Read Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) Online
Authors: Bell Hooks
| R/SP: | Yet if you walk through a lot of ethnic, Jewish, Hispanic, or black neighborhoods in New York, usually the older people still take their chairs and sit out on the street with their coolers—that’s their living room. They talk to people, and it’s really quite wonderful and relaxed. |
| bh: | I struggle a great deal with the phone, because I think the telephone is very dangerous to our lives in that it gives us such an illusory sense that we are connecting. I always think about those telephone commercials (“reach out and touch someone!”) and that becomes such a false reality— even in my own life I have to remind myself that talking to someone on the phone is not the same as having a conversation where you see them and smell them. I think that the phone has really helped people become more privatized in that it gives them an illusion of connection which denies looking at someone. Telephone commercials can be “great” because they actually let us see that person on the other end—see how they respond and give of this warmth that is never really conveyed just through the phone, so that we’re not just having a diminished experience of the nonperson you don’t really see on the other end. And it’s hard to always remember this—because we’re seduced. I love Baudrillard’s book Seduction, because he talks a lot about the way we’re seduced by technologies of alienation. We know that all technologies are not alienating, so I think it’s good to have a phrase like “technologies of alienation” so that we can distinguish between those ways of transmitting knowledge, information, etc. and other ways of knowing that are more fully meaningful to us. |
| R/SP: | Don’t you think that in our addictive culture, these seductions set up addictions which can never be satisfied? The telephone gives this impossible promise of connections; its “900” numbers promise a simulation of friendship and community (like a long-distance nightclub) which can never be fulfilled. An incredible sense of longing and desire is evoked. |
| bh: | Absolutely. When I spoke at a conference on the “War on Drugs, “I tried to talk about how a culture of domination is necessarily a culture of addiction, because you in fact take away from people their sense of agency. And what restores to people that sense of power and capacity? Well, working in an auto factory in America right now gives few workers a sense of empowerment. So how do you give them an illusory sense of empowerment? We could go to any major plant in America and look at what people do. And a lot of what people do when they get off work is drink. Many of the forms of “community” (set up to counteract the forces of alienation on the job) are tied to addiction. Because the fact is it’s simply not gratifying to work fuckin’ hard ten hours a day for low wages and not really be able to get the thing you need materially in life. In fact, if people weren’t seduced by certain forms of addiction, they might rebel! They might be depressed, they might start saying, “Why should any of us work ten hours a day? Why shouldn’t we share jobs and work four hours a day and be able to spend more quality time for ourselves and our families? Why shouldn’t workers who don’t know how to read be able to go to a job where you spend four hours working and another four hours looking at movies and having critical discussions?” I don’t know of any industry that has tried to implement those kinds of self-actualization moments in the experience of workers engaged in industrial work in this society. |
| R/SP: | What do you think are the underlying mechanisms of the “Drug War”? |
| bh: | I think the mechanisms of the Drug War have so much to do with the mechanisms of capitalism and money-making. Also, many people have shown the ways in which our state and our government are linked to the bringing in of masses of drugs to pacify people—starting with drugs like aspirin which make people feel like “you shouldn’t have any pain in your life” and that “pain means you’re not living a successful life.” And I think this is particularly hard to take. Black people and the black community have really been hurt by buying into the notion that “If I’m in pain, I must be a miserable person,” rather than, “Pain can be a fruitful place of transformation.” I think that early on, in the black communities I grew up in, there was a sense of redemptive suffering. And it’s really problematic for us to lose that sense. James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time that “If you can’t suffer, you can never really grow up—because there’s no real change you go through.” Back to M. Scott Peck who tells us that “All change is a moment of loss.” And usually at a moment of loss we feel some degree of sorrow, grief— pain, even. And if people don’t have the apparatus by which they can bear that pain, there can only be this attempt to avoid it—and that’s where the place of so much addiction and substance abuse is in our life. It’s in the place of “let me not feel it” or “let me take this drug so that I can go through it without having to really feel what I might have had to feel here.” Or, “I can feel it … but I’ll have no memory of it.” |
| R/SP: | And ultimately we go back to the whole issue of anger: to “not feel it so I won’t erupt with the kind of anger that pain has caused.” |
| bh: | I think that’s it precisely. What I see as the promise is: those of us who are willing to break down or go through the walls of denial to build a bridge between illusion and reality so that we can come back to our selves and live more fully in the world. |
| R/SP: | What do you write? |
| bh: | I started out writing plays and poetry, but then felt I’d received this “message from the spirits,” that I really needed to do feminist work which would challenge the universalized category of “woman.” Years ago certain ideas were prevalent in the feminist movement, such as “Women would be liberated if they worked.” And I was thinking, “Gee, every black woman I’ve ever known has worked (outside the home), but this hasn’t necessarily meant liberation.” Obviously, this started me posing questions: “What women are we talking about when we talk about ‘women’?” So I began doing feminist theory challenging the prevailing construction of womanhood in the feminist movement. I wrote Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which initially met with tremendous resistance and hostility because it was going against the whole feminist idea that “Women share a common plight.” I was saying that, in fact, women don’t share a common plight solely because we’re women—that our experiences are very, very different. Of course, now that’s become such an accepted notion, but twelve years ago people were really pissed. I remember people being enraged because the book challenged the whole construction of white woman as victim, or white woman as the symbol of the most oppressed … or woman as the symbol of the most oppressed. Because I was saying, “Wait a minute. What about class differences between women? What about racial differences that in fact make some women more powerful than others?” So that’s how I started out. I continued to do my plays and my poetry, but my feminist theory and writings became better known. |
| R/SP: | And you’re also a professor? |
| bh: | Yeah, although I’m on a leave of absence. It’s funny, lately I’ve been thinking a lot, because I’m having this life crisis right now and I’m just trying to pause for a moment—I call this a “pausitive life crisis” … I’m taking this time to focus more on creative work and on questions of performance. I have a desire to write little mini-plays and performances, dramas that can be acted out in people’s living rooms. I’m really into the deinstitutionalization of learning and of experience. The more I’ve been in the academy, the more I think about Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison and the whole idea of how institutions work. People have this fantasy (as I did when I was young) of colleges being liberatory institutions, when in fact they’re so much like every other institution in our culture in terms of repression and containment—so that now I feel like I’m trying to break out. And I’ve noticed the similarity between the language I’ve been using, and the language of people who are imprisoned, especially with regard to that sense of what one has to recover after a period of confinement. |
| R/SP: | I like your idea that theory can be liberating, but that so often it’s encased in a language so elitist as to be inaccessible. In the lecture I saw, the ideas you presented seemed so understandable. Plus, it seemed you brought your heart and soul to the “lecture” format. |
| bh: | That’s where I think performance is useful. In traditional black culture, if you get up in front of an audience, you should be performing, you should be capable of moving people, something should take place—there should be some total experience. If you got up in front of an audience and were just passively reading something, well, what’s the point? |
| R/SP: | Right. Why not listen to a tape recording? |
| bh: | There has to be this total engagement, an engagement that also suggests dialogue and reciprocity between the performer and the audience that is hopefully responding. I think about theory; I use words like “deconstruction.” Once someone asked me, “Don’t you think that these words are alienating and cold?” and I said, “You know, I expect to see these words in rap in the next few years!” In my book, Yearning, I talk about going home to the South and telling my family that I’m a Minimalist … explaining to them what the significance of Minimalism is to me (in terms of space, objects, needs and what have you). Because meanings can be shared—people can take different language and jargon across class and across experiences—but there has to be an intermediary process whereby you take the time to give them a sense of what the meaning of a term is. You’ve got to be able to express that complicated meaning in language that is plainer or translatable. This doesn’t mean that people can’t grasp more complex jargon and utilize it—I think that’s what books like Marx for Beginners had in mind: if you give people a basic outline or sense, then you are giving them a tool with which they can go back to the primary text (which is more “difficult”) and feel more at home with that. |
| R/SP: | Do you feel that you as a black woman are changing things in the academy? |
| bh: | Black women change the process only to the degree that we are in revolt against the prevailing process. However, the vast majority of black women in academe are not in revolt—they seem to be as conservative as the other conservatizing forces there! Why? Because marginalized groups in institutions feel so vulnerable. I’ve been rereading Simon Watney’s Policing Desire, and thinking a lot about how I often feel more policed by other black women who say to me: “How can you be out there on the edge? How can you do certain things, like be wild, be inappropriate? You’re making it harder for the rest of us (who are trying to show that we can be ‘up to snuff’) to be ‘in’ with the mainstream.” |
| R/SP: | So it’s like an assault from both sides. You were talking about the “internalization of the oppressor” in the minds of the colonized. |
| bh: | Simon Watney was talking about marginalized communities who will protest certain forms of domination (like the notion of “exclusion/inclusion” whereby they are excluded) but then invent their own little group wherein the same practices determine who is allowed into their “community.” We see that happening now with the recent return to a black cultural nationalism where a new, well-educated, cool, chic, avant-garde group of black people (who perhaps five years ago had lots of white friends or mixed friends) now say, “I really want to associate only with black people” or “black people and people of color.” I’m very much into the work of Thich Nhat Hanh; I consider him to be one of my primary teachers and have been reading him for years. He talks a lot about the idea of resistance to the construction of false frontiers—the idea that you make or construct someone as an enemy who you have to oppose, but who in fact may have more in common with you than you realize. However, in this society it’s easier for us to build our sense of “community” around sameness, so we can’t imagine a gay rights movement where eighty percent of the people might be nongay! I was working from Martin Luther King’s idea of the “beloved community” and asking, “Under what terms do we establish ‘community’?” How do we conceptualize a ‘beloved community’? King’s idea was of a group of people who have overcome their racism, whereas I think more of communities of people who are not just interested in racism, but in the whole question of domination. I think it’s more important to ask, “What does it mean to inhabit a space without a culture of domination defining how you live your life?” In Thich Nhat Hanh’s book The Raft Is Not the Shore (1975) he says that “resistance at heart must mean more than resistance against war. It must mean resistance against all things that are like war.” And then he talks about living in modern society … how the way we live threatens our integrity of being, and how people who feel threatened then construct false frontiers: “I can only care about you if you’re like me. I can only show compassion toward you if something in your experience relates to something I’ve experienced.” We see an expression of this in Richard Rorty’s book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, where he argues that white people in America can be in solidarity with young black youth if they stop seeing them as “young black youth” and look at them as Americans, and declare, “No American should have to live this way.” So it’s a whole notion of “If you can find yourself in the Other in such a way as to wipe out the Otherness, then you can be in harmony.” But a “grander” idea is “Why do we have to wipe out the Otherness in order to experience a notion of Oneness? I’m sort of a freak on the left in that I’m really dedicated to a spiritual practice in my everyday life, yet I’m also interested in transgressive expressions of desire. |
| R/SP: | Like what? |