GRAMSCI ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRY
(for AMST 731)


Gramsci, Antonio. 1891-1937,
Italian Communist leader and theoretician


Biography

Born on the politically and economically marginalized island of Sardinia, Gramsci endured a difficult childhood. His father, a low-ranking civil servant, was imprisoned on dubious charges in 1903, compelling Gramsci to withdraw from school to help support his family. He was also plagued by poor health, developing a malformed spinal that rendered him hunchbacked for the rest of his life.

Gramsci resumed his studies in 1908, living with an older brother active in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). Ever the disciplined student, he managed to earn a scholarship to study linguistics at Turin University, where northern Italy’s militant trade-union movement was swiftly burgeoning. In addition to reading Marx, Gramsci was there strongly influenced by the ideas of Georges Sorel, Antonio Labriola, and, perhaps above all, Benedetto Croce. Amidst this political and intellectual milieu Gramsci joined the PSI in 1913, eventually withdrawing from university to write fulltime for the socialist newspapers Avanti! and Il Grido del Popolo (and later L’Ordine Nuovo).

Disillusionment with the PSI’s tepidity during the Turin general strikes prompted Gramsci to help organize the Communist Party of Italy (PCdI) and lead its secession from the PSI in 1921. He served as the PCdI’s representative in Moscow from 1922-1923, during which time fragmentation of the Italian Left facilitated Mussolini’s ascent to power, and became PCdI Secretary-General and parliamentary deputy upon his return in 1924. He held these positions until late 1926 when, in contravention of his parliamentary immunity, Gramsci was arrested by fascist police. The prosecutor at his trial purportedly declared: “We must stop this brain from functioning for 20 years.”

Defying both prison censors and deteriorating health, Gramsci wrote prolifically during his imprisonment. Addressing a broad set of topics, his Prison Notebooks examine the extraordinary political and ideological resilience of Western capitalist society. Gramsci was released a month before his death in 1937, at age 46.

Key Concepts

The Bolshevik Revolution - which seemed to refute deterministic, positivistic Marxism - had a galvanizing effect on Gramsci’s thought. In both his earlier political writings and the Prison Notebooks, he assiduously rejects a rigidly mechanical approach to historical materialism.[1] Such crude economism, Gramsci writes, treats the “structure [economic base] as a hidden god,” of which every superstructural “fluctuation of politics and ideology [is] presented and expounded as an immediate expression.”[2]

Gramsci’s analysis instead advances a significant reformulation of the base-superstructure model, emphasizing a reciprocity and dialectic unity in which “structures [base] and superstructures form a ‘historical bloc.’”[3] In insisting that ideologies are “real historical facts which must be combated and their nature as instruments domination revealed,” Gramsci implicitly revalues forms of cultural struggle.[4] Note that Gramsci also employs the term “historical bloc” to express the unity of various other social actors and forces, including, perhaps most notably, the alliance of social groups constituting (or aspiring to) a hegemonic preeminence.

Gramsci’s development of the concept of hegemony has proven his most enduring theoretical contribution. Though his understanding of hegemony underwent important revision over the years, it refers in the broadest sense to “the ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.”[5] Beyond a totalizing or static “dominant ideology,” it is instead a “continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria” that “presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised.”[6]

Gramsci adapted the term from debates within the Russian Social-Democratic movement over the role of the working-class within the specific context of bourgeois-democratic revolutions. Here “hegemony” referred to proletarian leadership of a class alliance, premised upon their economic centrality but forged through strategic economic concessions and compromises with other subordinate groups (e.g. the peasantry or southern intellectuals). In the Prison Notebooks, the concept is extended to analyze stabilized, as opposed to revolutionary, conditions; to be applicable to both proletarian and bourgeois leadership, particularly in Western capitalist countries; and to encompass not only economic-corporate concessions but also the role of “cultural, moral, and ideological” (or ethico-political) leadership by dominant groups.

In his most straightforward formulation of hegemony, Gramsci establishes a series of binary oppositions. On the one hand is the “State,” or “political society” (police, the judiciary, etc.) and on the other “private” institutions, or “civil society” (schools, the Church, trade-unions, etc.). The former is understood as the site of direct domination, coercion, and dictatorship, whereas the latter is the locus of consent, direction, and the exercise of hegemony. The relative sophistication of civil society in advanced capitalist countries - as opposed to the East where civil society is “primordial and gelatinous” and the “State is everything”[7] - makes it preponderant over the State, and the principal venue for the maintenance of bourgeois control. Thus, a frontal war of maneuver could be effectively undertaken by the Bolsheviks in Russia, but a viable revolutionary program in the West would necessitate a more nuanced, counter-hegemonic war of position.

(In his later writings, it should be noted, Gramsci describes the State and civil society as coequal partners, or collapses the latter entirely into the former, thus reemphasizing “the central ideological role of the Western capitalist State.”[8] This formulation posits both a political hegemony and a cultural hegemony, operating in their respective spheres, and the expansion of the term “hegemony” itself to comprise a synthesis of consent and domination.)

Much of the Prison Notebooks thus wrestles with the problem of how individuals and classes develop their oft-contradictory “conceptions of the world,” the means by which the interests of the hegemonic class get assimilated and absorbed into subordinate groups' common sense consciousness. Gramsci identifies intellectuals - understood not as some independent social type, but broadly as all those performing “directive or organizational functions” for a given class - as playing a critical roll in this process, for it through these mediating “deputies” that dominant groups “exercise the subaltern function of social hegemony and political government.”[9]

Gramsci draws a significant distinction between two categories of intellectuals: traditional intellectuals and organic intellectuals. Organic intellectuals are those developed within a particular class, who emerge from its ranks to “give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own [economic, political, and social] function.” Traditional intellectuals - academic, artistic, literary, ecclesiastical, etc. - might superficially appear to exist autonomous from such economic and social conflicts, but their position, in fact, should be understood as a direct product of earlier economic formations.

The development of their own organic intellectuals, indeed their own culture, is thus an integral component of any subordinate group’s efforts to forge an alternative hegemony. Whether through schools or the revolutionary party, Gramsci envisages a radical and democratic diffusion of the intellectual function throughout society as part of this project. “All men are [already] intellectuals,” Gramsci explains, even if they do not perform “the immediate social function of the professional category of intellectuals” in a particular social order.[10]

Reception

Though Gramsci was little known outside of Italian leftist circles at the time of his death, his comrade Palmiro Togliatti (later responsible for the publication of much of Gramsci’s work) presciently recognized the importance of "remov[ing] him from the misfortunes of the present and preserving him for the future life of the party."

Not until the fall of fascism did Gramsci's prison writings first receive publication, however, beginning with Italian editions of his Prison Letters (1947) and a six-volume compilation of his Prison Notebooks (1948-1951). These works were enthusiastically received within Italy, but also by many third-world revolutionary movements (particularly in Latin America). The dissemination of Gramsci’s work in the United States and the United Kingdom occurred somewhat slower, where it was 1971 before a comprehensive English translation of the Prison Notebooks first appeared.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, Gramscian thought had already become deeply influential within sectors of the British academia. Gramsci (along with Althusser) was a key theoretical influence on Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, and his work significantly informed the scholarship of British social historians like Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and Gwyn Williams.

In the United States, Eugene Genovese’s landmark 1974 study of slavery in the American South, Roll, Jordan, Roll, was perhaps the clearest marker of Gramsci’s historiographical arrival. With an acute interest in the ways in which the paternalist ideology of slaveholders ultimately penetrated slave consciousness, Genovese utilized Gramsci’s work to develop a nuanced account of white, planter hegemony in the antebellum South. With varying degrees of explicit reference to Gramsci, a host of other historians in the 1970s - including Eric Foner, Alan Dawley, Lawrence Goodwyn, among many others - followed suit, similarly expanding the purview of social history to encompass issues like subaltern consciousness and ideology, the uneven development of historical blocs, and what Gramsci might label “the sphere of complex superstructures.”[11]

For Further Reading:

Gramsci’s Own Writing

Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, (New York: International Publishers, 1971).

The Antonio Gramsci Reader, ed. David Forgacs (New York: NYU Press, 1988).
Letters from Prison, ed. Frank Rosengarten and trans. Ray Rosenthal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

Antonio Gramsci: Selections From Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985).

Helpful Secondary Sources

T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony,” The American Historical Review, vol. 90, no. 3 (Jun. 1985), pp. 567-593.

Perry Anderson, “The Antimonies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review 100 (Nov. 1976 - Jan. 1977), pp. 5-78.

Paul Ransome, Antonio Gramsci: A New Introduction (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992).
Roger D. Simon, Gramsci's Political Thought: An Introduction (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1991).

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[1] For earlier political writings advancing this position, see articles “The Revolution Against Capital” (Dec. 1917), “Our Marx” (May 1918), and “Utopia” (Jul. 1918) published in Avanti! and Il Grido del Popolo. AGR, 32-36; 36-39; 45-52.
[2] SPN, 407 (“Problems of Marxism - Economy and Ideology”).
[3] SPN, 366 (“The Study of Philosophy - Structure and Superstructure”).
[4] AGR, 196 (“Hegemony, Relations of Force, Historical Bloc - [Political Ideologies]”).
[5] SPN, 12 (“The Intellectuals - Formation of the Intellectuals”).
[6] SPN, 161 (“The Modern Prince - Some Theoretical and Practical Aspects of ‘Economism’”).
[7] SPN, 238 (“State and Civil Society - Political Struggle and Military War”).
[8] Anderson, 42. Anderson, among others, have placed emphasis here in arguing against the “illusion” of a social-democratic reading of Gramsci that posits that revolutionary struggle can take place entirely within the sphere of civil society.
[9] SPN, 12, 13 (“The Intellectuals - Formation of the Intellectuals”).
[10] SPN, 9 (“The Intellectuals - Formation of the Intellectuals”).
[11] See, for example, Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon: 1974); Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976); Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

FINAL PROJECT UPDATE

I know I'm supposed to be posting updates on my final project, but it is increasingly not lending itself to blog form... for better or worse (I'm still unsure which). I continue to be concerned that I don't have enough research content, but the fact that I'm able to do what I want, in terms of presentation/form, with the material that I do have is terribly exciting.

So basically the starting point is this satellite map of my trip, with various numbers (1-5) along the route. As you open the main page, Johnny Cash's "All I Do Is Drive" starts playing, but with my introductory audio edited as a voice-over onto it. Then, as invited by the voiceover, you can click any of the numbers on the map (thank you HTML image maps!) and it takes you to a new page, each of which addresses one of my analytics themes/ruminations, very tentatively titled: CONCRETE COWBOYS (on the cultural mythology surrounding hitchhiking/trucking, and the social reality); THIS IS HOME (on climbing into a cab, and there conducting interviews); BOSSES, LOGS, & SMOKEYS (freedom and control in trucking); "THANK YOU, DRIVER" (an introduction to c.b. radios and trucker lingo); and "DRIVERS ONLY" (the geography of the truck stop).

Each of the five "fragment" pages have satellite maps of the specific site (see below), and hopefully (depending on how good my disposable camera pictures come back on Monday) personal photos that'll add a lot more. The audio for each section - where my analysis is (I promise I'm not just screwing around with glossy technology) - is embedded into the page, so it plays automatically as you open it.














And then from each of the five "fragment" pages you should be able to navigate directly to the other fragments through this miniature map at the bottom of each page:









This is going to be so cool if it all comes together. There might not be a whole lot of sleep in the next week and a half, but it's going to be cool.

KINSHIP DIAGRAM



The above kinship diagram (click diagram for full-screen version) is based largely on the model of Braman's article and the online tutorial, though some adaptations have been made to better represent my informant's understanding of her own (somewhat non-traditional) kinship network.

During the interview, my informant told me she "really ha[d] three families": her father's family, her mother's family, and her "other family." I ended up using different color markers to represent this, though I chose two similar colors (green and blue) to represent the two sets of biological relations and a dissimilar color (orange) to represent the other set.

The informant noted that divorce had played a fairly important role in her family's life, and it forced me to adapt the way I drew the kinship diagram. I realized that given this fact, it would be useful to distinguish between marriages that ended in divorce (11/12) and marriages that ended because of the death of a spouse (8/9, 15/16).

Another issue that arose was how to represent marriages vs. long-term romantic involvements. As explained below, the distinction between these two forms (for both the relationship participants and others in the family) is often minimal, and I struggled at length over whether I did a disservice to my informant and her family by differentiating between the two. Ultimately, though, I decided that (in contemporary American society, at least) long-term monogamous relationships and marriages are generally viewed differently - witness the struggle to have non-heterosexual unions recognized as marriages – and thus it was useful to develop a notation system that acknowledged this.

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I struggled some, after receiving initial comments, about whether to change the way I represented the relationship between (13) and (14). Basically, the issue is whether I needed to use a different symbol to represent a long-term, committed romantic relationship between a homosexual couple (legally prevented from getting married) than I used to represent a long-term, committed romantic relationship between a heterosexual couple (who choose not get married).

As I saw it, one of the two alternate options would be to use the symbol I used for a marriage, only amended with some sort of asterisks. While the people involved in the relationship might view their commitment to one another as most analogous to a marriage, and thus consider this notation appropriate, I decided against this because the simple, unfortunate fact that most others in contemporary American society would probably not recognize this as equivalent to a marriage (without some sort of acknowledgement from either Church or State).

The other alternate option would be to use the symbol I used for a long-term romantic involvement, only amended with some sort of asterisks. While this might help clarify the matter some, I thought it was in some ways demeaning that their relationship would require an explanatory asterisks while the long-term romantic involvement of others would not. I think it’s important to challenge this sort of heteronormativity in our work.

Certainly the way I left things is not perfect. But, I think it’s somewhat implicit when you see a long-term romantic relationship between a man and a woman that perhaps some choice has been made not to get married; and that when you see a long-term romantic relationship between two people of the same gender that there are structural reasons why this is not marked as a marriage. In the end, I decided to leave the representation as it was, like this.

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On a more technical matter, I decided to use numbers rather than pseudonyms to denote individuals in the diagram, mainly for simplicity's sake. Were this diagram part of a larger ethnographic project – an article or book, perhaps – I think it would make more sense to give names to the referents.


FATHER'S FAMILY (click diagram for full-screen version):


The informant's biological parents were divorced when she was quite young, and her father (11) has been living for eight years with the same woman (10). The informant refers to this woman as her step-mother, though upon further questioning the informant commented that the two had never actually married. The main reason for this, my informant stated, was economic – formalizing their union would prohibitively alter the informant's financial aid package and make it impossible for her to attend college – so for the present they remain unmarried.

Similarly, the informant's brother (14) has been in a long-term relationship with a man (13) who is warmly welcomed and recognized in the family as his partner. Because "gay marriage" is not legalized in their state they are not married, though both have expressed interest in doing so. Note that I have included this relationship in both the "Father's Side" and "Mother's Side" detailed diagrams.

Another interesting component of the kinship diagram on this side of the informant's family was that her widowed grandmother (9) ended up remarrying her deceased husband's (8) cousin (7). I thought this somewhat odd (perhaps even somewhat scandalous), but the informant explained that this second marriage was actually quite well received by the rest of the family, and the rest of the small surrounding community in which they lived. I chose to represent the informant's great-great-grandparents (1, 2) with "?"s rather than crossed-out squares and triangles because my informant – who just mentioned that (4) and (5) were siblings - never actually explicitly named them.

MOTHER'S FAMILY (click diagram for full-screen version):

The informant's maternal grandfather (15) died soon after informant's mother's (12) birth. Her maternal grandmother (16) soon remarried to another man (17), who essentially raised the informant's mother (12) as his own daughter. Though the informant's maternal grandmother (16) has since died, I included her second husband (17) in the kinship diagram because he very much remains in both the informant's and her mother's lives. It is worth noting that the informant refers to this man (17) as her grandfather, not her step-grandfather.

The informant's mother has been dating a man (18) for the past six months. This relationship does not seem nearly as committed or "serious" as either of the two aforementioned romantic relationships (10-11, 13-14), so I marked it with a single-squiggle rather than a double-squiggle. While I feel comfortable with this notation in this instance, it certainly raises an interesting question: at what point does a single-squiggle become a double-squiggle (or vice versa)?

"OTHER FAMILY" (click diagram for full-screen version):



The third piece of the informant's kinship diagram is her "other family," which includes her "other mother" (20), "other brother" (21), and "other father" (19) (which doesn't rhyme nearly as well). Her "other mother" and "other father" were both close, long-term friends with her biological mother (12) and father (13), and the fact that the two couples had children at almost the exact same time (the informant and her "other brother" (21), were born 3 weeks apart) only strengthened their bond. I considered it important to include these relationships in her kinship diagram.

PROJECT PROPOSAL - 2.26.06

Well I asked an old truck driver about life out on the road
If he does a lotta singing when he's bringing in his load
If there's a pretty waitress crying for him every hundred miles
If he gets a lotta loving if he has a lot of smiles
And I asked him if those trucking songs tell about a life like his
He said, "If you want to know the truth about it, here's the way it is...

"All I do is drive drive drive, try to stay alive
Keep my mind on my load, keep my eye upon the road
I got nothin' in common with any man who's home every day at five
All I do is drive drive drive drive drive drive…"

“All I Do is Drive,” Johnny Cash

OVERVIEW

I first started hitchhiking when I was 17, traveling around the United States and Mexico during a "year off" before coming to college. As a mode of transportation, hitching has a lot of advantages --- it’s free, there’re no reservations to book, you’re not supporting the oil economy, etc. --- but invariably the best part is meeting and trading stories with the kind folks you meet along the road. One set of those people I’ve always been particularly interested in is long-haul truckers, and it is with them that I propose to conduct my ethnographic fieldwork for my final project.

Over spring break, I plan to hitch to Urbana, IL to visit my grandmother, then on to St. Louis, MO to play some shows, then head back to Washington, DC where I was raised via I-64 through Kentucky and West Virginia. When I get rides with truckers, I’ll explain (after getting acquainted a little bit first, of course) that I’ve been interviewing people who have picked me up along the way, and solicit consent to record our conversation. Should they decline, at least I’ve still caught a ride!

There are a few things I can do to enhance the chances of landing rides with truckers (as opposed to regular automobile drivers). First off, I’ve found that these routes I’ll be traveling tend to have a high volume of truck freight traffic, particularly the east-west corridors of I-70 and I-80 through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Second, I’ve found truckers are often willing (if they like you) to use their CB-radios at ride’s end to contact other drivers headed your direction, vouching for your sociability and requesting others to pick you up. If you’re lucky, you can get passed off from one trucker to the next all day. Finally, I’m going to make a point of asking for rides predominantly in truck stops. Often, I’ve found it’s quicker to simply thumb from a highway on-ramp or along a shoulder (where there’s a high volume of passing motorists), but since I’m not in any particular hurry to get to Illinois I may as well just seek out truckers.

BACKGROUND & METHODOLOGY

I am interested in a number of different aspects of the lives of long-haul truckers, and I am sure many more will emerge over the course of the trip. Some basic research questions to start with, however, include:

- What factors lead individuals to first start working as a trucker, and what factors motivate them to stay? I am intrigued, in particular, by non-economic motivations: the (perhaps highly gendered) sense of power some drivers might feel managing such heavy equipment at high speeds; the feeling of mobility such work allows; relishing the seclusion and independence of life on the road…

- How do truckers cope with the highly atomizing nature of their jobs, which regularly take them away from family and friends for over a month at a time? What sorts of communities do truckers form, how do truck stops and CB-radio banter help forge these communities, and to what extent is occupational identity communally constructed?

- How dramatic are the differences amongst various subsets of truckers (chiefly owner-operators vs. per-mile employees, and union vs. non-union), both with regards to the objective conditions of their labor and the subjective ways in which they think about and understand their labor?

- What factors motivate tuckers to work such long hours, particularly those with somewhat more autonomy from direct employer supervision? Why do some truckers regularly cheat on their log-books (allowing them to drive beyond legal hour-limits) while others abide strictly?

- Why did the heck did they decide to give me a ride?

The existing literature on these topics is pretty slim, and Yale University’s holdings are disappointing. Through "Borrow Direct," however, I will soon be in possession of the two main ethnographies currently available: Lawrence J. Ouellet’s Pedal to the Metal: The Work Life of Truckers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994) and Michael Agar’s Independence Declared: The Dilemmas of Independent Trucking (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986). Other promising leads include (if I can track down copies of them): Joseph A. Blake’s “Occupational Thrill, Mystique, and the Truck Driver,” Urban Culture and Life 3:205-220 (1974) and Gabriel F. Fried and Richard D. Wolff’s “Modern Ancients: Self-Employed Truckers,” Rethinking Marxism 7 (4):103-115 (1994).

All interviews will be recorded on a digital audio recorder and small microphone, which I have yet to purchase. I conducted interviews for the previous assignment on a laptop computer, but I want to use a recording device that is as unobtrusive and mobile as possible for the main project. Given that I’m going to be traveling light, and given that I might be in rather cramped quarters, bringing a computer along simply isn’t practical. Best Buy has a nifty 30-day return policy, however, so should be able to obtain some good equipment for fieldwork and still be able to afford groceries come April! A disposable camera or two might also add to the project - though, sadly, I am no Robert Frank - as I want to do everything I can to capture some of the atmosphere of the cabs, truck stops, and the open road.

COMPLICATIONS

Safety is always, of course, a primary concern, but I feel comfortable with the risks and dangers associated with this sort of project. In 5 years (and scores upon scores of rides), I have found myself in very few situations where I have felt the least bit uncomfortable. And, though it pains me to say it, being white and male helps enormously... I would have much more to consider if I didn't enjoy this privilege.

On the research front, an issue that might be of concern is the fact that I won’t be dealing with “long-haul truckers” as a group, but rather “long-haul truckers passing through a particular region who happen to pick up hitchhikers.” Though somewhat tempting, it’s important not to conflate these two groups. Certain large companies, for example, have strict policies restricting their drivers from taking on passengers, so our sample will automatically exclude employees of these large companies. Also, an increasing trend among truckers is to work as tag-team drivers (often as husband-wife teams), but these trucks tend to have less spare room in the cab. I’ve rarely been picked up by them, and thus another sub-set of truckers has been excluded from our ethnography. I still think we can glean a lot of useful and interesting conclusions from ethnographic fieldwork based on this limited sample, but I think it’ll be important to couch our results.

Interview Analysis - 2.13.06

Interview was conducted with Ethan* (pseudonym), a 20-something barista at a popular New Haven coffee shop. The interview was conducted at the coffee shop, recorded onto a laptop computer with CakewalkAudio software.

Rather than trying to discern larger cultural truths from my first, modest foray into ethnographic fieldwork, I want to use this experience to reflect upon three categories of issues that arose over the course of my interview. Organized in order of increasingly problematic concerns:

1) Nervousness/Distraction (Track 1)

The interview was off to a rough start right from the get-go. After obtaining verbal informed consent, I started with an entirely open-ended question that my subject decided to run with:

A: My name is [fanciful moniker], I’m from Sweden…
Q: Why don’t you start off…
A: You said you were gonna change my name, right?
Q: [laughing] Yeah. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself?
A: I am, ah, immigrant from, ah, Sweden, and I work at coffee shop here in America, the land of... There’s a little snow outside today. It reminds me of home […]
Q: Alright, I want to go back to, ah, can you tell me a little bit about, ah, yourself. Where you grew up, childhood, all that good stuff… How old you are now.

I think it would be a mistake to read this exchange as simply goofiness on the part of the interviewer and subject (though this was certainly part of it), but rather as a nervous or defensive response to the oft-awkward form of ethnographic interview. I confess that I was somewhat thrown at first, but I think that being able to “laugh it off” and return with a more specific question helped focus our talk. In the grand scale of things this was a relatively minor glitch, but it serves as a good reminder that a lot of interview subjects will probably act defensively (and that said defensiveness may manifest in various ways) when they suddenly find themselves in front of a microphone

Environmental distractions also became a problem over the course of the interview. On the one hand, I think conducting the interview in the coffee shop was a good idea: it was accessible to both of us; I like the background noises and “coffee shop ambiance” on the recording; and it seemed like an appropriate setting given the subject (who, at one point, joked that the coffee shop was “like [his] home”). If I’m doing a project on squatter kids I don’t want to do interviews at a local Starbucks, and if I’m doing a project on frat kids I’m not sure a quiet physics lab would be the best locale. At the same time, though, the interview setting meant that numerous acquaintances of the subject passed through during our short time together, and that occasionally he needed to get up to attend to matters behind the counter.

A: …and I used to see so much cool stuff, and I used to always wonder, like, ‘Would they be able to see it too? Like, why isn’t anyone else here with me seeing this right now?’And the only cure for that was to [slapping hands] High five, Kevin!
Unknown: How did it go?
A: It went awesome…

2) Control/Ownership (Track 2)

A slightly larger issue was that of control over the interview. While I tried to make the interview pretty free-form - allowing the subject to dominate the direction of the discussion - I realized that I still very much conceived of myself as “in control” of the dialogue. On a couple of occasions, though, my subject decided simply not to answer the question I had posed, and I genuinely felt challenged in my roll as ethnographer:

Q: Can you tell me a little bit about why you enjoy, kind of, breaking into these places, whether it’s the factory or the Yale Bowl or…? What’s so cool about it?
A: I’ll tell you what the coolest thing ever is. The best thing ever, in terms of breaking into things, is Toad’s Place. That is the most fun place in the world to get in to. They actually… I’ll you about all the changes they’ve made to the landscape and architecture of Toad’s Place mostly because of me. First of all, there’s a door…

Q: Do you feel like you can communicate some things better, like, through your drawings or through your art?
A: Yeah, I can communicate with dinosaurs… telepathically over the internet. All the time I do it. Yeah.
Q: [laughing] Was that just a stupid question or were you…?
A: No, that was a very good question. I’m glad you asked it, Tom.
Q: [laughing] Um… hold on.

Initially I was tempted to categorize this phenomenon as simply another example of “nervousness” or “distraction,” but I think something else is at play here. In both of these instances, I was asking questions that related to specific themes/narratives I realize I was already developing in my head. While I gave the subject the autonomy to answer the questions any way he pleased, he ended up rejecting the questions outright, instead favoring other narratives or modes of self-(re)presentation with which he felt more comfortable.

This tension became explicit later in the interview when the conversation turned towards family:

Q: Can we talk about your family some?
A: Family stuff?
Q: Your family some.
A: Can we? It’s your interview, I guess. Yeah, sure… Pause it for a sec…[brief pause]
Q: Tell me about your brother?
A: He’s pretty cool.
Q: Younger brother?
A: Yeah.
Q: How much younger?
A: Six years younger.
Q: Do you think you guys are similar or dissimilar?
A: In some ways, in some ways not…
Q: So, what ways do you think you guys are alike?
A: We like music.
Q: Alright, well you just described, like, 90% of people, you know, under 30 in this country.
A: Yeah, I know. Nah, we’re really different people. We have the same parents, but beyond that, I don’t know…


It’s worth noting, however, that although apparently deferring to the ethnographer’s authority (“it’s your interview”), the subject successfully avoided discussing his brother in any substantive way. I made the decision to call him on it - I don’t know whether this was the right thing to do - but still we didn’t really probe the topic.

These clips serve as a good reminder that I need to thoroughly think through my methodology well before I start my interviews for my final project. If I am going to commit to this idea of giving complete ownership of the interviews over to the subjects (and I find there’s something exciting about such a radical approach), I need to do a lot more thinking about the subtle ways I still expect to be in control, perhaps despite myself, of the ethnographer-subject relationship.

3) Anonymity / Going Public (Track 3)

Protecting the identities of research subjects is always an important priority, but it will be particularly important if my project deals with people involved in some degree of illicit activity (which it probably will). This issue came out directly at one point during this week’s interview:

Q: What’s your, ah, where do you graffiti when you do stuff?
A: Where do I do it?
Q: Yeah.
A: Who’s going to be listening to this?
Q: [laughing] Not the police... hopefully
A: Okay. [pause] Um, I like rooftops, I like walls, I like outdoor spots…

If I’m going to have subjects open up, I need to make sure I have foolproof ways to ensure the interviews remain confidential (unless, of course, my subjects would rather that not be the case).
But if the interview process forced me to consider the intricacies of the relationship between the informant and the broader public, writing (and publishing) this brief interview analysis has forced me to confront the issue of what happens when the ethnographer enters the public realm. In particular, I’m referring to my emphasis here on the more technical/methodological lessons from the interview rather than ruminations on the “unarticulated assumptions or beliefs guided your interviewee’s comments” or “the way social life is structured for your informant and his/her social group.” Part of my hesitance on doing the latter (it took me some time to realize) is that Ethan* will probably be reading this later this week, and I want him (and all my later subjects) to be able to read my project(s). But damned does that make me somewhat uncomfortable.

Geographies of Neoliberalism, Winchester Ave.

Welcome to Science Park at Yale – built upon the neglected ruins of a post-industrial graveyard, the latest coup for a bourgeoning neoliberal university. Once upon a time, the Winchester rifle factories along this avenue produced American icons – “The Gun that Won the West,” the famously light and strong cowboy gun, quintessentially American – but these weapons proved futile against Schumpeter’s creative destruction. Now the palimpsest has been rechristened, future home to for-profit biotech spin-offs handled through Yale University’s Office of Cooperative Research.

We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old…



Over 19,000 union workers once filed into the plants during the 1940s, the last 186 of whom were laid off last Monday. Winchester rifles (now owned by Herstal Group, a Belgian company) will still be manufactured overseas, but the New Haven gates – now secured with rusty chains, lined with barbed wire, and adorned with red “Private Property” signs – are emphatically closed.

But these bleak, seemingly barren factories are littered with an infinity of traces, deposits of historical processes with which we must begin any critical elaboration. Over the past three decades, the rise of a neoliberal economic order has devastated American manufacturing, a trend which New Haven has experienced in full force. In 1965, 26% of New Haven jobs were in manufacturing, while Yale jobs accounted for 7% of the total; by 1999, the numbers had flipped, with 6% of New Haven jobs in manufacturing, and 24% at Yale. These statistics are written on the locked gates of Winchester Ave.

The geographical allure of the site, located just below Yale University’s “Science Hill,” is plain to see. Here the Marsh Botanical Gardens greenhouse, at the northern edge of the campus proper, provides a high-tech counterpoint to the faded red brick of Winchester Building 80.

25 Science Park (at the opposite corner of Winchester Ave. and Munson St.), anchoring one end of Science Park at Yale, interacts with the neighboring built environment more subtly. The fully restored and renovated warehouse stylistically echoes the other buildings in the neighborhood, preserving the horizontal-grid concrete façade; inside, however, there is world of difference.

With ample office and laboratory space, the property quickly filled with for-profit biotech tenants like CuraGen Corp., Cellular Genomics, Inc., and Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. with close relationships to Yale University. The University receives “millions in sponsored research, licensing fees, company equity and royalty payments from its biotech start-ups." [1] An article in Yale Medicine explained: “Guiding the transfer of Yale technology to private, for-profit companies within the region seemed the most promising way to assure that the gold and diamonds minded in Yale laboratories would be turned into jewelry close to campus.” [2]

New Haven taxpayers have profited considerably less, least of all residents of Science Park at Yale. New Haven’s biotech industry has produced only a few hundred jobs, the vast majority of which require advanced degrees requiring advanced degrees out of reach for New Haven’s blue-collar residents, and its contribution to New Haven’s tax base has proven negligible. [3] The neighborhood residents who essentially subsidized the start-ups through generous tax incentives have seen little of the promised boon.

The houses along the 100 block of Munson St., immediately across from part of the Winchester factory, are the dilapidated residential counterparts to the decaying industrial structures. Broken windows, blocked entrances, and vacant stares adorn both.

The graffiti “atomical” seems an apt commentary, though one might read it in a number of ways. Perhaps it’s the distinct awareness of being rendered minute and tiny before the command of market imperatives and integration into a neoliberal global economy. Perhaps it’s that everything here – the neighborhood, families, once-thriving factories - has been broken down into small atomized fragments, demystifying the relationships that once gave the neighborhood the appearance of organic, flourishing cohesiveness. Or perhaps it’s a reference to the type of bomb that must have been dropped at the corner of Munson St. and Winchester Ave. to leave such a desolate scene.

But to read Science Park at Yale as simply a uncomplicated contrast between two diametrically opposed (but dialectically inseparable) realities – a romantically recollected industrial past versus a privatized, antiseptic biotech future – overlooks a third narrative we might also investigate on Winchester Ave.

Exploring the factories themselves– the vast majority of which have still yet to completely crumble or be converted – one encounters a plethora of ways individuals have endeavored to subvert the space. Despite the barbed wire, homeless residents of Science Park at Yale have managed to squat inside; graffiti writers have painted colorful murals on the walls of the inside courtyards; and young punk kids high on Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem scale rooftops late at night to see the city stretch out before them.



[1] Connecticut Center for a New Economy, “Incubating Biotech” (2001). Available online at: http://www.ctneweconomy.org/Publications/Incubio.pdf.

[2] Marc Worman, “New Haven’s Biotech Boom” Yale Medicine (Fall 2000/Winter 2001).

[3] See “Incubating Biotech,” pp. 5-12.