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RICHARD JOHNSON INTERVIEW

1 JUNE 2011
Richard Johnson
Published online: 15 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Richard Johnson (2013) RICHARD JOHNSON INTERVIEW 1 JUNE
2011, Cultural Studies, 27:5, 800-814, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2013.773675
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Richard Johnson
RICHARD JOHNSON INTERVIEW
1 JUNE
2011

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[Hudson Vincent] I was hoping we could begin with your relationship to the
Centre. What drew you there to begin with?
[Richard Johnson] Well, thats quite complicated. In my last year at school,
I was 17 or 18, my sister gave me as a present The Uses of Literacy to read. She
was at the University of Hull, the city where we were both brought up. Partly
as a consequence of reading Hoggart, I got very interested as a beginner in
film-making and doing documentary work. With some school friends, I went
to Hunslet (Leeds) where The Uses of Literacy was set, and we talked to people
and got involved, very peripherally, in the youth culture there, where rockand-roll and teddy-boy culture were the big things. I was sent to a very
privileged boarding school, so this was quite mind blowing really. I went back
to Hunslet twice and the second time we took a lot of film though never
made anything of it. At that stage I wanted to be an artist and do documentary,
maybe film, but certainly documentary: painting, drawing, visual stuff. I made
a portfolio and sent it Goldsmiths and I got accepted for a place to do art there.
But then my dad said no: On no account will you go to a bohemian arty life in
London, youve got a place at Cambridge, youre going to go to Cambridge.
At that stage, I didnt have the courage to make a break from the career he set
out for me. He was an ambitious nouveau riche businessman in Hull. And he
had very definite ideas about the paths for his children. So I never made that
break, and I did go to Cambridge and I did history. I actually met Michael
Green there who was one of the first staff members of the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) which Hoggart set up at Birmingham.
We ended up at the same University. I was teaching social history. But I knew
about the Centre. I went to one or two seminars but couldnt really
understand much of what they were talking about. This would be about 1966/
1967 soon after the foundation of CCCS . . ..
But then, I suppose I became once more interested in cultural studies
because of my past. I had had to put aside my early enthusiasm for culture
and the contemporary. At Cambridge perhaps, in retrospect, the choice of
history was the nearest I could get to a social study but I did a Ph.D. there
and decided I was going to be a historian and an academic. Cultural studies
was hardly a real choice then. But then the student movement happened, and
Cultural Studies, 2013
Vol. 27, No. 5, 800
814, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2013.773675
# 2013 Taylor & Francis

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RICHARD JOHNSON INTERVIEW

it was quite big in Birmingham. This is really how I came back into cultural
studies. There was more than a weeks Occupation that involved a lot of
CCCS students and Michael and Stuart were obviously sympathetic if not
more, and I was very enthusiastic. I used to do all my teaching twice: once in
the Occupation, which was in the Great Hall for those who were there, and
once in the regular lecture hall, because I didnt expect all of my students to
go there. It was very moving and exciting for me. I think it kind of made me
politically.
Academically and in reaction to home and school, I already saw myself as
left wing. I had been very influenced by E.P. Thompsons history and taught a
history MA with Dorothy Thompson his historian partner. I saw myself as a
Marxist in history and historiography. Not necessarily in political practice. It
was the student movement that really got me into politics. A group of staff at
Birmingham influenced by the student movement and working with students
politically, campaigned to change the university. We sought to change its
autocratic governance, with proper representation on all committees for
non-professorial staff, students and campus workers. We advocated new forms
of interdisciplinary work, introducing social knowledge into medicine and
other science-based practices (dominant in the university) for instance. Above
all, perhaps, the movement stood for more open and informal and in a way
more equal relations between teachers and students. This was mainly a
politics confined to the university but there was quite a strong strand that led
many into forms of community politics, taking with them the same stress on
participatory democracy. So we became sort of reformers of the university,
defending also our colleagues who had led the occupation and, at best,
interested in community politics.
You know, if youre a full-time academic, your politics does tend to be in
the academy. I mean I found teaching social history very satisfying and really
liked it a lot. There were waves of radical students coming into the university,
making demands on the subject, including feminists as well by the early 1970s.
So it wasnt that I wasnt satisfied. But then this job came up at the CCCS. I
think I talked to Michael and Stuart: should I apply type of thing. All my
colleagues in History and in Social Science thought I was crazy
all the
historians, you know thinking that it was wrecking this potential historians
career. They were thinking of appointing either an anthropologist or a
historian and they appointed me.
I think that the main reason I applied was because I saw the Centre as a
place where you could actually practice some of the ideas that had been
produced in the Occupation and in the reform movement which by now had
lost much momentum, though it did produce changes in the institution in
broadly democratic direction. But there was also this past history of mine
which may have worked fairly unconsciously to impel me into the riskier world
of cultural studies. CCCS seemed to be a place where you could help to change
the social relations of learning, by sharing a project. And of course, I did

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know that Michael and Stuart and the CCCS students had instituted these
practices already.

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[Hudson Vincent] Could you explain in greater detail how the Centre arranged
itself in terms of pedagogy and research?
[Richard Johnson] The most important thing was that we regarded it as a
collective project. Remember they were postgraduate students, although we
were already teaching some undergraduates. We wanted to make the relations
as equal as possible. Well, a main slogan of the occupation was staff and
students together, so was it possible to realize such cooperation in practice

breaking down hierarchies, breaking down deference
broadly a socialist,
egalitarian notion. As teachers, you should only get the respect you earned.
You didnt get it because you were a professor, this or that. So beyond this
general ethos there were practical devices, so formally within the Centres
understanding, decisions were taken in a weekly general meeting with
everybody present. Policy decisions were made at that meeting. The staff were
bound by these and had to implement them. I mean it was effectively
consensual. You couldnt have them voting against us in that sense, you
know.
It was very idealistic. It was very vulnerable, very contradictory. Because
of course in the Universitys eyes and in terms of salary and position and
prominence, there was a large difference between staff and students. But there
was a real attempt to apply this theory I think: of staff and student together.
The seriousness of the ambition was shown in the detailed organization. We
had groups to administer different areas and these included admissions, which
in the British system it is absolutely forbidden. Thats absolutely forbidden,
actually illegal, for students to be involved in admitting other students. So we
were doing that secretly.
Still the staff met and talked. We would strategize, but everything had to
come to a general meeting. Most things were administered through these
groups: There would be a publications group that looked after the Working
Papers in Cultural Studies (the journal), then the Stencilled Occasional papers.
An Administrative group to generally set out a weekly agenda with all things
happening. I actually forget the other admin groups, but some information is in
the documentation, especially the Annual Reports. Admissions was a big one,
you can imagine. For example, as there came to be more women in the
Centre, influenced by the Womens Movement, then the student balance of
men and women became more of a political issue. And why arent there
women teachers? You can imagine. And the same thing happens, a little later,
around race and black politics. And later, very much later, around gay politics
which was as a collective impulse, quite a late emergence in CCCS. But the
relatively democratic organization and, importantly, the larger autonomies that

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RICHARD JOHNSON INTERVIEW

still existed in and for the universities, provided forums for different groups of
students to get together and push for changes.
So the way Ive always seen it, is as a two-stage process. First, theres the
student movement, which led to some democratization in the institutions and a
quite radical if small-scale democratization of some individual units. But then the
social movements impact: womens movement, black politics, gay and lesbian
politics, they find spaces because of the democratization to shift things along. So I
think that double process happened that made a limited but real university reform.
So thats the political
administrative end, but then there was an intellectual
organization as well. This came in two levels. It had the level of the General
Theory Seminar, which came out of Stuarts work more than anything I think.
Where he did literally take people through European philosophy and US
sociology and lots of other things. And that became a central forum for
discussion of theoretical issues and provided the frameworks, the terms of
dialogue within which a lot of work happened. And that was weekly. And then it
was replaced by the MA course, on which I was appointed to teach with Stuart.
The theory seminar became the theory course. But everybody was supposed to
attend it, at least for the first year, whether you were doing an MA or not.
And then there were the subgroups, which I think are the most
distinctive part of it. So anybody could set up a subgroup on anything. You just
needed two people really. It wasnt assumed that each group needed a staff
member. Staff tried to be in as many we could. Groups started usually as
reading groups, just like you do on any a project. They were reading and
discussion groups basically, and then they could develop some writing or other
interventions. So the Education group that I was in for a long time did two
books and lots of articles, and we got around to talking to teachers, making
policy interventions, particularly in the training debate of that time. Our
members of course were often
or became
teachers in schools, colleges or
in universities or in some cases became active in educational NGOs. Groups
could develop their own intellectual project and political activity. And in a
looser sense they were all in some way political, in the sense of intellectual
politics, which is limited but real.
If you look at the annual reports, youd be able to trace what the
subgroups were and when they existed and also much of what they did. There
were a lot more than just subcultures of course. Everyone knows about
the very productive Subcultures group, but even when I was first there, there
were five or six groups, and there were often up to eight.
[Hudson Vincent] Do you recall exactly which ones existed while you were
there?
[Richard Johnson] Yeah, I can probably remember, though some of these
groups may have started a bit later . . . There was the Subcultures group that
becomes the policing/mugging project as you probably know. There was a

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Work group which was also an ethnography group. Paul Willis and later Chris
Griffin, who was Pauls successor as research fellow, were involved in
successive groups on fieldwork method. There was Education, which was
studying Labor party policy and the beginning of what we now know as
Thatcherism. Whereas Policing the Crisis was looking at it more generally, we
were looking at the changes in education policy. A lot of the work was around
that transition from the social democratic settlement to Thatcherite neoliberalism. On reflection, a lot of the work generally in CCCS in the 1970s
was looking at different aspects of this key transition and we were also puzzling
about the theoretical problem of transition too. There was a Marx reading
group that read Marx, especially Marxs political writings. There was a State
group that studied theories of the state
though this may have been later . . .
There was a Media group that was very important and had a lot of people in it.
There was a concern with language and with linguistic theory and that was the
focus for some of the work in post-structuralism. There was certainly work on
masculinity when I first arrived as Andrew Tolson will tell you but I think that
was in the context of the Work group. There was a Literature group. They
mapped different literary theories, and produced an early journal with this
title. I remember discussions of Macherey and although Derrida was not then
discussed to my recollection, there was a strong interest in what was then seen
as advanced post-structuralism and Lacanian theory. I think the language and
literature end of the work
and its still true isnt it?
leads people most
readily into the latest cultural theory. But the history work was also
interesting. One of the first groups I was involved with, with Michel Green
was called Cultural History and we wrote (I think Michael did the final draft)
a very interesting study, which we called Out of the People, about war
radicalism and the origins of the post-war settlement.
[Hudson Vincent] Could you describe the type of students the Centre seemed
to attract?
[Richard Johnson] A common element would be that everyone was dissatisfied
with their education, because it was too narrow, single discipline. People were
adventurous and intellectually wanted to do something different. Many people
were dissatisfied with a traditional literary education. I think that would
probably be the most common element in the early years.
A little bit later when cultural studies had a shape, the people did the MA
to transfer to cultural studies, knowing a bit more what it was. This is 1975, by
then theres some sort of shape to cultural studies, so people can know some of
the parameters and it is also possible to teach it.
[Hudson Vincent] Youve already spoken on this to some extent, but could you
elaborate a bit on how the Centre was fundamentally different from traditional
forms of education?

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[Richard Johnson] Ive always seen this as a slightly more general phenomenon
happening in different disciplines, certainly including sociology and social
history. And there was a radical, critical movement in history in that same
period, in the History Workshop in particular, where collaborative work is at
the centre of that experiment. Thats the Oxford Ruskin College, a college for
adults and trade unionists, where staff and students set up these history
workshops, which happened annually. We were quite connected with them
obviously because of my history work. We gave papers at history workshops
which were a crucial location for British feminism as well.
CCCS was particular but I dont think it was all together unique at that
time. After all, you had the student movement right across the universities,
some stronger than others. You had similar debates. One of the crucial things
was that the attitude towards learning and teaching had changed so the
teachers wanted to relate to students in a different ways. And students were
making demands on their teachers which they hadnt before. They had been
very deferential. I am not talking about demands made as customers as
today [laughs]
these were demands by, so to speak, co-scholars, who
wanted particular kinds of knowledge. People were making demands like
what about women? And why all these white theorists? You know what
I mean? So I think thats happening quite a lot in the late 1960s and through
the 1970s
with waves of social movements and society making demands on
the academy.
So when you asked what type of students were attracted to the Centre, the
other thing I should have said is that the students were by and large influenced
by those currents. So they see cultural studies as a place where they can do
intellectual work that corresponds to their values and their politics. That
includes a whole range from fairly orthodox left sects and movements, which
there were always a fair number, like the socialists workers party, but right
through to libertarians and anarchists of various kinds with no formal politics,
but who had very strong political feelings. I think thats the most important
thing about who the students were.
Cultural studies soon became a movement across different institutions and
there were other places like Portsmouth, but I dont know how soon that was.
So I think under the label of cultural studies, yes Birmingham is definitely first
and its the most radical in its pedagogy. In a way we didnt have a pedagogy.
We didnt think through what the teaching issues were in this partially
transformed context. And there was a kind of an idealist romantic notion that
everybody would just get on and produce knowledge, but not really a theory
or an understanding of how you teach in that context. Quite an important
point and it took me a long time to find a way to operate and to be effective as
a teacher.
[Hudson Vincent] Do you think that lack of a pedagogy was a detriment to the
Centre? Or was that what made it so great?

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[Richard Johnson] Well it was both I think. It was what was distinctive. This
intellectual democracy without a pedagogy. It wasnt necessarily an easy place
to learn. Lots of lots of contradictions. You know this one about whos in
control always. Could you have a democracy in the context of a conservative
democracy and differences of age and knowledge and status and pay? I think
theres a contradiction between a kind of high value of intellectual ability and
this democratic ethos as well. You need to ask Stuart about this, but I think his
conception of the Centre was always that it was a place for very able people.
There were hierarchies around that as you can imagine; among the students,
not just between staff and students.

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[Hudson Vincent] What relationship do you see between research at the

Centre and political engagement? Was there a direct connection?
[Richard Johnson] Well I think we all thought that working at the Centre was a
kind of politics. So in that sense you were being political by being there and
doing the work. But people were encouraged to make connections outside the
academy, if thats the distinction. And a lot of people did. Like I told you about
the education group getting around to talk to teachers. Once we had analysis,
we used to go around and tried to make suggestions and criticisms in various
forums. I think it could easily be overestimated the amount of actual politics
went on, in the sense of extra-academic politics. Individuals had political
projects and belongings with parties or movements. And there was a lot of
feminist activity in the city. But feminism is a very diffused politics, so when
are you being political? I think we took over, the Centre as a whole took over,
quite a feminist conception of what politics was. You probably have to be very
specific about that if you think about the mugging project, but it had quite a
light relation to Hansworth. There were individuals who were into community
politics.
Later, when we did undergraduate work, there as a very interesting course
we taught called West Midlands which Michael and Maureen McNeil taught.
They took students into the city and got student involved in cultural politics in
the city. I think that was relatively uncommon.
[Hudson Vincent] I often hear the criticism that academics have thought that
the act of writing is a political act and that act alone is enough to be political.
Do you agree with that?
[Richard Johnson] I dont agree with that, no. But then Im now retired and
Im a part-time organizer. So I can see the differences now more clearly. I
think I would have taken that position myself. I would have thought Im being
political by being in the Centre, and my work is politically directed. I dont
build my work on the basis of a career. If I had, I would have stayed in history.
I went here that was where the demand seemed to be. And to some extent

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RICHARD JOHNSON INTERVIEW

from my experiences and background, interesting things are happening in

education policy now. In 1975 we were at perhaps the fulcrum of social
democratic tradition shifting in a neo liberal direction. Of course you can see
that in retrospect in 1970s education politics. Why they were so fascinated in
what goes on to be called Thatcherism. So in that sense it is politically
connected. Im still saying that doing radical, critical, intellectual work is
important, an important politics, its just that its very different. I dont know,
writing placards and newsletters and speaking in public and doing all the things
I now do as an organizer is very different. And its speaking to a different kind
of people with different kinds of assumptions. You cant assume those
knowledges. It took me quite a long time to change my vocabulary. Even as a
teacher, still in a very definite social space, very different from talking in the
marketplace or a storefront.
I think its right that intellectual work can be political in a deep sense, but
its not politics full stop, and its a very limited; well, Marx would have called
it a limited material practice. Its very constrained. You can do certain things
there and you cant do other things there. Education is incredibly important.
Talking to young people is incredibly important.
[Hudson Vincent] A lot of literature Ive read tries to situate cultural studies in
the in-between, presumably playing off its radical contextuality and place in
between the disciplines. Would you agree with this suggestion? And how
might cultural studies even be seen as trans-disciplinary or anti-disciplinary?
[Richard Johnson] Lets take the last one first, the anti-disciplinary, because
thats partly a position I would take. It seems that a discipline always takes its
agenda of study or says it does or theres a pressure to take the agenda of study
from the development of the discipline. So whats a question in the progress of
this science? So I dont see cultural studies quite as that. I see it as something
that is always taking it from the outside. Its taking the agenda of study not
from the discipline. And in that sense it is not disciplinary. In a particular
sense, it begins taking on a lot of characteristics like a discipline. It starts to
have its own canon. It starts to have the things you must read. It starts to write
its history unendingly. It starts to do all those things, but my kind of cultural
studies is always taking this agenda somewhere else. Mind you sociology might
well be thought to do the same. So the contemporary makes demands, you
respond to that and explicitly. Because implicitly that happens to science as
well. So anti-disciplinary in that sense.
Inter-disciplinary obviously because it takes from literature and sociology
initially and follows those debates. History for me. Anthropology much later.
Never really had that conversation. But yes, definitely inter-disciplinary. And I
think the most important thing about the intellectual formation is the
combination of an interest in text and language, representation on the one side
and interest in context and the social and the political on the other. That

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crosses a very important sort of meta-disciplinary boundary because its

literary on the one side and the historical and the sociological on the other. I
think that was a very, very crucial aspect. And its there right from the
beginning in Hoggart interestingly. Hes concerned with language and a bit
unsystematically with contemporary history and whats happening with mass
culture and all that.
Ill use the term trans-disciplinary to express the fact that cultural studies is
now to be found everywhere. It has influenced everything. So you have literary
cultural studies, media sociology, you know what I mean? So now theres a lot
of different cultural studies making claims. Theres a version thats really
postmodern theory for example, which is quite problematic for me and very
dominant in the states as I get the impression. I mean postmodern theory only.
You might want some postmodern theory [laughs].
[Hudson Vincent] What conditions of possibility led to the Centres founding
in 1964?
[Richard Johnson] Stuart would be better to ask that one, because I wasnt
there you know. Well. 1964 was before the student movements. My answer is
the student movement, but that was my cultural studies. His answer might go
back to the new left, and I guess to adult education. Adult education is a very,
very important nexus. Very, very important. And its a kind of different
academic space you see already. Ive done adult education. I did a couple years
when I retired and some before that, and its a space where you have to
negotiate with your students. You dont have a choice. Theyll just interrupt
you and tell you to shut up. Youve got to be interesting. So that was really
important. And that coming in there before the student movement, really
predisposing people like Stuart, maybe Hoggart, to have a different relationship with their students.
[Hudson Vincent] What forces do you see as causing the Centres closure in
2002?
[Richard Johnson] Well some of the things you started right at the beginning
talking about
whats happening to the modern university. But it was an act of
extreme self-destructiveness by the university because there was a unit that
was extremely well known. This is in their terms! Extremely well known,
recruiting still postgraduate students extremely successfully, huge numbers of
undergraduate students, large staff and worthy of a blue plaque! Theyve now
put a blue plaque up at Birmingham University saying cultural studies was
invented here [laughs].
So its crazy. I wasnt there, so I cant see how on earth it happened. It
didnt fit quite. But then, I cant make a judgement about what it was like in
2002. I know that they still had a relatively open pedagogy. They did projects.

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Some of the original people were still there. Michael Green was still there.
Ann Gray was the kind of link person there. They were innovative in their
education. They did get students to do projects, etc. There was a successful
MA course which had some of the same ethos. But they were got by the
university in that their research assessment wasnt good enough. Thats
the excuse the university gave. But basically its a much longer process, where
what was the Centre idea becomes more and more difficult to operate as
youve got increased surveillance, youre judged by your results in a very
mechanical way, you know how many things have you published, etc. I think it
was difficult to sustain that. It was already while I was there much harder to
sustain that.
My answer to your question is that theres a lot that happens before the
closure. All of which is really saying the same thing. Its more and more
difficult in the neo-liberal university to have the autonomy to have this kind of
experiment. Its more and more difficult. And how would you do it in a
modern university? I dont know.
You can do it in bits. Ill give you something Ive written about it. You can
do collaborative work. You can have collective projects. But could you have a
whole institution or centre that ran itself in this way? Where students didnt do
their Ph.D. They didnt do their Ph.D.! They worked on collective books.
Well , some people did finish very good Ph.Ds, but they often did them much
later. And they were allowed to! In those days it could be 10 years to the end
of time to finish your Ph.D. Now its four years here usually. Here its a very
strict four-year thing which is pretty universal. You can get extensions, but
you got to go down on your knees. So you couldnt use these postgraduate
students as though they were post-doctorates. In modern terms, thats whats
happening. The postdoctoral projects done by people who havent got Ph.D.s
instead of doing their Ph.D.s.
And then theres the MA course, but the MA course has lots of project
elements and one of the elements was that it had to be involved in a subgroup.
You must be involved with a subgroup. That was your third element. You had
a couple of courses and a subgroup attachment. So you had to be involved with
a collective project. And I dont know how long that continues. The subgroup
system starts to get very creaky by the late 1980s. And then I think its
effectively over by the time we join with Sociology in 1987 or 1988.
The university was telling us these things, youre too small, youve got to
join with somebody else or well destroy you, we cant afford you, youre too
small. So Michael devised a plan, because Sociology was also under threat, that
we fuse with sociology, or approach the sociologists and say which of you
would like to be in cultural studies. Up to then, there were only three of us,
never more than three, and that was our first expansion. But there were costs.
We had to teach the sociology programme, as well as the cultural studies
programme. And we had to move into a new faculty, commerce and social
science. Which turned out to be quite a less benevolent context. But thats

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quite a crucial moment for everything, for whats left of the Centres
practices. Because the new staff dont know anything about that. The
university is now looking at us very closely. Two suspicious units, sociology
and cultural studies. I think its the dean of social science who said if you carry
on with your admission process, well kick you from here to Perry Bar. Now
Perry Bar is in the middle of Birmingham [laughs]. So its really, really
difficult. It needs a lot of thinking.

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[Hudson Vincent] Could you speak at greater length on the crises and
contradictions youve experienced in academia and their limitations on
educational opportunities like this?
[Richard Johnson] Well I suppose there are internal contradictions within the
project, which we have talked about a bit. For me its three phases, Ive
written a bit on this. First phase is what I call gentlemanly spaces, which are
autonomous universities, even in the newer ones, the civic universities,
relatively autonomous spaces. So departments have a lot of space within the
university too. These are also very male spaces on a whole, because women are
a minority. In the Oxford/Cambridge set-up, there was actual segregation of
men and women colleges. And a very traditional curriculum and very
deferential relations between staff and students, you know the great professor.
Then theres phase two, which is really this insurgency, first the student
movement, then the social movements, which actually do change the university
quite radically though as it turns out, quite temporarily. And there were actual
gains within the institutions. There were more democratic ways of governing
the universities. That certainly happened at Birmingham.
And then from about the late 1970s there is this neo-liberal drive that has
effects everywhere, but it deeply affected the academy in Britain in steps and
stages. The broad things being marketization, you know treating the high
education sphere as a market or making it much like a market as possible,
which includes of course fees instead of grants. Of course we had grants. It was
free to go to higher education. And so gradual introduction of fees, making the
university more dependent on fees and less dependent on state funding.
Because they were almost wholly dependent on state funding, well there were
bequests and alumni and all that.
So theres marketization, but theres also a move towards managerial
control. And the construction of the internal politics of the university into line
management. With the vice-chancellors at the top and then everybody doing
what theyre told all the way down. And so the dean of faculty used to be a
very important post, now its just a point in lines of control. Lots of changes in
institutions, abolition of faculties, invention of schools and all sorts of stuff
going on, abolishing small units, thats what we were threatened with. Much
more inspection, right from the government, about how postgraduates are
doing, are they going to complete their theses. So these autonomous spaces

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get squeezed and squeezed and squeezed, and thats happening right through
the 1980s. And that was my academic career. I experienced gentlemanly
spaces at Cambridge and the insurgency of Birmingham and then the closing
down of the spaces, first at Birmingham, then I went to Nottingham Trent and
experienced it even more. And then the students start experiencing it. First
the undergraduates, then the MAs, and finally the Ph.D.s. Everybody gets
controlled.
Thats the key difficulty. And that runs against the kind of conception of
intellectual work that we had. It was not just critical but ideally alternative.
Thinking about the current world and what was wrong with the current
situation and what could be achieved and all those things. Its been a big
struggle really.
[Hudson Vincent] What have been the most effective responses to these crises?
[Richard Johnson] Well I went to Nottingham Trent, which is a new university
in English terms, meaning ex-polytechnic, because I was invited to go there.
I had retired from Birmingham because I was exhausted. I really was
exhausted. Then was sort of seduced back to a university at another place. And
what I tried to do there was to try to recreate the Centre among the
postgraduate population there, which they were trying to encourage. In the
faculty of humanities, we got 20 new postgraduates every year, which was
quite a good and interdisciplinary mix. And cultural studies was already in
there centrally. So it was a beautiful position to be in. So that was worth it.
There was still a space there for postgraduate work. Control hadnt quite
reached there yet. I think there are always spaces for working together, but it
didnt work with the staff there.
I tried to get the staff involved, but they took a very individualistic attitude
to publication. I think we only produced one book, which is that The Practice of
Cultural Studies
just the one book. There was a big programme for it, but we
didnt get off the ground. But the postgraduate work did. And there was a
postgraduate public there
people talking to one another and swapping ideas.
The element of the Centre that can operate in this new university situation
is to try and get students together to talk about common problems and work
together. Thats more difficult with undergraduates, but with postgraduates,
Ph.D. students and maybe MA students, its still possible. And we did that for
a long time. So instead of you just working on your thesis or doing course
work, which I know is more the US system, we had programmmes of
cooperative work about the problems of doing theses, about the issues and
about theories and methods. But we did that as a collaborative thing.
Encouraging people to learn from each other and not just the teachers. So that
was still possible, and I think its still going on. Well I know its still going on
because I give sessions there. We became very popular and the art and design

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people came in on it as well. I think some forms of collective and collaborative

work are still possible and to some extent encouraged by the system.
The other thing that some people are doing and my friend Joyce Canaan
does this. She actually does research with her students on the neo-liberal
university. [laughs] She was at the Centre. I dont have a good answer for you
there, because my experience doesnt stretch far enough. In a sense, I was
getting out just when it was getting impossible.

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[Hudson Vincent] It seems almost non-existent in my experience at the

undergraduate level. There are a few examples, but theyre extremely hard to
find.
[Richard Johnson] Yeah, you have to have assessment systems. You have to
have an institutional context that makes that collective project possible.
Because Ph.D.s and MA dissertations or whatever youre going to call them are
very individualizing. Its one person doing the work. If you read acknowledgements, you know damn well its not just one person doing the work.
I mean everyones contributed, but its not the same as getting together and
saying what should we do? How should we do it? Lets do it together. You do
this, Ill do that. You know what I mean?
[Hudson Vincent] Do you think Cultural Studies exists today in the way it
existed at the Centre? If not, what forms has it taken?
[Richard Johnson] It exists in many, many different forms. I went to Taiwan
recently and spent six weeks teaching there and there were two really opposed
versions of cultural studies there. One was very much postmodern theory, and
on the other hand there was a kind of social
cultural studies that was very
connected to the movements. There are a lot of really interesting social
movements in Taiwan. Theyve just come out of autocracy or military
dictatorship, so its really fizzing with social movements. And a lot of
academics especially in the south of the country are very connected to the
social movements. So there, theres a version of cultural studies thats more
like the one I identify with. More political and more rooted and more local as
well. I think this local, global thing is very important and very hostile to the
postmodern version of cultural studies. So I went there and kept saying Oh
no, thats not cultural studies! Its nearer what the people associated with the
movements are doing; you may call yourself a sociologist but actually theres a
difference between being interested in culture and doing something more like
cultural studies. The postmodern theorists in Taipei are more interested in
culture than cultural studies.
[Hudson Vincent] Could you elaborate on your anxieties about the relation of
postmodern theory to cultural studies?

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[Richard Johnson] Yes, its not the ideas because I read Foucault and Derrida
and love some of that stuff very much. Foucault particularly actually. Deleuze
and Guattaris Thousand Plateaus, I like that. Its a bit wild, but there are lots of
good things in it. So its not an opposition to the ideas, and Id even take the
relativization and the criticisms of science. Though Im still much more
concerned with adequacy and serious knowledge than those postmodern
positions sometimes are. Theyre just too playful for me sometimes about
knowledge. I dont know why any academic work should be taken seriously if
were that playful about it. So I have a reservation about the epistemology. My
kind of postmodernism is about social difference and power and knowledge,
rather than about fluidity and uncertainty.
The ideas are okay, and you can take those, and you can learn from them,
but the point is where and what on and what about? Often its very confined
within a literary framework, in the sense that when it comes to an example
theyre often literary examples. And at best a literary
historical actual object.
Said would be an excellent example of that, but would you call him
postmodern, Im not sure. And queer theory would be another good example.
It has an object in that sense. Its often then a commentary on Oscar Wilde or
something.
Queer theory is actually a very interesting example. The intellectual work
that comes from it is quite conventional in some ways. I think if I tried to pin
that down theoretically, the difference between looking at cultural discourse or
language, and perhaps thats the common element of these theories, looking at
cultural as bound up with material life, which is where English, British cultural
studies comes from to begin with. From Williams and the very early work and
then the ethnographies and then the feminist work. I think theres a great limit
to looking at only public discourse. Because most discursive analysis is of fairly
abstracted formal texts, whether theyre political speeches or media texts or
literary works, and thats a very different kind of object from people living
their lives. How they manage difficulties and contradictions in their lives and
what sense they make of it, all those meanings. Its not that those are entirely
separate things, they work on each other, but theres a question of point of
entry. So inevitably when you look at social life as culture then youre located
in a particular place, a locality, an agenda which comes out of the agendas of
peoples lives. Whereas if you look at a historical
literary text, its not quite
clear where you are located. You can relate it to the present, but thats a sort
of secondary act.
Whats important is where these ideas come from. What problems were
they actually asking. The kind of hidden histories behind the theories I think it
really important when youre teaching theory. I mean I taught theory for a
long time, because when Stuart left I became the theorist. It took me a long
time to workout how to do it. But I did find a way in the end. And it was really
looking at theories of culture as a sequence that was driven by political
problems. So you know, why do we get interested in structuralism? Well we

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get interested in structuralism because we need to handle complexity. There

are lots of political agents here. Not just some old binary, a class binary or
gender binary. You have these intersectionalities going on and you need a
complex theory. So structuralism appeals for that reason. You can think about
complex unities. And then the world does seem much more fluid and difficult,
and we change a lot and nothing seems so certain. Post-structuralism is all a
part of that. Thats how I really came into all this postmodernism. I was really
interested into structuralism, and then I was into post-structuralism.
Whats interesting when you teach theory is that theres something from
that early theory that youve just got to hold on to. There isnt some sort of
movement that you can justify from one fashionable position to another. Its
always a particular problem leading to a new set of ideas. That doesnt mean
that you can throw it all away. Stuarts position on theory is the same, very
much. That its never redundant. Marxism is never redundant, for example.

Notes on interviewee
Richard Johnson taught social history and cultural studies at Birmingham
University from 1966 to 1993. He taught on an MA in international cultural
studies and helped to organize and teach a research practice programme for
Ph.D. students in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Art and Design at
Nottingham Tent University from 1995 to 2004. After leaving academic
employment, he taught for two years in adult education. He has continued to
research and write in relation to movement politics, especially the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament. His interests continue to include cultural theory and
research, practices of research and authorship and contemporary history and
politics. Newer interests include the reasons why scientists differ on radiation
risk and the role of civil society groups and organizations in the making of a
new political culture.