The Political Education of Walter Benn Michaels: An Interview

Walter Benn Michaels has spent the last decade disabusing the political value of diversity, arguing that instead we need to focus on class. He’s done this in the trade book, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (2006), as well as a continuing series of essays. At the same time, since joining the faculty at the University of Illinois-Chicago, he has become involved in the faculty union there. This interview took place amidst the planning for a walkout of faculty, represented by the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT), as they negotiated a new contract, and hence deals particularly with Michaels’ union work as well as his critical writing. Michaels fi rst made his reputation writing on literary theory. He drew an avalanche of response with his polemic, “Against Theory,” co-written with Steven Knapp. Originally appearing in Critical Inquiry 8.4 (1982), it was the catalyst of the collection Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell (1985), which included responses from Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty, and many others. Alongside his work on theory, Michaels has been one of the most infl uential Americanists of his generation, author of The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (1987) and Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995), as well as a teacher of many rising Americanists, including Michael Clune, Amy Hungerford, Mark McGurl, Michael Szalay, Jane Thrailkill, and many others. He also co-edited The American Renaissance Reconsidered (with Donald E. Pease, 1985). More recently, Michaels’ The Shape of the Signifi er (2004) combines his thinking on intentionality with a reading of contemporary American fi ction. In addition, he has just completed a new book, The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy and Political Economy (2015). Born in 1948, Michaels attended Michigan and CCNY, as he tells here, before settling at UC-Santa Barbara, from which he received his BA (1970)