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An Interview with Paul Willis : Commodification, Resistance and Reproduction

Roberta Sassatelli, Marco Santoro and Paul Willis European Journal of Social Theory 2009 12: 265 DOI: 10.1177/1368431009106205 The online version of this article can be found at: http://est.sagepub.com/content/12/2/265

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European Journal of Social Theory 12(2): 265289

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

VIEWPOINTS

An Interview with Paul Willis Commodication, Resistance and Reproduction

Interviewed by Roberta Sassatelli and Marco Santoro
U N I V E R S I T Y O F M I L A N A N D U N I V E R S I T Y O F B O LO G N A , I TA LY

As a major contemporary gure in sociology and cultural studies, Paul Willis is best known for his rich ethnographic studies of working-class youth culture from Learning to Labour to Profane Culture to Common Culture. A prominent member of the celebrated Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Willis is the joint founding editor of the journal Ethnography. Translated into many languages, his work is widely read in sociology, anthropology and education. His insights have informed much contemporary work on topics such as socialization, consumer culture, music and popular culture. Theoretical reection is in many ways central to Williss work, thriving on eld experiences and the intimate portrayal of peoples everyday creativity. His studies are instructive examples of what has recently been called peopled ethnography (Fine, 2003), a type of eldwork-based research that not only provides thick descriptions sensitive to the peculiarities of individual subjectivities, but also offers theoretical insights on broader socio-cultural dynamics. They have been drawn upon by a number of social theorists, including Giddens (1984), to capture human agency as both productive and bounded, as embodied and discursive consciousness which produces and reproduces given social structures. This interview takes the reader on Williss intellectual journey to insist on the main theoretical thrust of his work. Since Profane Culture (Willis, 1978), Willis has shown that mass commodities may become occasions for popular resistance and catalysts of cultural innovation. With the backdrop of a Gramscian perspective, he has emphasized the symbolic work performed on commodities in ordinary life, which may help marginal groups explore alternative ways of imagining themselves as against dominant classications. Even though consumerism has often been a whipping boy, youth cultures since the 1960s have been cultures of consumption the motorbikers and the hippies studied by Willis appropriated mass commodities as elements for the constitution of the group. Willis notoriously characterized hippy culture as an immanent critique of the Protestant ethic: the hippies celebrated the natural through mass commodities in a hedonistic but cerebral search for pleasure that transgures dominant values and creates new values:
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These cultures work through profane materials: simple functional commodities, drugs, chemicals and cultural commodities exploitatively produced by the new consciousness industry. And yet from the rubbish available within a pre-constituted market these groups do generate viable cultures, and through their work on received commodities and categories, actually formulate a living, lived out and concretized critique of the society which produces these distorted, insulting, often meaningless things. (Willis, 1978: 3)

As he acknowledges in the following pages, Williss work can be traced back to both E.P. Thompsons and Richard Hoggarts concern for the capacity of subaltern groups to constitute themselves within capitalist power relations. The concept of homology, which he draws from Lvi-Strauss classic structuralist work, has remained central to his intellectual endeavours from his rst book to his recent The Ethnographic Imagination (2000). Close to de Certeaus (1984) view of consumers as bricoleurs operating in the gaps and the contradictions of dominant consumer culture, he has lingered on the margins of the poststructuralist and post-modernist turn in cultural analysis. His proclaimed humanism stands at a distance from thinkers such as Foucault or Derrida who inspired Stuart Hall and British Cultural Studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Through his remarkable prose, he has remained truthful to his original desire of taking seriously the aesthetic qualities of popular and mass culture, exploring the symbolic as an ordinary practice accomplished by common people rather than a system of signs pre-determined by capitalist relations. While the latter determine the conditions of the process of commodication, the meanings of commodities are in many ways reconstructed by people in everyday uses. Although the commodity form may have alienating effects on consumption:
Commodities can be taken out of context, claimed in a particular way, developed and repossessed to express something deeply, and thereby to change somewhat the very feelings which are their product. And all this can happen under the very nose of the dominant class and with their products. (Willis, 1978: 6)

Certainly, as suggested by Baudrillard ([1970] 1988), capitalism is fuelled by its very critique, which it internalizes and transforms through the market logic. Also certainly, imagining a very powerful consumer may remove all too readily the need for political regulation of commodity chains (Sassatelli, 2006). Yet, as Willis proposes in Common Culture (1990: 135), messages are not so much sent or received as made in reception and a grounded aesthetics testies to subversive, undisciplined renderings of commercial culture. Once removed from the market, especially in so far as consumed by marginal or subcultural groups, commodities are arranged as part of a profane creativity which may be the only way to radical cultural change. While clearly passionate about his subjects, Willis no longer reads such creativity through the lenses of British Cultural Studies heroic moment: human creativity is a humble necessity, rooted in the contingencies of communication, which entail both the ceremonial manipulation of signs and the ceaseless deployment of bodies. It is a sensuous human activity that emerges everywhere and

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yet may quickly be subsumed by power structures: commodity ows take the shape of never-ending spirals, with peoples meaningful, sometimes subversive, practices of appropriation being monitored, mimicked and reworked by the cultural industry. The cultural industry has long deployed professionals whose task is to fuel commercialization by incorporating all that is cool, subversive or alternative with the view of infusing yet again some sort of authenticity in capitalist production (Frank, 1997; Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999). Capitalism thus pregures a continuous dialectic between ordinary, profane, common culture, on the one hand, and commercial culture, on the other a dialectic which can be grasped neither by a blind critique of market capitalism nor by the triumphal advent of a sovereign consumer. While he appreciates the political potential of subaltern cultural practices, Willis suggests in the interview that symbolic resistance is short-lived. Still, it may be favoured as well as undermined by structural conditions, including public policies. Willis keenly stresses that structural conditions constrain symbolic work within rather rigid boundaries, and in particular an ever-shifting, but unrelenting class structure. However, he looks at how such structural conditions are worked upon and translated into practical everyday activities. The enduring relevance of class in its cognitive and symbolic dimension is the thrust of Williss renowned book Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Published in 1977, it has become a classic of ethnographic research, a founding book of the British Cultural Studies tradition and a model for empirically grounded research illuminating the mechanisms of social reproduction (Bessett and Gualtieri, 2002; Dolby and Dimitriadis, 2004). This book grew out of a desire both intellectual and political to grasp from within, through the understanding of peoples own interpretation (their penetrations in Williss words), the deep cultural processes which 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 of schooling, its social organizational principles and its cultural classications that generate the conditions for the denition of working-class subjectivities as distinct and opposed to middle-class ones. In contrast to the French scholars, however, Willis is not content with theoretical architectures emerging from the analysis of ofcial statistics or institutional documents. He wants to look at mechanisms of reproduction through agency, stressing the active collaboration of working-class youths in their subjectication/subjection. Spending over a year with 12 teenagers in a Midlands school sharing their musical passions and sport activities, joining their discussions, recording their verbal expressions, jokes and complaints both in 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 rules and school hierarchy as personied by the headmaster and the teachers. In his work, Willis anticipated a number of researchers who have stressed agency in the reproduction of class as well as gender division such as Barrie Thornes (1993)

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insightful ethnography of boys and girls playing in schools. Portraying workingclass itineraries within the school as sources of growing alienation, he has shown that alienation is not to be traced back to a lack of subjectivity but to a form of oppositional subjectivity which, outside the close subcultural circles which it thrives on, becomes societal subjection. A sort of self-fullling prophecy is realized through the minutiae of daily resistance and quite a remarkable degree of symbolic creativity. Such creativity prises open opposition, challenge and subversion which then ends up reproducing the very social conditions of its production; yet this mechanism cannot be traced back to structural determinism in that what is needed for reproduction is the working-class kids collaboration their reexivity, their cultural work, their symbolic innovation, in a word, their agency. In this interview, Willis reminds us that only through eldwork the sharing of meaningful practical experiences with the researched subjects, living through the spatiality and temporality of their embodied conditions, etc. can we hope to understand the mechanisms of social reproduction, both the strictures of social divisions and the ssures for social emancipation. In Bourdieusian terms, only through eldwork can we hope to grasp habitus as an ongoing practice of subjectication that translates, with subtle variations, objective structures. This clearly places Willis at a distance from mainstream stratication studies, such as those conducted by John Goldthorpe. But there is more. In a consciously paradoxical move, Willis strives to keep alive the anti-intellectual posture which is typical of subordinate groups with a characteristically socio-analytical aim: the hope of developing conceptual categories sensitive to the life experiences of his research subjects. The ultimate objective is a critical understanding of everyday practices, embodiment, and subjectivity. The critical moment is crucial to Williss enterprise. He is wary of pure science, and clearly sides with the underdog, as Howard 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 analogous to the ethnographic imagination: the latter proceeds like that necessary symbolic work which characterizes the informal domain of the everyday. His methodological-theoretical stance is clear: the ethnographic imagination is rooted in the art of coping with contingencies, which is the only art that can catch the suppressed, silenced elements of ordinary life, amplifying them beyond the boundaries of the ordinary, and transforming them into instruments and objects of knowledge and consciousness. Willis closes his interview with a voluntaristic turn, well in line with his humanistic position and his Gramscian heritage: only a ghting optimism of the will can make our research experiences useful to social change, and only if we carry them out with the required intellectual pessimism about social inequalities. PW Paul Willis; RS Roberta Sassatelli; MS Marco Santoro RS Lets start from your early research which has had an important theoretical impact. You are the ethnographer of the so-called Birmingham School. What was the place of ethnographic research for you, at that time?

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Sassatelli & Santoro An Interview with Paul Willis

PW I was trained in English and without any formal training in methodology, my own understanding of ethnography was rather opportunistic, and creative, an exploration. As one of the rst generation of Cultural Studies people in 1968, I was interested in music, and music seemed to offer a real change socially, culturally and aesthetically. Even though commercially provided, it seemed to be of the people in some basic way that the high arts and literature that Id been trained in at Cambridge were not, and I wanted 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 music to the people and ask them to discuss it, and spend time with them and their music. MS Did you have a direct personal involvement in music, did you play an instrument? PW I didnt play personally. The technique was to go to the boys who were in a bike club in Birmingham called the Double Zero and ask them what music they liked. They had to bring their own records and put it on a big disk player which I took in and I remember carrying a huge reel-to-reel tape recorder, it was like a suitcase. I think, by accident, I was one of the rst social researchers to be using tape and experimenting with the difculty of getting it on, setting up the microphone and wondering if I would be able to hear them after, how to stop the tape to transcribe. I was practically making up my own methodology to see what the interface was between a textual form what studying literature at Cambridge had prepared me for and a social project what my own lived experience had made me think was important. Music was promising a different kind of future, the energizing effects of music were changing peoples attitudes and freeing up a very old-fashioned English set of cultural norms and forms that had been inherited from the past. Looking back to the 1960s now its easy to forget 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 the background while were doing our shopping. The 1960s heralded a new set of human relations, which were more democratic and open: remember Williams and The Long Revolution (Williams, 1961). MS Can you say something more about the relationship between the ethnographic and the literary in your research experience? PW In my mind, my method was an extension of the close reading technique of Cambridge, which Id grown sick of and couldnt do properly because I wasnt bourgeois enough, didnt have the right cultural capital and decoders. I was always struggling and it felt like repression, but it had made me focus on only the words on the page, a kind of discipline: there wasnt a quicker way of getting to the meaning, you had to show how the words were meaningful and that made me want to look closely at music and motorbikes and drugs and any practices around as texts but also as social

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life. Im not happy to call anything textual after that, because the whole point is the living bit and the text must not be separated but we must ask how the symbolic forms are used. I thought that if I could closely read a poem, then I could closely read a piece of music and I could read the cultures and the interactions. So I was always interested in a text but understood it as indissolubly social. I had to nd a technology for thinking and researching about my topic and the obvious thing was to do what I would have been doing already informally listening to music or going to pubs or mixing but doing it in a way which was more scientic, systematized, in order to record data and using a repatriated, unalienated and de-auratized notion of close reading. In retrospect, I think I did that in rather a nave way, partly because I was the rst in the Centre to do eldwork dont forget, the other people who did eldwork 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 with textual analysis than you . . . PW They certainly had a background in English usually. I think it is of interest that the Centre grew in an English department, and Richard Hoggart was professor of English, and the early people were English graduates. I was thinking of doing a PhD and I was just not very good at the English literary academic forms, yet my interest for culture was growing out of music and not out of society directly or an interest in sociology. RS You went to Birmingham at the height of the contestation years . . .

PW The very rst term I arrived in Birmingham, there was a student sit-in in the Great Hall, This was a crucial and central event for me, and Stuart Hall himself spoke at these mass rallies which was a very great thing to do as a member of staff. CCCS students were treated by him as the standing emergency committee of the sit-in. We saw the sit-in itself as about democratizing the relationship to knowledge and introducing new texts and new ways of working. So, all of a sudden, you were granted a licence, some role in history. There are separate trajectories in history: then there were alienated institutional experiences that engaged with personal experience and the cultural revolutions of the 1960s so there they came together as the possibility of using ones own whole experience in more political or institutional ways and that produced change. I think there was the sense of a new relation to knowledge for me, in that I could go out and develop my 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 domain which was yet to be studied on its own terms, these are your words in Profane Culture . . .

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PW My interest, say, in cultural anthropology was seeing it as encompassing the sub-continent of human creativity in my biography moving from a very individual, adolescent feeling of that, to a rather bourgeois literary but ailing view, to a more grounded academic and theoretical view, and then to a more embattled view, still digging back into the humanistic resources for what creativity might be . . . Of course, you have to consider the much greater theoretical development of the Centre in later years, and its shift to post-structuralism, feminism and a much more theoretical Marxism. Its a genealogy or geology I am referring to here: in my intellectual posture there was some basically humanist belief in, or wanting to believe in, creativity throughout different social and intellectual formations. And I felt, somehow always, like having to defend myself or trying to keep the coach on the road for creativity and its different developments or conditions. I think thats not necessarily Cultural Studies and Stuart Hall always had a much less humanist view of creativity. I think back, of those early days, the Centre went through a number of stages, but in our tight collective, where Stuart Hall was obviously the leader by influence he refused to lead institutionally but personally was hugely inuential we were working in the so-called Theory Seminar to produce a theoretical outline of what Cultural Studies might be. We read Berger and Luckman, Durkheim, LviStrauss and many more, Goldman, for example, where I think I picked up my notion of `homology`. But that theoretical project of trying to tightly dene a new subject kind of failed because of sectarian disputes about the role 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 collective and 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 a fantastic way of working: the tight collective frightened everyone and we argued and found no agreement. In the loose collective we worked a whole year 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 the end of the year and people were still frightened but very geared up now to show what they had done that year and indicate its relevance to whatever Cultural 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 of texts, we tried to nd a centre about culture in the very tight collective but we failed. I dont think the developing project was about human creativity, it was about responding to cultural change around us and positing much more clearly a level of the cultural and of representations as part of the social totality. It was certainly a revolt against the lack of empirical sociology and numeric, formalized structural-functionalism, the latter especially

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for Stuart. I then didnt understand fully, I was nave when I arrived in 1968 at a sit-in, working out my methodology, and I was suddenly switched on intellectually. Then I was moving at the speed of light, which Stuart had been doing for over ten years. He saw the Centre as part of the New Left project and for him it was questioning old and established traditions, particularly Marxism and American structural-functionalism from perspectives on current cultural changes he was saying: how about these subcultures?, how about the kids? I think he liked my work because, however navely, 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 about what they thought whereas Stuart`s focus was the New Left, challenging the structural-functionalists, developing the cloistered conversations with E.P. Thompson and Williams. No one had actually gone to the streets and come back with a piece of the actual feelings of the streets, so I think my left-wing, working-class, humanistic creativity was nave for Stuart, but it had a trajectory, it was bumping through cultural reality in a much less mediated way. RS But your distinctiveness perhaps was and still is that you claim nave humanism to be central to your intellectual endeavour. Am I right?

PW Yes. I dont believe in encapsulated ways of seeing so-called British Cultural Studies. I am think Im part of it and an embattled part of it now, and my positions are read more widely out of Cultural Studies. Reading Richard Hoggart when I arrived at the Centre, and still some time after, was crucial. In retrospect, I see him as having a certain literary-ethnographic method and I think I hit an early humanistic moment in the development of Cultural Studies which helped to dene my perspective almost by mistake. Also, the exciting part of being in Cultural Studies was that every two years there was another theoretical paradigm to discuss, wed become increasingly embattled through Marxism and feminism and anti-racism and poststructuralism. These were positive for me and helped me think about how to theorize and defend my humanism in new ways. Then it was like centrifugal forces in the mid-1980s. I must say that the move on to postcolonialism and post-modernism and all of the language turn with its widespread inuence, all those things took off in different directions and the Centre didnt hold. MS It seems you represent a strong continuity from the original pool of Cultural Studies, Williams, Hoggart, E.P. Thompson and what is called culturalism . . . 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 them all the time. Depends whether this is a conscious or unconscious thing, a shackle or a medium. Some kind of humanism, some literary intent, and of course the metamorphosized practices of close reading had become a sort of medium for me, but they were in no way prescriptive: otherwise they

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wouldnt have had their inuence. Ive been trying to do what I wanted to do not very consciously. I had to believe, at least, that I was dealing with the world, not with the traditions; or with the latter as only something to defend myself against where they did not seem to be dealing with the world. Its like now, my deepest interest is in whats below language. And I worry about intellectuals, that we are already in the mainstream of a language tradition and we may just continue the stream. But what makes the stream more than ever in this case are the undergrowth and the mountains and the complexity of grappling with life and experience. And, of course, this posture is itself a tradition now but I dont see it as me bathing in the stream. And as a writer, to wander around the mountains and being drenched with the rain and seeing the ways the typography helped to make the conuences to then become traditions. It always surprises me when I have to shake myself dry and see what the main rivers are called around here. Now, for instance, that means trying to defend my humanism with a different view of language, deposing its absolute centrality. What was good at the Centre, was that I felt that I was given a licence to talk about the things that were interesting for me in the way that I wanted, at least for long enough to establish my own ideas and practices before the traditions came to get me again. A weight was taken off my head particularly by Stuart, though he is and was in other ways overwhelmingly and powerfully located in terms of traditions; he was the bell-wether of changing traditions and crises in and between them. And, while I didnt have the sophistication to place myself in traditions, I could work on my ability to develop my own categories and theories in relation to puzzles from the eld, which is so obviously similar to practice. That hasnt answered your question, I know, not directly at least. I realized I was part of Cultural Studies as it developed, and perhaps I was part of it in always a decentred way. I think you could write a feminist, post-structuralist history of Cultural Studies, but I felt I was defending myself or one of the older traditions under attack, which would be a certain humanistic cultural one, close to some founding gures, but none of the founders did ethnography. Hoggart is perhaps closest to it with his well-written recollections of his childhood, but most of his theory and politics is questionable and not very sophisticated and Williams, who had some of the original ideas, never did ethnographic work, though in his creative work perhaps he is a kind of ethnographic novelist; there are continuities here. But Williams never grappled 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 anthropological or consciously organized real eldwork was and is very small in the CCCS uvre. RS Doing ethnographic work was expedient for you to create your own theoretical categories from direct experience, which of course means embodied experience, one which brings the social analyst out of her daily round into

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where analyzed practices actually take place. What do you consider to be the role of embodiment? PW The body has come back into sociology. From an ethnographic point of view, it is crucial. The body is the research instrument and the way you put it under the same regimes, controls, rules and regulations, urgencies and problems as the people youre trying to understand. Its a very important way of getting over the epistemological and methodological problems of the ethnographic authority: of course, you can never know what its like to be the other but if your own body is in the same situation if youre working in the factory, getting up early, waiting for the others and you really are tired and at the same time you are trying to meet certain objectives and you know youre not going to be there at a later date and youve got a very specic reason to be there, of course you know what the regime feels like. Im deliberately not calling it the real but it is real things that happen to you and the representations you produce have a particular history, technology and genealogy and are rooted in direct social relations which you share with the people about whom youre making representations, then via your bodily experience those representations have some root or connection to the social experiences and relations of those whom youre studying in ways that purely disconnected representations dont. Thus understood, ethnography sets limits on an entirely constructivist view of how you go about methodology. Yet, social sciences are still disembodied and I think its a problem in sociology. All of our social theories and ways of understanding should have space for the body. RS And yet embodied experience, so it seems, cannot really be translated straightforwardly into language?

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

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and social policing of meaning as opposed to the subterranean level of feelings of difference, potentiality and signicance which cant be registered in the dominant discourse. A sense of positionality with respect to others who are born in subordination can be held in music and clothes and walking style and attitudes which still hold some space for dignity, whereas if its swallowed and reprocessed as language even a political language of trade unionism the specicity of their position may be lost. Most subordinate groups know very well that there are certain kinds of walking and talking, and whats not said as much as what is said, as well as music of course, that carry a cultural identity which isnt absorbable into the dominant cultural control carried through language. I see that as a much broader trail of cultural production which sometimes, under certain circumstances, might surface like an iceberg tip above the sea as resistance, but which 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 eldwork, is perhaps a very different entry into subordinate experiences . . .

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PW Yes, sure. We just need to avoid making this view a bit too crude, especially to assign resistance too readily to the body. We need to start with a broad notion of a sensuous cultural production which is about a bodily, homological and somatic production of a sensibility. This has resonance for all social groups, dominant, middle, professional and scientic, for instance, who hold identities through use of, and relationships to, objects and artefacts and material practices, as Science and Technology Studies shows, for instance, for scientists. What we might call the sensuous cultural production of the self is partly intentional, even conscious in a way which is verbalized and partly subconscious though always inuenced by signication and histories of signication of objects. For dominant groups all of this is more or less in line, non-antagonistic, and certainly includes bodily and sensuous elements. For subordinate groups, though, the balance is different and more antagonistic. The language bit of control over objects is less and different, less ofcial, less about taking the oor in Bourdieus terms, and the sensuous homological use of objects is more about holding out and holding off other peoples verbalizations. Language itself is a contested and asymmetric social practice under conditions of domination. Language is often kind of at war with itself for subordinate groups, but things, gestures, objects, bodily styles can carry social positionalities which allow dignity for the self denied in the positions dominant and dominating language offers . . . this antagonistic cultural production is always indissolubly linked to the language level because everything signies and is subject to signication but it can also be against dominant language practices sensed (in both somatic and cognitive meanings of that word), despite the varnish, as nothing other than the provision of and invitation to inhabit subordinate subject positions and act accordingly. This might be a way of rethinking class, because now class has gone out the window, even

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though diverse forms of oppression are growing, we havent got and need to develop a proper methodology for registering the contemporary cultural relation and dimension and re-thinking class categories along sensuous and homological lines might help. But the language turn goes in the wrong direction. Thats what annoys me about the language trend, you may miss so much. Even now, in this interview, there is a level of experience, a whole other level, not just of communication but presence and cultural making, a lot of which were not particularly aware of and this is a very elite discourse: if we were working-class kids in the suburbs, smoking dope, you know, Id put a tape on, then the relations to language would be somewhat different as well as the shared sense of the sensuous, corporal presence. I always understood that this was the problem with Marxism and with the structural 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 are you going to t culture in, where are the spaces? You get structures, social relations all that, all important to me, yet in a certain funny way it could all be happening on Mars and be abstract and happening on the level of signiers in a textbook or a sociological lecture where, of course, we cant reproduce the whole of the textured social life. Still, Cultural Studies, as I saw it, was about having theoretical openings, possibilities, potentialities and spaces which we might never ll, but where we could be sensitive to sensuous experience . . . At present, Im not actually doing ethnography though I hope to: ethnographic work is to pose again that problem, how about these living, warm, sensuous bodies, how about the palpable feeling that something is shared and theres a cultural production of a kind? This connects also to my humanism around a sense of profane aesthetics: its not just in art galleries and great works of art, but what makes someone tick is an aesthetic feeling, a feeling of quality and signicance of the point of being human even in very difcult circumstances. RS So when you say aesthetic feeling you mean quality and signicance? PW Yes, but signicance makes you think of signication, which makes you think of language: thats part of it, but I am on about other kinds of signicance-as-being-ation. Theres evidence that those moments of aesthetic feeling would be about connecting the body to symbolic forms directly, and with expression which lifts humanity from only biological being and which connects the self to others and to the future in ways which promise something like transcendence or something like a hope, meaningfulness 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 of creative work: what people do when they consume is to do creative work which transforms the commodity into lived culture. Matching the emphasis in social theory upon the active consumer, this whole problematic is now dened as de-commodication. Certainly Profane Culture and Common Culture provide a perspective on this, as if commercial culture, rather than

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schooling, could paradoxically offer spaces for creativity to the underprivileged. The idea that even commodity consumption could be creative was very important in the early 1970s as a way to put critical theory of a Marxist variety in perspective. Today thanks to the development of a largely interdisciplinary sub-eld of research on consumer practices and to post-Marxist work on the commodity form we may think that the commodity form is never stable nor set once and for all. Of course, professionals in the promotion industries have to show that whatever they sell is useful for the consumer. Yet it is people rather than the consumer who appropriate and make commodities useful in practical ways, and in doing so they may nd a space of relative autonomy from the productive system. And yet again, to put it plainly, even if people transform meanings, companies are still making money out of their custom. So what is the relevance of the spaces of autonomy opened by the cultures of consumption? Even in your earlier work, it seems to me, that you were quite critically aware that companies are willing accomplices in resistance, they hold up people to be creative: human creativity, just like individualization, looks like a necessity of the commodity circuit, or as Simmel thought, of mature capitalism (Simmel, [1900] 1990). Then, the promotional system, to say it with John Clarke (1991), appropriates the vernacular, and the circuit starts 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 may construct a relatively separated world which re-frames commodities, yet what they do may not be consequential on the company or the economy as a whole. Precisely because the cultures of consumptions are relatively separate, they will be translated when they go outside themselves in forms which are out of the hands of the local participants. Can you say something more about how you see this ambivalence? PW Let me answer in terms of Marcos interest in traditions this time. I guess that from where the Centre was coming from and what there certainly was in my mind, I was trying to understand the capitalist system of commodity production in relation to the way of life of a subordinate group. The New Left position was exactly that, since the working class, apparently more than the bourgeois groups, was taking seriously the new cultural commodities, ITV had just started, there was popular music, trash papers, trash magazines which seemed to be the thing for the working class. I think part of the terrain of the birth of Cultural Studies was exactly your question: is it possible that commodities produced for prot may provide a ground for other than an alienated cultural consciousness? And the things people had chosen to do after they were fed and warm and safe: was this a new form of super-exploitation that capital had moved into or could it be the grounds of an alternative, radical, long revolution which had empowering effects? Its not just todays question, I think it was one of the founding questions in the Centre and one that in my humanistic, culturalist way I understood very clearly, and I think I was looking at how commodities

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could be appropriated in alternative ways and the whole variety of things that are produced for prot could be taken over and I still think this happens even though we havent got proper sociological theories for them yet, especially linking such processes to the larger enduring categories of class and social reproduction of them. Theres been a fundamental world historical change in the movements of capital and as soon as capitalist production moved on from the provision of food, safety, warmth and shelter to culture, consciousness and electronic mediation, it changed the nature of the game and in the process destroyed the old ways of workingclass culture because the proliferation of signiers and forms allowed us the working class to build new identities and new objects of desire. The old working-class culture itself was rendered into signiers which reached escape velocity and circled the ether electronically usually with highly negative connotations; who on earth would decide to be working class in England, so earthbound again in their referents? You know, why wouldnt we all be James Bond, stirred and shaken? And yet there seemed to be the formation of a hybrid culture, always compromised and in a sense dubious, but nevertheless a culture which in some ways through bodily expressivity, not language really, said something about their proletarian position, about their position in the factory, in the neighbourhood, in the social space which was expressive in a way that hadnt been there before. But it wasnt a hand-me-down bourgeois expression or workers poetry, it wasnt a kind of Russian hybrid trying to take high art and adapt it to the proletariat; in my own mind, it might have been the beginnings of a genuinely proletarian culture bottom-end up, not a hand-me-down opera for the masses. Yes, for a time we felt that on the grounds of the commodity and dominated systems there was the possibility of a genuine class culture that wasnt folk tradition or idiocy banned in a Marxist sense, but was based on new relations which could then be translated into political representation, possibly set new agendas, possibly work through demands which were non-reformist. Thats what I thought Cultural Studies was about: there is this terrible danger of ex-post rationalization, of course but we had to somehow grasp that capital had made a new platform of culture through commodication and that platform could partly be taken up by alternative ways of being and doing. Of course, there was always a danger of navety especially with all the enthusiasm of the 168 season: you could say the hippies in California seemed to be opposed to capital, but really they were inventing a whole new mode of genetic cultural forms which would allow capitalist commodity culture to continue. In the nave days of the early Centre work, there seemed to be a long moment of resistance on the grounds of capitalism. Now that moments very short disappearing for most analysts but which I believe is more important than ever to hang on to because the capital relation comes round super-quick and pinches any new idea or de-fetishization in order to put it back into formal production. It hasnt only done it to motorbikers the Harley chopper but across the

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consumer board, tout court. I still think were living the crisis, the failure of that rst stage picked up by Cultural Studies, which hoped to see a level of stability in the alternatives provided by the bodily forms of difference. The truth is, the capitalists are far cleverer than we ever bloody thought they were: commodity capital will nd ways of generating surplus value from oppositions to its own nature. Capitalism may be better at culture than any system that weve managed to invent. It may produce a non-capitalist culture, and some of the greatest areas of advance and prot-making may be in anti-capitalist culture which capital can easily exploit. To nish the answer to Robertas question, I do think some cultural entrepreneurs, cultural producers understand more than we do, because thats part of what they do: they know their products are fetishized and there are all kinds of ways in which their producers imagine how the product is going to be used in processes of de-fetishization; its an understanding of selves in this restless circuit of capital. The shift to the service economy is in part about imagining use values and is in part about the capitalist frame of gaining surplus and trying to extend ever further back into all kinds of informal cultural production . . . so youre not making a prot making things or importing from China, you make a prot from selling in a particular way to groups, co-present or not, that will consume together in ways through which they will bond together, even if only in imagination . . . RS This brings us to the frontiers of thought for critical knowledge. What are the questions we have to keep asking? And, indeed, can we still ask critical questions?

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PW Yes, I think one of the crucial questions is, what is the possible everyday politics of all this? Is there a micro political will to operate in a theoretically 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 traditionalists, but also looking at the informal ways of cultural production, at ways of strengthening them, analysing them, allowing them to unfold not into spaces of capital control but into spaces of collective diffuse control . . . there could be a whole range of different policies to recognize emerging, marginalized cultural production, dont let it be swallowed by capital. Why do we leave it to the capitalist market to pick up and externalize, and provide objects for future homological and integral development? Why should the state and collectively owned charity not be massively engaged in cultural promotion? Why cant some of the collective forms in informal life loose social games or those things which are often demonized as youth cultures, marginal culture with their opposition to capitalist regime control why cant those forms be seen and supported as quasi-institutions that might give space for the self-recognition of forms of cultural production, and consequently be given some form of cultural citizenship?

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MS Id like to move onto another issue, considering cultural production from a rather different perspective, asking you to think about the American sociology of cultural production as practised by Richard Peterson or Paul Di Maggio (see Santoro, 2008). It seems that, from your point of view, the real problem of such an approach is the lack of a concept of capitalism: they dont 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 classic article by Peterson [Peterson and Anand, 2004] you sent me which was very important. In a very specic, I would say, positivistic way, Peterson is doing what Raymond Williams was asking for in material culturalism, which is: how is culture manufactured? It doesnt just happen, it always has its own mode of production. If culture is a commodity, its made in a factory, like a can of beans can be made, so a Country & Western song can be made. Of course, its a materialism-type perspective to ask How is a commodity produced? In that broad sense, what Richard Peterson is doing is in a certain way Marxist because its materialist, not idealist. And its to be welcomed from that point of view. But, yes, my stance would be that theres no position in a capitalist mode of production which is production for its own sake, its driven by surplus, its capital accumulation. Now, from Petersons work, youd never guess the motive for it all was accumulation. His cultural production perspective doesnt know its place in the surplus circuit. Even though I think Peterson has demonstrated the constructive, cynical nature of the production of the symbolic form, it does not focus on the circuit and its politics: when the commodity meets the subjective response and helps to structure it and be structured by it dialectically, then it becomes part of the living experience, which is itself exploited because theres a business executive coming around to see what the latest style of wearing hats, is or the belts, or if youre making your own music. Again it gets 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, only longer then, in Cultural Studies when we were saying that working-class culture seemed to be developing power but on the grounds of capitalist production. There is a moment, however short, now of authentic appropriation to local purpose. Peterson says that the biggest remaining issue for the sociology of culture is where the feelings of authenticity come from, in what he calls auto-production: thats obviously got to do with what I call informal cultural production. Hes got to the problem of authenticity because culture is a commodity. But if he got through to the other end of the equation you know my commodity circuit, de-fetishization, and back again informal cultural production makes products which are taken back up by market researchers into the logic of capital. This isnt just an empirical circuit on a positivistic model: why it has taken off, its de-fetishization, is in relation to lifes urgencies and contradictions as experienced in the bottom of the social space by the people who are the workers producing the other commodities or the general surplus production. Petersons specialism

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is always Country & Western music, that develops in relation to a set of sensibilities and feeling that are generated at the bottom of the capitalist system in the process of regulation, control and exploitation of persons. In my terms, those feelings get homologically represented in music. And in a certain way I dont really care where the music came from, of course, I never thought it had come from heaven or hell or essentially from the singers imagination. But the point is that those variations in the music could be like Darwinian variations in form, it doesnt matter whether theyre authentic or not, it matters if theyre taken up in homologies, and how. And then into this how people exercise some form of control and this is 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 particular way, feel it in a particular way, act it in a particular way. Then its informal cultural production. MS Is there a specic denition of authenticity implied in this? PW The commodity relation can allow a true integral relation because even if you dont control the conditions of the production of music, you do control a lot about the conditions of the consumption of the music and what it means to you at that point it becomes authentic in your appropriation of a specic set from the available objective possibilities of the form. One of the new class frontiers may be how and if some kind of authenticity is achieved. I almost said it in The Ethnographic Imagination. Authenticity beyond or beneath language, even in the classic days, was always socially constructed, a homological relation. In that sense, the moments now might be shorter but they might be about more. Though its very interesting to see how the production of a piece of music occurs and of course its cynical and about a capital relationship surprise, surprise! the crucial issue is indeed how it becomes taken up into informal cultural production to produce these feelings of authenticity, of bodily authenticity. Subordinate social positions above ground are regulated by language, then theres a need for symbolic forms which attempt to hold below the bourgeois scope to give you that feeling, a somatic aesthetic burst, you know, this music represents 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 makes the authenticity. In the commodity circuit, if we havent got a moment of some bodily homological resonance beyond desiccated signication and that has aspects of authenticity as presence, then the whole damn system cant work . . . MS The concept of homological resonance plays a central role in all your production, from Profane Culture to The Ethnographic Imagination, which ends with an Appendix specically devoted to the notion of Homology. This concept raises two issues for me, and I ask you to help me to explore both of them, one after the other. Firstly, the way you deploy the notion resonates with the work of Pierre Bourdieu a sociologist whose theories

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and studies about social reproduction may not have directly inuenced your work, but at least they offer a fertile intellectual context in which to situate and understand it, especially your research on schools. How do you see your notion of homology in relation to Bourdieus work on reproduction 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 perspective when I developed my socio-symbolic cultural approach in the eld research reported on in Profane Culture. I was attempting to bring out and understand the nature of cultural development giving due scope to creativity, bottom end up, as I had studied it in a contemporary example. The Ethnographic Imagination is an ex-post recovery of positions developed during that eldwork defended against subsequent theoretical developments, principally those associated with the language turn. In particular, whilst recognizing the import of the critique of essentialism, I was to trying to rescue and stabilize the possibility, nd a material and theoretical basis, as I said before, for subordinate experiences of authenticity, to validate that at the level of ideas. To validate that durable identities, formed somatically and materially, could be understood in ways which didnt leave them completely vulnerable to essentially bourgeois interpolations of subjectication in language, the latter mere idealistic squiggles from a socio-symbolic point of view. Sensuous body/taste/formations have historical foundations which are material and specic beyond the oating, a-historical, random signiers which have no materiality beyond their own signier corporeality but only convention to anchor them to social practice in time and space. You could argue in these ways, reecting, if you like, the class divisions in academic discourses and arguments, that the subordinate are more real and authentic than the superordinate: they are pushed under the foam of language to nd long tides of identity in material not idealist ways. Anyway, so sympathizer as I am, I kind of bypassed Bourdieu though I imagine that he 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 the forms/sensibilities which the socio-symbolic approach analyses. But for me there is something lingeringly positivistic about the notion of habitus. It designates somehow only results of complex processes not the diaphanous precariousness of their internal dialectics. The attempts to hold together the subjective and the objective in the middle terms of a basically compressed institutional ontology in Bourdieu can lose too easily the specicity of both the subjective and the objective, for me, of course, then selling the subjective short. Homologies try to disaggregate the process, to recognize the specicity of both sensibility and form and to put them in motion together without collapsing them. If you like, I see homologies as a technology for thinking about how bits of something like habitus can come about in the rst place. Specic cultures and lived cultural forms do not arise through some kind of mystical transubstantiation of structures and structural location

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but from complex and knowable mediations of sensibility/form. The detail and the specicity matter. The question of the collusion of cultural forms in social reproduction is a wider issue and requires more theoretical apparatus including what I called in Learning to Labour penetration and limitation than is contained in the notion of homologies and is multifaceted and complex. But again, I would prefer over Bourdieu a somewhat more creative and collective agentive role for subordinate cultural actors unfolding over time and in concrete situations where they are not just subject to symbolic violence and species of self-blame but, through their cultural practices if not in words, actually see into aspects of enclosing structures and ideologies but in ways which produce unexpected and ironic outcomes. Social relevance to locating conditions of existence is then one of the factors producing and enabling homological development but the latter 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 in Bourdieus case, it seems that the notion of homology you put forward makes it difcult to account for change, for social and cultural transformation . . . How do we account for change, and what makes you so sure there are all these homologies in the world? PW Homologies in the world? Homology is an analytic device with some reference to a real relation in the world as sensuously engaged with by me in my bike culture research. Of course, practising ethnographers and writers, particularly those concerned with some literary intent, never imagined there is a one-to-one relation between analytic devices and what arises from the experiences of your body and mind in the eld. No question, particularly with their own struggle in the cultural world of the academy, defending themselves there, academics can freeze, essentialize and reify categories wholly forgetting the uidity of the real world. But I would still insist that homologies present in thought, a real relation in the world in more productive ways than can language-derived ideas of signication which seem to have taken the academic eld. Think of music. I just read in the Financial Times about sound branding where companies supply music for restaurants, retail outlets, etc. where certain sounds are taken to reect a particular brand and where states of mind corresponding to certain musical forms, further specied by age and class, can thereby be induced, it is hoped, by playing that music. In lived culture it is commonplace now especially for young people actively to manipulate their own moods and atmospheres with use of clothes, music, objects, artefacts and drugs taken to carry appropriate meanings with them. These things clearly have non-accidental relationships and we need theoretical categories to keep up with the world. Homologies might be clunky but they allow a practical way forward in the analysis of denite relations between form and sensibility. As for change and this is why I included the Appendix in The Ethnographic Imagination, forgive me, it is simply forgotten that my socio-symbolic theory has three

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parts to it: the indexical, the homological and the integral. The indexical refers to, if you like, the accidental relation of sensibility to form our relationship to the things we happen to nd around us. The homological refers to correspondences and ts of shape between sensibility and form. The integral treats of the historical dialectical relation between form and sensibility which brings about basic homologies to start with. Just as the commodity manipulators want to control atmosphere, to the same end, informal practitioners with their repeated exposures to a form produce not only some kind of reection or resonance but higher concentrations of focus, effect and emotion which then, in turn, produce agentive motivations to change and develop aspects of form to better produce desired effects and emotions which then produce further development in sensibility which produce further agentive impulses with respect to form, etc. This is what I call integral circuiting. In closed cultures of production and consumption, such as the early hippies, I argue in Profane Culture that a rapid integral circuit can develop with music producers developing music with what I call objective possibilities quite actively shaped to represent and return cultural meanings. In more diffuse cultures, including commodity-mediated ones, changes and developments in choice, quality and quantity of exposure and adaptations in material and social conditions of reception and consumption as well as outside signication brought to bear on objects/forms or changes in such signication all these can produce re-selections or retakes on what I call the objective possibilities of form which then opens up the dialectical path to changes in sensibility, and so on. Such dialectical change has all kinds of instabilities built into it, not least unexpected double edges of form, of commodity fetishism, of technology exposed by agentive selection leading to unplanned and unpregured, precisely profane, outcomes in sensibility. This gives a more scientic basis for humanistic notions of creativity. Basic homologies of sensibility/form only arise through such dialectics and are always subject to change and destruction through them as well as subject to being displaced by other homological relations and their integral circuiting as well as all disruptive and invasive forms of commodication. There are theoretical resources and openings here, even though micro, for understanding larger currents of change. RS The cultural, and a certain vision of it, are central to the literature on the production and consumption of culture. What about the alleged specicity of the cultural commodity? You insist very much on how specic and different it is from the other types of commodities. In The Ethnographic Imagination (Willis, 2000: 66), you write that what separate the cultural commodity from commodities in general is the particular nature of their usefulness as related to the construction and maintenance of identity. You say that the use value of a cultural commodity such as a CD or a DVD is not extinguished with use and you go on distinguishing between its basic commodity-ness, the bearer form and its cultural usefulness or cultural

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form. Now, I agree we must look at the continuous cultural re-framing of commodities. Yet, it seems that this applies to all commodities. As Wendy Griswold (1994) has made clear, everything can be studied as a cultural product. Most consumer commodities today, even pre-packaged meals, may better be considered cultural. Functional products perhaps do not carry the same possibility of being central to a dedicated symbolic activity, but they may carry an awful lot of symbolic meanings, can be used in a number of creative scenarios and are especially relevant, so it seems, in what you dened as the cool subcultures just like the hippies made symbolicallyrich and art-like a number of consumer goods which were not so cultural originally. In this perspective it is hard to identify something essentially different in cultural commodities, dont you think? PW I think youre right and I dare say that later on in the book I may contradict myself to an extent, and Im glad youre looking at that as I think youve spotted a real issue: that its not now possible to separate cultural commodity from commodity and its a slight problem for the rhetoric of the argument there because I want to separate them in order to make a point that the cultural commodity has a communicative element and, under conditions of advanced capitalism, it is implicated in the very set of contradictions that you pointed to in your previous question . . . Dont forget my fundamental aim here in The Ethnographic Imagination is not to come up with a better classication of commodities but to point out a contradiction in the bearer form and the cultural content of cultural commodities which throws all simplicity about fetishism in to confusion. You could argue every commodity is cultural and my basic argument would then apply to all commodities! But I would say that there are still differences between informational commodities and sensuous commodities, for instance so that when you listen to the news or read the newspaper, its information, and the way in which the cultural commodity works with that, for me is sensualizing the code so that you try to get communities or sex into it. Theres the informational, pure commodity that really isnt a can of beans, and there are cans of beans, yet you can see something of a culturalization around them, which makes them into a cultural commodity not an information item RS Its a matter of degrees and scope, perhaps. One way to differentiate between commodities, it seems to me, is to come clean on their commodity circuit, and the different processes it entails. There are commodities that are built as the focal point of social practices which are dened as cultural and others which are not. The former may be considered cultural rather than culturalized, even though this is clearly a contextual denition. There are cultural commodities whose creator is visible and made visible in the very commodity such as most art, or many entertainment products. I guess we need to identify who does the cultural work and how, such as the professionals

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for a commercial campaign, or people in everyday use, or creators within a commercial system . . . In this light, we could still claim a rock song is different from other products, as there is a creative person who lives his work through a commodity system and while his product is mass distributed, people who listen to it may have the possibility of a relationship which might bypass commercialization . . . PW Yes, exactly because I dont think we can now have a free-standing humanistic notion of creativity what would it be? Wed have to get in a dialogue with form, explore more the conditions for creativity . . . RS Perhaps we should try to discriminate commodity circuits and think about those who can better allow for symbolic creativity. And, to go back to what you were saying to Marco, we should perhaps discriminate between different forms of organizing the production-consumption link which generate different forms of authenticity.

PW Maybe we should consider an analogy, that we as cultural analysts are in the same game because were trying to make our writings detached from dominant ways of looking at things, and at the same time we want to be read and the only way to do that is to produce using certain forms and formats, which youve got to do of course . . . But things can be explored, like, I think its in Sarah Thorntons book [Club Cultures, 1995], the socalled white label phenomenon, where a DJ in a club would play their own mixture of songs or vocals or scratch different versions of other peoples songs and then sell them later but having nothing on the labels so there was no author, copyright or distribution and that was a way of refusing the commodity culture. Also in the club culture at its height. you never found out where a real house event was going to take place, because it wasnt advertised or on the local media; it was refusing electronic and commodity communication and only by being at the last event would you be given a ier or people phoned each other to tell them where to go. Take swarming which started in Canada where groups would call each other on the phone and all say weve all got to be in such and such square in one hours time and there was no indication it was coming and theyd all go and do something dance or sing and then all melt away again. Its now a dynamic of popular experience, not only within club culture, within a variety of local groups, just to nd different ways either for tricking or fooling or bypassing the commodication process: an element of fooling the market must be there, a way of holding homological meanings which arent thrust back immediately into the commodity mill. RS This is somehow close to total rejection of commodication. So you want to hold still on the Marxist idea that for resistance to be there, it must be outside the market? Cant the market be changed?

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

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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 example of exploiting de-fetishization where you know perfectly well that if you advertise in the normal way on generalist TV the people who dont want to be mainstream will not buy. If theyre cool, they think theyre evading the mainstream cultural circuit, and will nd products or ways or things to do 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 spreading different ways of communication which dont look commercial, but which may well have been started on the basis of a commercial producers forms of inuence. This week, as I noticed in the Financial Times again, the Head of Coca-Cola has said that their biggest single and most effective communication this year had been on YouTube where people load up their own little sequences where soda was put in salt tablets or sugar tablets in bottles of Coke and they explode because theres a dye which makes a soda fountain. This YouTube stuff was the biggest single reproduction of the Coca-Cola brand name that had been achieved all year. So, its not just us who are trying to gure all this out. Its a question of analysis and working for 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 reframings . . . You make a similar point in your work, when you stress that the symbolic richness of informality, of sensuous experience, of transgression has been discovered by capital. Informality is getting mainstream: elite groups, including political gures not directly connected to capitalist organizations, they have to show bits of their private life; they have to look human in their faults, show a glimpse of loose emotionality if they want to reach the public. And back to the commodity circuit, lets think of culture jamming and sub-advertising on the one hand, and its appropriation by multinationals like The Body Shop on the other. Symbolic strategies, like the naming & blaming of unfair companies, are perhaps less effective than regulation, or at least they cannot do it all. Perhaps there was a moment when resistance was more effective via the symbolic, but now, shouldnt we go back, in new guises, to a structural-materialist approach?

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

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other institutions actually for most of our lives. On the other hand, too much of state expenditure is about meeting in a very banal way the needs of capitalist production and not cultural empowerment. Just as commercial forces can worry about the uses of commodities and de-fetishization, why cant protective, collective and state institutions give time to cultural meanings? 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 you have in mind for your next study? PW I think of two cases: one would be a surviving car factory where they really have been intensifying work, and another would be a nished factory where the labour has gone, that is displaced from the factory: where have all the workers gone? Do they still dream of the factory? MS So, youve been working on consumption but work like in Learning to Labour was always there in the back of your mind. So whats going to be the study of paid labour, after exploring creative work? PW I hope I will soon have time you know the conversation we just had, that will 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 facing the necessity of the speed up, never has there been more pressure: when in their heads theyre these consumers, endlessly expanding, endlessly selfinventing identities; how does that square with the realm of necessity which work represents? A reection of what has happened in the very different realms of production and consumption is to look at fragmented identities. Are things separated? Mass psychosis! Or is there a new form of working-class culture which, despite fragmentation, still makes something of the factory experience of subordination at its sharpest point of necessity but worked out in cultural terms derived from elds apparently far from necessity? Id like to think the second. Notes
This interview was conducted in Hampstead, London, in January 2007, and subsequently was commented on by Paul Willis. An abridged and partially different version appeared in Italian in Studi Culturali 2/2008.

References
Baudrillard, J. ([1970] 1998) The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage. Bessett, D. and Gualtieri, K. (2002) Paul Willis and the Scientic Imperative, Qualitative Sociology 25: 6782. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (1999) Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme. Paris: Seuil.

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Sassatelli & Santoro An Interview with Paul Willis

Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J-C. (1964) Les Hritiers. Paris: Minuit. (1970) La Reproduction. Paris: Minuit. Clarke, J. (1991) New Times and Old Enemies. London: HarperCollins. De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Dolby, N. and Dimitriadis, G., eds (2004) Learning to Labour in New Times. London: Routledge. Fine, G.A. (2003) Towards a Peopled Ethnography: Developing Theory from Group Life, Ethnography 4(1): 4160. Frank, T. (1997) The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counter Culture and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Griswold, W. (1994) Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. Thousands Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Peterson, R. A. and Anand, N. (2004) The Production of Culture Perspective, Annual Review of Sociology 30: 31134. Santoro, M. (2008) Culture as (and after) Production, Cultural Society 1: 731. Santoro, M. and Sassatelli, R. (2008) Lavoro simbolico e immaginazione etnograca. Intervista a Paul Willis, Studi Culturali 2: 24172. Sassatelli, R. (2006) Virtue, Responsibility and Consumer Choice. Framing Critical Consumerism, in J. Brewer and F. Trentmann (eds) Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives. Oxford: Berg. (2007) Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics. London: Sage. Simmel, G. ([1900] 1990) Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge. Thorne, B. (1993) Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Thornton, S. (1995) Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity Press. Williams, R. (1961) The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour. Farnborough: Saxon House. (1978) Profane Culture. London: Routledge. (1990) Common Culture. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. (2000) The Ethnographic Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Paul Willis is Professor of Social and Cultural Studies at Keele University, Staffordshire, UK. Address: Keele University, Staffordshire, UK. [email: willispaul@ blueyonder.co.uk]

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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: marco.santoro@unibo.it]

Roberta Sassatelli

is Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Milan. Address: Dipartimento di Studi Sociali e Politici, Via Conservatorio 7, 20122 Milano, Italy. [email: roberta.sassatelli@unimi.it]

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