcultural group identity,whose forms took shape as ostensibly opposed to the ways of thinking that they,the lads, attributed to the earoles, fellow students who obeyed the schools rulesand school hierarchy as personified by the headmaster and the teachers. In hiswork, Willis anticipated a number of researchers who have stressed agency in thereproduction of class as well as gender division such as Barrie Thornes (1993)

Sassatelli & Santoro An Interview with Paul Willis 2 6 7


insightful ethnography of boys and girls playing in schools. Portraying working-class itineraries within the school as sources of growing alienation, he has shownthat alienation is not to be traced back to a lack of subjectivity but to a formof oppositional subjectivity which, outside the close subcultural circles which itthrives on, becomes societal subjection. A sort of self-fulfilling prophecy is realizedthrough the minutiae of daily resistance and quite a remarkable degree of sym-bolic creativity. Such creativity prises open opposition, challenge and subversionwhich then ends up reproducing the very social conditions of its production; yetthis mechanism cannot be traced back to structural determinism in that what isneeded for reproduction is the working-class kids collaboration their reflexivity,their cultural work, their symbolic innovation, in a word, their agency.

In this interview, Willis reminds us that only through fieldwork the sharingof meaningful practical experiences with the researched subjects, living throughthe spatiality and temporality of their embodied conditions, etc. can we hope tounderstand the mechanisms of social reproduction, both the strictures of socialdivisions and the fissures for social emancipation. In Bourdieusian terms, onlythrough fieldwork can we hope to grasp habitus as an ongoing practice ofsubjectification that translates, with subtle variations, objective structures. Thisclearly places Willis at a distance from mainstream stratification studies, such asthose conducted by John Goldthorpe. But there is more. In a consciously para-doxical move, Willis strives to keep alive the anti-intellectual posture which istypical of subordinate groups with a characteristically socio-analytical aim: thehope of developing conceptual categories sensitive to the life experiences of hisresearch subjects. The ultimate objective is a critical understanding of everydaypractices, embodiment, and subjectivity. The critical moment is crucial to Willissenterprise. He is wary of pure science, and clearly sides with the underdog, asHoward Becker would say. He appears to be enamoured with ordinary life.However, his is a lucid passion, as the cognitive quality of ordinary life is analo-gous to the ethnographic imagination: the latter proceeds like that necessarysymbolic work which characterizes the informal domain of the everyday. Hismethodological-theoretical stance is clear: the ethnographic imagination is rootedin the art of coping with contingencies, which is the only art that can catchthe suppressed, silenced elements of ordinary life, amplifying them beyond theboundaries of the ordinary, and transforming them into instruments and objectsof knowledge and consciousness. Willis closes his interview with a voluntaristicturn, well in line with his humanistic position and his Gramscian heritage: onlya fighting optimism of the will can make our research experiences useful to socialchange, and only if we carry them out with the required intellectual pessimismabout social inequalities.

PW Paul Willis; RS Roberta Sassatelli; MS Marco Santoro

RS Lets start from your early research which has had an important theoreti-cal impact. You are the ethnographer of the so-called Birmingham School.What was the place of ethnographic research for you, at that time?



PW I was trained in English and without any formal training in methodol-ogy, my own understanding of ethnography was rather opportunistic, andcreative, an exploration. As one of the first generation of Cultural Studiespeople in 1968, I was interested in music, and music seemed to offer a realchange socially, culturally and aesthetically. Even though commerciallyprovided, it seemed to be of the people in some basic way that the higharts and literature that Id been trained in at Cambridge were not, and Iwanted to see how music was experienced in common social practices. So,without any formal training, it just seemed to me a good idea to play musicto the people and ask them to discuss it, and spend time with them andtheir music.

MS Did you have a direct personal involvement in music, did you play aninstrument?

PW I didnt play personally. The technique was to go to the boys who were ina bike club in Birmingham called the Double Zero and ask them whatmusic they liked. They had to bring their own records and put it on a bigdisk player which I took in and I remember carrying a huge reel-to-reeltape recorder, it was like a suitcase. I think, by accident, I was one of thefirst social researchers to be using tape and experimenting with the diffi-culty of getting it on, setting up the microphone and wondering if I wouldbe able to hear them after, how to stop the tape to transcribe. I was practi-cally making up my own methodology to see what the interface was betweena textual form what studying literature at Cambridge had prepared mefor and a social project what my own lived experience had made methink was important. Music was promising a different kind of future, theenergizing effects of music were changing peoples attitudes and freeingup a very old-fashioned English set of cultural norms and forms that hadbeen inherited from the past. Looking back to the 1960s now its easy toforget that they were raw and exciting: it felt as if things were changing!Now music is in danger of becoming muzak: its something thats in thebackground while were doing our shopping. The 1960s heralded a newset of human relations, which were more democratic and open: rememberWilliams and The Long Revolution (Williams, 1961).

MS Can you say something more about the relationship between the ethno-graphic and the literary in your research experience?

PW In my mind, my method was an extension of the close reading techniqueof Cambridge, which Id grown sick of and couldnt do properly because Iwasnt bourgeois enough, didnt have the right cultural capital and de-coders. I was always struggling and it felt like repression, but it had mademe focus on only the words on the page, a kind of discipline: there wasnta quicker way of getting to the meaning, you had to show how the wordswere meaningful and that made me want to look closely at music andmotorbikes and drugs and any practices around as texts but also as social



life. Im not happy to call anything textual after that, because the wholepoint is the living bit and the text must not be separated but we must askhow the symbolic forms are used. I thought that if I could closely read apoem, then I could closely read a piece of music and I could read thecultures and the interactions. So I was always interested in a text but under-stood it as indissolubly social. I had to find a technology for thinking andresearching about my topic and the obvious thing was to do what I wouldhave been doing already informally listening to music or going to pubs ormixing but doing it in a way which was more scientific, systematized, inorder to record data and using a repatriated, unalienated and de-auratizednotion of close reading. In retrospect, I think I did that in rather a naveway, partly because I was the first in the Centre to do fieldwork dontforget, the other people who did fieldwork of a kind, like Angela McRobbie,were a slightly different generation, they came later . . .

MS I think your colleagues at Birmingham were concerned much more withtextual analysis than you . . .

PW They certainly had a background in English usually. I think it is of interestthat the Centre grew in an English department, and Richard Hoggart wasprofessor of English, and the early people were English graduates. I wasthinking of doing a PhD and I was just not very good at the English literaryacademic forms, yet my interest for culture was growing out of music andnot out of society directly or an interest in sociology.

RS You went to Birmingham at the height of the contestation years . . .

PW The very first term I arrived in Birmingham, there was a student sit-in inthe Great Hall, This was a crucial and central event for me, and Stuart Hallhimself spoke at these mass rallies which was a very great thing to do as amember of staff. CCCS students were treated by him as the standing emer-gency committee of the sit-in. We saw the sit-in itself as about democra-tizing the relationship to knowledge and introducing new texts and newways of working. So, all of a sudden, you were granted a licence, some rolein history. There are separate trajectories in history: then there were alien-ated institutional experiences that engaged with personal experience andthe cultural revolutions of the 1960s so there they came together as thepossibility of using ones own whole experience in more political or insti-tutional ways and that produced change. I think there was the sense ofa new relation to knowledge for me, in that I could go out and developmy own theoretical categoris.

RS And you were interested in grasping what you named human creativity,to track down where humour a form of translation of dominant codes is created and how it happens. Human creativity as an informal domainwhich was yet to be studied on its own terms, these are your words inProfane Culture . . .



PW My interest, say, in cultural anthropology was seeing it as encompassingthe sub-continent of human creativity in my biography moving from avery individual, adolescent feeling of that, to a rather bourgeois literary butailing view, to a more grounded academic and theoretical view, and thento a more embattled view, still digging back into the humanistic resourcesfor what creativity might be . . . Of course, you have to consider the muchgreater theoretical development of the Centre in later years, and its shift topost-structuralism, feminism and a much more theoretical Marxism. Its agenealogy or geology I am referring to here: in my intellectual posture therewas some basically humanist belief in, or wanting to believe in, creativitythroughout different social and intellectual formations. And I felt,somehow always, like having to defend myself or trying to keep the coachon the road for creativity and its different developments or conditions. Ithink thats not necessarily Cultural Studies and Stuart Hall always had amuch less humanist view of creativity. I think back, of those early days, theCentre went through a number of stages, but in our tight collective, whereStuart Hall was obviously the leader by influence he refused to leadinstitutionally but personally was hugely influential we were working inthe so-called Theory Seminar to produce a theoretical outline of whatCultural Studies might be. We read Berger and Luckman, Durkheim, Lvi-Strauss and many more, Goldman, for example, where I think I picked upmy notion of `homology`. But that theoretical project of trying to tightlydefine a new subject kind of failed because of sectarian disputes about therole of intellectual work, how we connected or didnt connect, of course,to what was outside of the Centre, and then we went to a loose collectiveand we had a set of working groups. I was in the work studies group,others in the educational group, ideology group, and so on. It became afantastic way of working: the tight collective frightened everyone and weargued and found no agreement. In the loose collective we worked a wholeyear in a subgroup, often without staff and very focused and productive,but we were still a collective and we had to put up a presentation at theend of the year and people were still frightened but very geared up now toshow what they had done that year and indicate its relevance to whateverCultural Studies was going to become: the summer term was exciting,some presentations became important working papers and books.

MS What has later come to be called Cultural Studies was still, of course,implicit . . .

PW Cultural Studies as we know it, sure, didnt exist. There was a series oftexts, we tried to find a centre about culture in the very tight collective butwe failed. I dont think the developing project was about human creativity,it was about responding to cultural change around us and positing muchmore clearly a level of the cultural and of representations as part of thesocial totality. It was certainly a revolt against the lack of empirical sociol-ogy and numeric, formalized structural-functionalism, the latter especially



for Stuart. I then didnt understand fully, I was nave when I arrived in 1968at a sit-in, working out my methodology, and I was suddenly switched onintellectually. Then I was moving at the speed of light, which Stuart hadbeen doing for over ten years. He saw the Centre as part of the New Leftproject and for him it was questioning old and established traditions,particularly Marxism and American structural-functionalism from perspec-tives on current cultural changes he was saying: how about these sub-cultures?, how about the kids? I think he liked my work because, howevernavely, I was trying to address these questions in a directly empirical way.I would play music to the bike boys and come back with a statement aboutwhat they thought whereas Stuart`s focus was the New Left, challengingthe structural-functionalists, developing the cloistered conversations withE.P. Thompson and Williams. No one had actually gone to the streets andcome back with a piece of the actual feelings of the streets, so I think myleft-wing, working-class, humanistic creativity was nave for Stuart, but ithad a trajectory, it was bumping through cultural reality in a much lessmediated way.

RS But your distinctiveness perhaps was and still is that you claim navehumanism to be central to your intellectual endeavour. Am I right?

PW Yes. I dont believe in encapsulated ways of seeing so-called British CulturalStudies. I am think Im part of it and an embattled part of it now, andmy positions are read more widely out of Cultural Studies. Reading RichardHoggart when I arrived at the Centre, and still some time after, was crucial.In retrospect, I see him as having a certain literary-ethnographic methodand I think I hit an early humanistic moment in the development ofCultural Studies which helped to define my perspective almost by mistake.Also, the exciting part of being in Cultural Studies was that every two yearsthere was another theoretical paradigm to discuss, wed become increas-ingly embattled through Marxism and feminism and anti-racism and post-structuralism. These were positive for me and helped me think about howto theorize and defend my humanism in new ways. Then it was likecentrifugal forces in the mid-1980s. I must say that the move on to post-colonialism and post-modernism and all of the language turn with its wide-spread influence, all those things took off in different directions and theCentre didnt hold.

MS It seems you represent a strong continuity from the original pool ofCultural Studies, Williams, Hoggart, E.P. Thompson and what is calledculturalism . . .

PW I must say that for me intellectual traditions are usually ex-post things.Doesnt mean they dont exist, of course, or that were not drenched in themall the time. Depends whether this is a conscious or unconscious thing, ashackle or a medium. Some kind of humanism, some literary intent, andof course the metamorphosized practices of close reading had become asort of medium for me, but they were in no way prescriptive: otherwise they



wouldnt have had their influence. Ive been trying to do what I wanted todo not very consciously. I had to believe, at least, that I was dealing withthe world, not with the traditions; or with the latter as only something todefend myself against where they did not seem to be dealing with theworld. Its like now, my deepest interest is in whats below language. AndI worry about intellectuals, that we are already in the mainstream of alanguage tradition and we may just continue the stream. But what makesthe stream more than ever in this case are the undergrowth and the moun-tains and the complexity of grappling with life and experience. And, ofcourse, this posture is itself a tradition now but I dont see it as me bathingin the stream. And as a writer, to wander around the mountains and beingdrenched with the rain and seeing the ways the typography helped to makethe confluences to then become traditions. It always surprises me when Ihave to shake myself dry and see what the main rivers are called aroundhere. Now, for instance, that means trying to defend my humanism witha different view of language, deposing its absolute centrality. What wasgood at the Centre, was that I felt that I was given a licence to talk aboutthe things that were interesting for me in the way that I wanted, at leastfor long enough to establish my own ideas and practices before thetraditions came to get me again. A weight was taken off my head particu-larly by Stuart, though he is and was in other ways overwhelmingly andpowerfully located in terms of traditions; he was the bell-wether of changingtraditions and crises in and between them. And, while I didnt have thesophistication to place myself in traditions, I could work on my abilityto develop my own categories and theories in relation to puzzles from thefield, which is so obviously similar to practice. That hasnt answered yourquestion, I know, not directly at least. I realized I was part of CulturalStudies as it developed, and perhaps I was part of it in always a decentredway. I think you could write a feminist, post-structuralist history ofCultural Studies, but I felt I was defending myself or one of the oldertraditions under attack, which would be a certain humanistic cultural one,close to some founding figures, but none of the founders did ethnography.Hoggart is perhaps closest to it with his well-written recollections of hischildhood, but most of his theory and politics is questionable and not verysophisticated and Williams, who had some of the original ideas, never didethnographic work, though in his creative work perhaps he is a kind ofethnographic novelist; there are continuities here. But Williams nevergrappled with making sense of a particular piece of practice or set of data,with what experience and theory might mean in a given micro example.Thompson, you may say, is an ethnographic historian, yet the anthropo-logical or consciously organized real fieldwork was and is very small in theCCCS uvre.

RS Doing ethnographic work was expedient for you to create your own theor-etical categories from direct experience, which of course means embodiedexperience, one which brings the social analyst out of her daily round into



where analyzed practices actually take place. What do you consider to bethe role of embodiment?

PW The body has come back into sociology. From an ethnographic point ofview, it is crucial. The body is the research instrument and the way youput it under the same regimes, controls, rules and regulations, urgenciesand problems as the people youre trying to understand. Its a very import-ant way of getting over the epistemological and methodological problemsof the ethnographic authority: of course, you can never know what its liketo be the other but if your own body is in the same situation if youreworking in the factory, getting up early, waiting for the others and youreally are tired and at the same time you are trying to meet certain objec-tives and you know youre not going to be there at a later date and youvegot a very specific reason to be there, of course you know what the regimefeels like. Im deliberately not calling it the real but it is real things thathappen to you and the representations you produce have a particularhistory, technology and genealogy and are rooted in direct social relationswhich you share with the people about whom youre making representa-tions, then via your bodily experience those representations have some rootor connection to the social experiences and relations of those whom yourestudying in ways that purely disconnected representations dont. Thusunderstood, ethnography sets limits on an entirely constructivist view ofhow you go about methodology. Yet, social sciences are still disembodied and I think its a problem in sociology. All of our social theories and waysof understanding should have space for the body.

RS And yet embodied experience, so it seems, cannot really be translatedstraightforwardly into language?

PW Its an unworkable epistemological and theoretical problem, because wereusing language right now . . . Im not saying language isnt extremelyimportant or even predominant, because it is the primary means of oursocialization and every moment were turning other sensations and bodilyfeelings into language, which itself conditions how we feel, our senses . . .But, it cant be only language despite the famous Stuart Hall quote whichgoes something like There are other experiences, but if its meaning, it mustbe language. He is saying that because by definition language is meaning,then you cant have meaning without language. The very notion of sayingtheres a somatic, semantic meaning is just rubbish for post-structuralism:if you have a meaning in your head, its come through language and bodilyfeelings would be secondary. Also in broad terms, if we say that all is alanguage, that could be radically against a democratizing culture by alwayswanting to put things into language and realizing meaning systems withinlanguage in ways which actively subordinate powerless groups of all kindsin all kinds of ways. These groups coded by class, race, gender or sexu-ality appear to feel a tension with language as a means of social control



and social policing of meaning as opposed to the subterranean level offeelings of difference, potentiality and significance which cant be registeredin the dominant discourse. A sense of positionality with respect to otherswho are born in subordination can be held in music and clothes andwalking style and attitudes which still hold some space for dignity, whereasif its swallowed and reprocessed as language even a political languageof trade unionism the specificity of their position may be lost. Mostsubordinate groups know very well that there are certain kinds of walkingand talking, and whats not said as much as what is said, as well as musicof course, that carry a cultural identity which isnt absorbable into thedominant cultural control carried through language. I see that as a muchbroader trail of cultural production which sometimes, under certain circum-stances, might surface like an iceberg tip above the sea as resistance, butwhich for most of the time is just a means of ordinary dignity.

RS You are suggesting that being on the scene, with all your senses doing field-work, is perhaps a very different entry into subordinate experiences . . .

PW Yes, sure. We just need to avoid making this view a bit too crude, especi-ally to assign resistance too readily to the body. We need to start with abroad notion of a sensuous cultural production which is about a bodily,homological and somatic production of a sensibility. This has resonancefor all social groups, dominant, middle, professional and scientific, forinstance, who hold identities through use of, and relationships to, objectsand artefacts and material practices, as Science and Technology Studiesshows, for instance, for scientists. What we might call the sensuous culturalproduction of the self is partly intentional, even conscious in a way whichis verbalized and partly subconscious though always influenced by signifi-cation and histories of signification of objects. For dominant groups all ofthis is more or less in line, non-antagonistic, and certainly includes bodilyand sensuous elements. For subordinate groups, though, the balance isdifferent and more antagonistic. The language bit of control over objectsis less and different, less official, less about taking the floor in Bourdieusterms, and the sensuous homological use of objects is more about holdingout and holding off other peoples verbalizations. Language itself is acontested and asymmetric social practice under conditions of domination.Language is often kind of at war with itself for subordinate groups, butthings, gestures, objects, bodily styles can carry social positionalities whichallow dignity for the self denied in the positions dominant and domin-ating language offers . . . this antagonistic cultural production is alwaysindissolubly linked to the language level because everything signifies andis subject to signification but it can also be against dominant languagepractices sensed (in both somatic and cognitive meanings of that word),despite the varnish, as nothing other than the provision of and invitationto inhabit subordinate subject positions and act accordingly. This might bea way of rethinking class, because now class has gone out the window, even



though diverse forms of oppression are growing, we havent got and needto develop a proper methodology for registering the contemporary culturalrelation and dimension and re-thinking class categories along sensuous andhomological lines might help. But the language turn goes in the wrongdirection. Thats what annoys me about the language trend, you may missso much. Even now, in this interview, there is a level of experience, a wholeother level, not just of communication but presence and cultural making,a lot of which were not particularly aware of and this is a very elitediscourse: if we were working-class kids in the suburbs, smoking dope, youknow, Id put a tape on, then the relations to language would be somewhatdifferent as well as the shared sense of the sensuous, corporal presence. Ialways understood that this was the problem with Marxism and with thestructural functionalism that we were trying to say to them: this is culture,lets really pose the question by example, what is culture for you? How areyou going to fit culture in, where are the spaces? You get structures, socialrelations all that, all important to me, yet in a certain funny way it couldall be happening on Mars and be abstract and happening on the level ofsignifiers in a textbook or a sociological lecture where, of course, we cantreproduce the whole of the textured social life. Still, Cultural Studies, as Isaw it, was about having theoretical openings, possibilities, potentialitiesand spaces which we might never fill, but where we could be sensitive tosensuous experience . . . At present, Im not actually doing ethnographythough I hope to: ethnographic work is to pose again that problem, howabout these living, warm, sensuous bodies, how about the palpable feelingthat something is shared and theres a cultural production of a kind? Thisconnects also to my humanism around a sense of profane aesthetics: itsnot just in art galleries and great works of art, but what makes someonetick is an aesthetic feeling, a feeling of quality and significance of the pointof being human even in very difficult circumstances.

RS So when you say aesthetic feeling you mean quality and significance?

PW Yes, but significance makes you think of signification, which makes youthink of language: thats part of it, but I am on about other kinds ofsignificance-as-being-ation. Theres evidence that those moments of aes-thetic feeling would be about connecting the body to symbolic formsdirectly, and with expression which lifts humanity from only biologicalbeing and which connects the self to others and to the future in ways whichpromise something like transcendence or something like a hope, meaning-fulness or pleasure but all of a piece with a contexted body in place and time.

RS One of the things that run across the majority of your books is the idea ofcreative work: what people do when they consume is to do creative workwhich transforms the commodity into lived culture. Matching the emphasisin social theory upon the active consumer, this whole problematic is nowdefined as de-commodification. Certainly Profane Culture and CommonCulture provide a perspective on this, as if commercial culture, rather than



schooling, could paradoxically offer spaces for creativity to the under-privileged. The idea that even commodity consumption could be creativewas very important in the early 1970s as a way to put critical theory of aMarxist variety in perspective. Today thanks to the development of alargely interdisciplinary sub-field of research on consumer practices andto post-Marxist work on the commodity form we may think that thecommodity form is never stable nor set once and for all. Of course,professionals in the promotion industries have to show that whatever theysell is useful for the consumer. Yet it is people rather than the consumer who appropriate and make commodities useful in practical ways, and indoing so they may find a space of relative autonomy from the productivesystem. And yet again, to put it plainly, even if people transform meanings,companies are still making money out of their custom. So what is therelevance of the spaces of autonomy opened by the cultures of consump-tion? Even in your earlier work, it seems to me, that you were quite criti-cally aware that companies are willing accomplices in resistance, they holdup people to be creative: human creativity, just like individualization, lookslike a necessity of the commodity circuit, or as Simmel thought, of maturecapitalism (Simmel, [1900] 1990). Then, the promotional system, to sayit with John Clarke (1991), appropriates the vernacular, and the circuitstarts again. The way I see it is via the notion of re-framing (Sassatelli,2007). It is true that through their cultures of consumption people mayconstruct a relatively separated world which re-frames commodities, yetwhat they do may not be consequential on the company or the economyas a whole. Precisely because the cultures of consumptions are relativelyseparate, they will be translated when they go outside themselves in formswhich are out of the hands of the local participants. Can you say some-thing more about how you see this ambivalence?

PW Let me answer in terms of Marcos interest in traditions this time. I guessthat from where the Centre was coming from and what there certainlywas in my mind, I was trying to understand the capitalist system of com-modity production in relation to the way of life of a subordinate group.The New Left position was exactly that, since the working class, apparentlymore than the bourgeois groups, was taking seriously the new culturalcommodities, ITV had just started, there was popular music, trash papers,trash magazines which seemed to be the thing for the working class. I thinkpart of the terrain of the birth of Cultural Studies was exactly your question:is it possible that commodities produced for profit may provide a groundfor other than an alienated cultural consciousness? And the things peoplehad chosen to do after they were fed and warm and safe: was this a newform of super-exploitation that capital had moved into or could it be thegrounds of an alternative, radical, long revolution which had empoweringeffects? Its not just todays question, I think it was one of the foundingquestions in the Centre and one that in my humanistic, culturalist way Iunderstood very clearly, and I think I was looking at how commodities



could be appropriated in alternative ways and the whole variety of thingsthat are produced for profit could be taken over and I still think thishappens even though we havent got proper sociological theories for themyet, especially linking such processes to the larger enduring categories ofclass and social reproduction of them. Theres been a fundamental worldhistorical change in the movements of capital and as soon as capitalistproduction moved on from the provision of food, safety, warmth andshelter to culture, consciousness and electronic mediation, it changed thenature of the game and in the process destroyed the old ways of working-class culture because the proliferation of signifiers and forms allowed us the working class to build new identities and new objects of desire. Theold working-class culture itself was rendered into signifiers which reachedescape velocity and circled the ether electronically usually with highlynegative connotations; who on earth would decide to be working class inEngland, so earthbound again in their referents? You know, why wouldntwe all be James Bond, stirred and shaken? And yet there seemed to be theformation of a hybrid culture, always compromised and in a sense dubious,but nevertheless a culture which in some ways through bodily expres-sivity, not language really, said something about their proletarian position,about their position in the factory, in the neighbourhood, in the socialspace which was expressive in a way that hadnt been there before. But itwasnt a hand-me-down bourgeois expression or workers poetry, it wasnta kind of Russian hybrid trying to take high art and adapt it to the prole-tariat; in my own mind, it might have been the beginnings of a genuinelyproletarian culture bottom-end up, not a hand-me-down opera for themasses. Yes, for a time we felt that on the grounds of the commodity anddominated systems there was the possibility of a genuine class culture thatwasnt folk tradition or idiocy banned in a Marxist sense, but was based onnew relations which could then be translated into political representation,possibly set new agendas, possibly work through demands which werenon-reformist. Thats what I thought Cultural Studies was about: there isthis terrible danger of ex-post rationalization, of course but we had tosomehow grasp that capital had made a new platform of culture throughcommodification and that platform could partly be taken up by alternativeways of being and doing. Of course, there was always a danger of navetyespecially with all the enthusiasm of the 168 season: you could say thehippies in California seemed to be opposed to capital, but really they wereinventing a whole new mode of genetic cultural forms which would allowcapitalist commodity culture to continue. In the nave days of the earlyCentre work, there seemed to be a long moment of resistance on the groundsof capitalism. Now that moments very short disappearing for mostanalysts but which I believe is more important than ever to hang on to because the capital relation comes round super-quick and pinches any newidea or de-fetishization in order to put it back into formal production. Ithasnt only done it to motorbikers the Harley chopper but across the



consumer board, tout court. I still think were living the crisis, the failureof that first stage picked up by Cultural Studies, which hoped to see a levelof stability in the alternatives provided by the bodily forms of difference.The truth is, the capitalists are far cleverer than we ever bloody thought theywere: commodity capital will find ways of generating surplus value fromoppositions to its own nature. Capitalism may be better at culture thanany system that weve managed to invent. It may produce a non-capitalistculture, and some of the greatest areas of advance and profit-making maybe in anti-capitalist culture which capital can easily exploit. To finish theanswer to Robertas question, I do think some cultural entrepreneurs,cultural producers understand more than we do, because thats part of whatthey do: they know their products are fetishized and there are all kinds ofways in which their producers imagine how the product is going to be usedin processes of de-fetishization; its an understanding of selves in thisrestless circuit of capital. The shift to the service economy is in part aboutimagining use values and is in part about the capitalist frame of gainingsurplus and trying to extend ever further back into all kinds of informalcultural production . . . so youre not making a profit making things orimporting from China, you make a profit from selling in a particular wayto groups, co-present or not, that will consume together in ways throughwhich they will bond together, even if only in imagination . . .

RS This brings us to the frontiers of thought for critical knowledge. What arethe questions we have to keep asking? And, indeed, can we still ask criticalquestions?

PW Yes, I think one of the crucial questions is, what is the possible everydaypolitics of all this? Is there a micro political will to operate in a theoreti-cally informed manner in consumer sites? Perhaps it is a matter of balance,why cant some of those non-commercial spaces, controlled by the state,for example, be used for market-like consumption, upsetting the tradition-alists, but also looking at the informal ways of cultural production, at waysof strengthening them, analysing them, allowing them to unfold not intospaces of capital control but into spaces of collective diffuse control . . . therecould be a whole range of different policies to recognize emerging, margin-alized cultural production, dont let it be swallowed by capital. Why do weleave it to the capitalist market to pick up and externalize, and provideobjects for future homological and integral development? Why should thestate and collectively owned charity not be massively engaged in culturalpromotion? Why cant some of the collective forms in informal life loosesocial games or those things which are often demonized as youth cultures,marginal culture with their opposition to capitalist regime control whycant those forms be seen and supported as quasi-institutions that might givespace for the self-recognition of forms of cultural production, and conse-quently be given some form of cultural citizenship?



MS Id like to move onto another issue, considering cultural production froma rather different perspective, asking you to think about the Americansociology of cultural production as practised by Richard Peterson or PaulDi Maggio (see Santoro, 2008). It seems that, from your point of view, thereal problem of such an approach is the lack of a concept of capitalism: theydont have an idea of capitalism as a historical system of production . . .

PW You already made me think about this. I had in fact not seen the classicarticle by Peterson [Peterson and Anand, 2004] you sent me which wasvery important. In a very specific, I would say, positivistic way, Peterson isdoing what Raymond Williams was asking for in material culturalism,which is: how is culture manufactured? It doesnt just happen, it alwayshas its own mode of production. If culture is a commodity, its made in afactory, like a can of beans can be made, so a Country & Western song canbe made. Of course, its a materialism-type perspective to ask How is acommodity produced? In that broad sense, what Richard Peterson is doingis in a certain way Marxist because its materialist, not idealist. And its tobe welcomed from that point of view. But, yes, my stance would be thattheres no position in a capitalist mode of production which is productionfor its own sake, its driven by surplus, its capital accumulation. Now, fromPetersons work, youd never guess the motive for it all was accumulation.His cultural production perspective doesnt know its place in the surpluscircuit. Even though I think Peterson has demonstrated the constructive,cynical nature of the production of the symbolic form, it does not focuson the circuit and its politics: when the commodity meets the subjectiveresponse and helps to structure it and be structured by it dialectically, thenit becomes part of the living experience, which is itself exploited becausetheres a business executive coming around to see what the latest style ofwearing hats, is or the belts, or if youre making your own music. Again itgets taken up into exploitation. On the other side, though, dont forget,there is a short moment, a bit like that classic moment I described just, onlylonger then, in Cultural Studies when we were saying that working-classculture seemed to be developing power but on the grounds of capitalistproduction. There is a moment, however short, now of authentic appro-priation to local purpose. Peterson says that the biggest remaining issue forthe sociology of culture is where the feelings of authenticity come from, inwhat he calls auto-production: thats obviously got to do with what I callinformal cultural production. Hes got to the problem of authenticitybecause culture is a commodity. But if he got through to the other end ofthe equation you know my commodity circuit, de-fetishization, and backagain informal cultural production makes products which are taken backup by market researchers into the logic of capital. This isnt just an empiri-cal circuit on a positivistic model: why it has taken off, its de-fetishization,is in relation to lifes urgencies and contradictions as experienced in thebottom of the social space by the people who are the workers producing theother commodities or the general surplus production. Petersons specialism



is always Country & Western music, that develops in relation to a set ofsensibilities and feeling that are generated at the bottom of the capitalistsystem in the process of regulation, control and exploitation of persons. Inmy terms, those feelings get homologically represented in music. And in acertain way I dont really care where the music came from, of course, I neverthought it had come from heaven or hell or essentially from the singersimagination. But the point is that those variations in the music could belike Darwinian variations in form, it doesnt matter whether theyreauthentic or not, it matters if theyre taken up in homologies, and how.And then into this how people exercise some form of control and thisis the work of consumption: you choose between this, that and the other,and you put your hat in a particular way and you see it yourself in a parti-cular way, feel it in a particular way, act it in a particular way. Then itsinformal cultural production.

MS Is there a specific definition of authenticity implied in this?

PW The commodity relation can allow a true integral relation because even ifyou dont control the conditions of the production of music, you do controla lot about the conditions of the consumption of the music and what itmeans to you at that point it becomes authentic in your appropriationof a specific set from the available objective possibilities of the form. Oneof the new class frontiers may be how and if some kind of authenticity isachieved. I almost said it in The Ethnographic Imagination. Authenticitybeyond or beneath language, even in the classic days, was always sociallyconstructed, a homological relation. In that sense, the moments now mightbe shorter but they might be about more. Though its very interesting tosee how the production of a piece of music occurs and of course its cynicaland about a capital relationship surprise, surprise! the crucial issue isindeed how it becomes taken up into informal cultural production toproduce these feelings of authenticity, of bodily authenticity. Subordinatesocial positions above ground are regulated by language, then theres a needfor symbolic forms which attempt to hold below the bourgeois scope togive you that feeling, a somatic aesthetic burst, you know, this music repre-sents me, is me, in a form that allows me a point in history that matters,rather than just being kicked about like a piece of shit. Thats what makesthe authenticity. In the commodity circuit, if we havent got a moment ofsome bodily homological resonance beyond desiccated signification andthat has aspects of authenticity as presence, then the whole damn systemcant work . . .

MS The concept of homological resonance plays a central role in all yourproduction, from Profane Culture to The Ethnographic Imagination, whichends with an Appendix specifically devoted to the notion of Homology.This concept raises two issues for me, and I ask you to help me to exploreboth of them, one after the other. Firstly, the way you deploy the notionresonates with the work of Pierre Bourdieu a sociologist whose theories



and studies about social reproduction may not have directly influencedyour work, but at least they offer a fertile intellectual context in which tosituate and understand it, especially your research on schools. How do yousee your notion of homology in relation to Bourdieus work on reproduc-tion and habitus?

PW This is a large question and I reply as a tiller of soil in my own small holding.I was not attempting to deal with or answer to a Bourdieuian perspectivewhen I developed my socio-symbolic cultural approach in the field researchreported on in Profane Culture. I was attempting to bring out and under-stand the nature of cultural development giving due scope to creativity,bottom end up, as I had studied it in a contemporary example. The Ethno-graphic Imagination is an ex-post recovery of positions developed duringthat fieldwork defended against subsequent theoretical developments, prin-cipally those associated with the language turn. In particular, whilst recog-nizing the import of the critique of essentialism, I was to trying to rescueand stabilize the possibility, find a material and theoretical basis, as I saidbefore, for subordinate experiences of authenticity, to validate that at thelevel of ideas. To validate that durable identities, formed somatically andmaterially, could be understood in ways which didnt leave them completelyvulnerable to essentially bourgeois interpolations of subjectification inlanguage, the latter mere idealistic squiggles from a socio-symbolic pointof view. Sensuous body/taste/formations have historical foundations whichare material and specific beyond the floating, a-historical, random signifierswhich have no materiality beyond their own signifier corporeality but onlyconvention to anchor them to social practice in time and space. You couldargue in these ways, reflecting, if you like, the class divisions in academicdiscourses and arguments, that the subordinate are more real and auth-entic than the superordinate: they are pushed under the foam of languageto find long tides of identity in material not idealist ways. Anyway, sosympathizer as I am, I kind of bypassed Bourdieu though I imagine thathe would not have been hostile to the spirit of the positions expressed above.Of course, the notion of habitus covers the larger terrain which contains theforms/sensibilities which the socio-symbolic approach analyses. But for methere is something lingeringly positivistic about the notion of habitus. Itdesignates somehow only results of complex processes not the diaphanousprecariousness of their internal dialectics. The attempts to hold together thesubjective and the objective in the middle terms of a basically compressedinstitutional ontology in Bourdieu can lose too easily the specificity of boththe subjective and the objective, for me, of course, then selling the subjec-tive short. Homologies try to disaggregate the process, to recognize thespecificity of both sensibility and form and to put them in motion togetherwithout collapsing them. If you like, I see homologies as a technology forthinking about how bits of something like habitus can come about in thefirst place. Specific cultures and lived cultural forms do not arise throughsome kind of mystical transubstantiation of structures and structural location



but from complex and knowable mediations of sensibility/form. The detailand the specificity matter. The question of the collusion of cultural formsin social reproduction is a wider issue and requires more theoreticalapparatus including what I called in Learning to Labour penetration andlimitation than is contained in the notion of homologies and is multi-faceted and complex. But again, I would prefer over Bourdieu a somewhatmore creative and collective agentive role for subordinate cultural actorsunfolding over time and in concrete situations where they are not justsubject to symbolic violence and species of self-blame but, through theircultural practices if not in words, actually see into aspects of enclosingstructures and ideologies but in ways which produce unexpected and ironicoutcomes. Social relevance to locating conditions of existence is then oneof the factors producing and enabling homological development but thelatter is not itself and for itself a mechanism of social reproduction.

MS We move on to the second issue, now, which is more analytical. As inBourdieus case, it seems that the notion of homology you put forwardmakes it difficult to account for change, for social and cultural transform-ation . . . How do we account for change, and what makes you so surethere are all these homologies in the world?

PW Homologies in the world? Homology is an analytic device with some refer-ence to a real relation in the world as sensuously engaged with by me inmy bike culture research. Of course, practising ethnographers and writers,particularly those concerned with some literary intent, never imagined thereis a one-to-one relation between analytic devices and what arises from theexperiences of your body and mind in the field. No question, particularlywith their own struggle in the cultural world of the academy, defendingthemselves there, academics can freeze, essentialize and reify categorieswholly forgetting the fluidity of the real world. But I would still insist thathomologies present in thought, a real relation in the world in more produc-tive ways than can language-derived ideas of signification which seem tohave taken the academic field. Think of music. I just read in the FinancialTimes about sound branding where companies supply music for restau-rants, retail outlets, etc. where certain sounds are taken to reflect a particu-lar brand and where states of mind corresponding to certain musical forms,further specified by age and class, can thereby be induced, it is hoped, byplaying that music. In lived culture it is commonplace now especially foryoung people actively to manipulate their own moods and atmosphereswith use of clothes, music, objects, artefacts and drugs taken to carry appro-priate meanings with them. These things clearly have non-accidental rela-tionships and we need theoretical categories to keep up with the world.Homologies might be clunky but they allow a practical way forward in theanalysis of definite relations between form and sensibility. As for changeand this is why I included the Appendix in The Ethnographic Imagination,forgive me, it is simply forgotten that my socio-symbolic theory has three



parts to it: the indexical, the homological and the integral. The indexicalrefers to, if you like, the accidental relation of sensibility to form ourrelationship to the things we happen to find around us. The homologicalrefers to correspondences and fits of shape between sensibility and form.The integral treats of the historical dialectical relation between form andsensibility which brings about basic homologies to start with. Just as thecommodity manipulators want to control atmosphere, to the same end,informal practitioners with their repeated exposures to a form produce notonly some kind of reflection or resonance but higher concentrations offocus, effect and emotion which then, in turn, produce agentive motiva-tions to change and develop aspects of form to better produce desired effectsand emotions which then produce further development in sensibility whichproduce further agentive impulses with respect to form, etc. This is what Icall integral circuiting. In closed cultures of production and consumption,such as the early hippies, I argue in Profane Culture that a rapid integralcircuit can develop with music producers developing music with what I callobjective possibilities quite actively shaped to represent and return culturalmeanings. In more diffuse cultures, including commodity-mediated ones,changes and developments in choice, quality and quantity of exposure andadaptations in material and social conditions of reception and consump-tion as well as outside signification brought to bear on objects/forms orchanges in such signification all these can produce re-selections or re-takes on what I call the objective possibilities of form which then opensup the dialectical path to changes in sensibility, and so on. Such dialecti-cal change has all kinds of instabilities built into it, not least unexpecteddouble edges of form, of commodity fetishism, of technology exposed byagentive selection leading to unplanned and unprefigured, precisely profane,outcomes in sensibility. This gives a more scientific basis for humanisticnotions of creativity. Basic homologies of sensibility/form only arise throughsuch dialectics and are always subject to change and destruction throughthem as well as subject to being displaced by other homological relationsand their integral circuiting as well as all disruptive and invasive forms ofcommodification. There are theoretical resources and openings here, eventhough micro, for understanding larger currents of change.

RS The cultural, and a certain vision of it, are central to the literature on theproduction and consumption of culture. What about the alleged specificityof the cultural commodity? You insist very much on how specific anddifferent it is from the other types of commodities. In The EthnographicImagination (Willis, 2000: 66), you write that what separate the culturalcommodity from commodities in general is the particular nature of theirusefulness as related to the construction and maintenance of identity. Yousay that the use value of a cultural commodity such as a CD or a DVD isnot extinguished with use and you go on distinguishing between its basiccommodity-ness, the bearer form and its cultural usefulness or cultural



form. Now, I agree we must look at the continuous cultural re-framing ofcommodities. Yet, it seems that this applies to all commodities. As WendyGriswold (1994) has made clear, everything can be studied as a culturalproduct. Most consumer commodities today, even pre-packaged meals, maybetter be considered cultural. Functional products perhaps do not carrythe same possibility of being central to a dedicated symbolic activity, butthey may carry an awful lot of symbolic meanings, can be used in a numberof creative scenarios and are especially relevant, so it seems, in what youdefined as the cool subcultures just like the hippies made symbolically-rich and art-like a number of consumer goods which were not so culturaloriginally. In this perspective it is hard to identify something essentiallydifferent in cultural commodities, dont you think?

PW I think youre right and I dare say that later on in the book I may contra-dict myself to an extent, and Im glad youre looking at that as I thinkyouve spotted a real issue: that its not now possible to separate culturalcommodity from commodity and its a slight problem for the rhetoric ofthe argument there because I want to separate them in order to make apoint that the cultural commodity has a communicative element and,under conditions of advanced capitalism, it is implicated in the very set ofcontradictions that you pointed to in your previous question . . . Dontforget my fundamental aim here in The Ethnographic Imagination is notto come up with a better classification of commodities but to point out acontradiction in the bearer form and the cultural content of culturalcommodities which throws all simplicity about fetishism in to confusion.You could argue every commodity is cultural and my basic argument wouldthen apply to all commodities! But I would say that there are still differ-ences between informational commodities and sensuous commodities, forinstance so that when you listen to the news or read the newspaper, itsinformation, and the way in which the cultural commodity works withthat, for me is sensualizing the code so that you try to get communities orsex into it. Theres the informational, pure commodity that really isnt a canof beans, and there are cans of beans, yet you can see something of a cultur-alization around them, which makes them into a cultural commodity notan information item

RS Its a matter of degrees and scope, perhaps. One way to differentiate betweencommodities, it seems to me, is to come clean on their commodity circuit,and the different processes it entails. There are commodities that are builtas the focal point of social practices which are defined as cultural and otherswhich are not. The former may be considered cultural rather than cultur-alized, even though this is clearly a contextual definition. There are culturalcommodities whose creator is visible and made visible in the very commod-ity such as most art, or many entertainment products. I guess we needto identify who does the cultural work and how, such as the professionals



for a commercial campaign, or people in everyday use, or creators withina commercial system . . . In this light, we could still claim a rock song isdifferent from other products, as there is a creative person who lives hiswork through a commodity system and while his product is mass dis-tributed, people who listen to it may have the possibility of a relationshipwhich might bypass commercialization . . .

PW Yes, exactly because I dont think we can now have a free-standing human-istic notion of creativity what would it be? Wed have to get in a dialoguewith form, explore more the conditions for creativity . . .

RS Perhaps we should try to discriminate commodity circuits and think aboutthose who can better allow for symbolic creativity. And, to go back to whatyou were saying to Marco, we should perhaps discriminate between differ-ent forms of organizing the production-consumption link which generatedifferent forms of authenticity.

PW Maybe we should consider an analogy, that we as cultural analysts are inthe same game because were trying to make our writings detached fromdominant ways of looking at things, and at the same time we want to beread and the only way to do that is to produce using certain forms andformats, which youve got to do of course . . . But things can be explored,like, I think its in Sarah Thorntons book [Club Cultures, 1995], the so-called white label phenomenon, where a DJ in a club would play their ownmixture of songs or vocals or scratch different versions of other peoplessongs and then sell them later but having nothing on the labels so therewas no author, copyright or distribution and that was a way of refusing thecommodity culture. Also in the club culture at its height. you never foundout where a real house event was going to take place, because it wasntadvertised or on the local media; it was refusing electronic and commoditycommunication and only by being at the last event would you be given aflier or people phoned each other to tell them where to go. Take swarming which started in Canada where groups would call each other on thephone and all say weve all got to be in such and such square in one hourstime and there was no indication it was coming and theyd all go and dosomething dance or sing and then all melt away again. Its now a dynamicof popular experience, not only within club culture, within a variety oflocal groups, just to find different ways either for tricking or fooling orbypassing the commodification process: an element of fooling the marketmust be there, a way of holding homological meanings which arent thrustback immediately into the commodity mill.

RS This is somehow close to total rejection of commodification. So you wantto hold still on the Marxist idea that for resistance to be there, it must beoutside the market? Cant the market be changed?

PW Just as here are no non-cultural commodities, perhaps there are no socialfields which remain completely un-marketized. How do you know that



the cultural entrepreneurs arent ahead of us even outside of the market?As far as I can see, the whole growing area of viral marketing is an exampleof exploiting de-fetishization where you know perfectly well that if youadvertise in the normal way on generalist TV the people who dont wantto be mainstream will not buy. If theyre cool, they think theyre evadingthe mainstream cultural circuit, and will find products or ways or things todo which separate them so, theyre cool, so new products are put in clubs,or you start a whisper on the internet, and the internet itself is spreadingdifferent ways of communication which dont look commercial, but whichmay well have been started on the basis of a commercial producers formsof influence. This week, as I noticed in the Financial Times again, theHead of Coca-Cola has said that their biggest single and most effectivecommunication this year had been on YouTube where people load up theirown little sequences where soda was put in salt tablets or sugar tablets inbottles of Coke and they explode because theres a dye which makes a sodafountain. This YouTube stuff was the biggest single reproduction of theCoca-Cola brand name that had been achieved all year. So, its not just uswho are trying to figure all this out. Its a question of analysis and workingfor our side of meaning rather than the cola side of meaning.

RS If you look at it only in terms of cultural surface, its a reverberation of re-framings . . . You make a similar point in your work, when you stress thatthe symbolic richness of informality, of sensuous experience, of transgres-sion has been discovered by capital. Informality is getting mainstream: elitegroups, including political figures not directly connected to capitalistorganizations, they have to show bits of their private life; they have to lookhuman in their faults, show a glimpse of loose emotionality if they wantto reach the public. And back to the commodity circuit, lets think of culturejamming and sub-advertising on the one hand, and its appropriation bymultinationals like The Body Shop on the other. Symbolic strategies, likethe naming & blaming of unfair companies, are perhaps less effective thanregulation, or at least they cannot do it all. Perhaps there was a momentwhen resistance was more effective via the symbolic, but now, shouldnt wego back, in new guises, to a structural-materialist approach?

PW All very good points, everyone has clued up at the same game . . . Andsome people may think about older forms of collective action and insti-tutional action: Im not sure we can switch the clock back, there are somebig new issues like the environment and the huge debate about the futureof the state and supported and collective forms of doing economy andculture . . . This was partly the answer I was trying to give Marco, I thinkwe are moving to new structural contradictions, not least in the environ-ment, which might be able to move us in a more direct way to deal withsome of the contradictions and how they are played out. And at the sametime, were not living all of our lives on the grounds of commercial culturalproduction and consumer media; we are in work and in education and in



other institutions actually for most of our lives. On the other hand, toomuch of state expenditure is about meeting in a very banal way the needsof capitalist production and not cultural empowerment. Just as commer-cial forces can worry about the uses of commodities and de-fetishization,why cant protective, collective and state institutions give time to culturalmeanings? But at the same time, in the light of our whole discussion here,we must go back I think to study labour again, factories, workplaces . . .

MS Going back to what you said just before: which kind of factory do youhave in mind for your next study?

PW I think of two cases: one would be a surviving car factory where they reallyhave been intensifying work, and another would be a finished factorywhere the labour has gone, that is displaced from the factory: where haveall the workers gone? Do they still dream of the factory?

MS So, youve been working on consumption but work like in Learning toLabour was always there in the back of your mind. So whats going to bethe study of paid labour, after exploring creative work?

PW I hope I will soon have time you know the conversation we just had, thatwill form my sensibility, like an attention for the whole commodity circuit,for the whole life of a worker. What really interests me is how theyre facingthe necessity of the speed up, never has there been more pressure: when intheir heads theyre these consumers, endlessly expanding, endlessly self-inventing identities; how does that square with the realm of necessitywhich work represents? A reflection of what has happened in the verydifferent realms of production and consumption is to look at fragmentedidentities. Are things separated? Mass psychosis! Or is there a new form ofworking-class culture which, despite fragmentation, still makes somethingof the factory experience of subordination at its sharpest point of necessitybut worked out in cultural terms derived from fields apparently far fromnecessity? Id like to think the second.

Notes

This interview was conducted in Hampstead, London, in January 2007, and subsequentlywas commented on by Paul Willis. An abridged and partially different version appearedin Italian in Studi Culturali 2/2008.

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Paul Willis is Professor of Social and Cultural Studies at Keele University,Staffordshire, UK. Address: Keele University, Staffordshire, UK. [email: [email protected]]

Marco Santoro is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Bologna.Address: Dipartimento di Discipline della Comunicazione, Via Azzo Gardino, 23,40122 Bologna, Italy. [email: [email protected]]

Roberta Sassatelli is Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology at the Universityof Milan. Address: Dipartimento di Studi Sociali e Politici, Via Conservatorio 7,20122 Milano, Italy. [email: [email protected]]



enterwiew with paul willis

Documents

profane culture willis

popular culture

consumer culture

contemporary work

hippy culture

common culture

williss work

social structures