APPENDX 2 CORNEL WEST INTERVIEW

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Cornel West Interview
7.14.93
via Telephone with
Milton S. F. Curry and
Darell W. Fields
EDITED VERSION 8.6.93
CW: Congratulations on this wonderful institution you all have
created. Really, those three, those salvo pieces at the beginning are
really quite dynamite.
DF: Thank you. Thanks for your inspiration as well.
CW: Oh, very much so. You all "doin the do" out there.
MC: We have a number of questions. I'm going to start. Wanted to ask
you to start with Professor West: let me take you back to the Fall of
1991. At that time, in the midst of what you yourself called an
"intellectual crisis in architectural criticism," you show up at the
Harvard Graduate School of Design at the Piper Auditorium. What was
going through your mind or what were you thinking as you sat there
ready to address students and faculty at that particular moment in
time?
CW: You see I had come from a conference that we had back in 1988 or
89 that was held in Chicago at one of Frank Lloyd Wright's spots - I
forget the name of it now - where we were talking about what it means
to create an oppositional architectural criticism. And that's when I
really begun to read a lot on from Summerson to Frampton to ...I even
went back and read old Sigfried's piece - the huge history of
architecture, I forget what - Space Time and Architecture, something

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like that. I tried to read all the texts I could in order to write a
short piece. And so for three days it was rather intense and I
learned a lot, eventhough I was still very much a neophyte. Then, I
put that paper away and had dialogue with Vidler and Colquhoun and
especially Michael Hays, who was here at Princeton. And so when I
went back to Harvard I was thinking, 'well I haven't read the stuff
in a while' - it was about a two year gap or so. I had only read
Assemblage and some stuff by Mark Wigley here and some of the other
graduate students in architecture. So I was wondering exactly where
architectural criticism was at that time. What kind of new
interventions had actually taken place since 89/90? And when Michael
Hays invited me up, I think he was relatively new then. I think he
had actually just left Princeton a year or two before. I was just
wondering to what degree what I would have to say - trying to set a
larger context, but also say something about the specificity of
architectural criticism. I didn't want to give a piece on cultural
criticism in the abstract or just the larger historical context
without trying to highlight what are the particular functions of an
architectural critic who is concerned with engagement with the larger
cultural/historical issues, and concerned with the larger cultural
critical forms. And so that's what I was really trying to get at in
the piece and that's what was on my mind as I stepped to the podium
there.
MC: You brought up some interesting critical points in that essay.
Some of our readers may not know this, but you regularly lecture on
architecture at architecture schools all over the country. I know
that you've been at several places also in Canada. In speaking to
such a broad audience in your travels, do you see anyone out there
responding to your call for new cultural practices to find their way

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into architectural discourse? And if so, who is responding to that
and what are they doing?
CW: Really in all honesty when I read through you all's number one,
volume one - that to me was the most significant reponse. Ah, now
again you see I don't really read architectural critical papers in
the variety of periodicals regularly - therefore, there might be some
persons out there who I've simply overlooked, you know. But when I
actually sat down and went through you all's work, it seemed to me
that you had already taken it far beyond my little cryptic remarks
about, you know, Corbu and Josephine Baker and others. So that I must
really say Appendx more than any other forum that I know of. I read
Assemblage irregularly. But when I read it I still see a certain
reluctance at times to really highlight the specificity of
architectural criticism I must say, a real sense to want to
appropriate Foucault, Derrida, and all the fascinating figures. But
to really get inside architectural history, and to tease out those
silences and those blindnesses there - I haven't seen that at work.
Now, I must say, there's this wonderful thesis written by Thia
Blassingame - you all probably heard about that thesis - it was a
senior thesis this year. I was on the committee. She's the daughter,
you know, of John Blassingame, the great Yale historian. It's a
wonderful thesis focusing primarily on Taylor. It's more
historiographical than theoretical - which is, you know, fine for
undergrad - but a tremendous work done on the old, as you know, the
1892 valedictorian of MIT and going down to Tuskegee and then looking
at his work over thirty-five/forty years and then his legacy - this
is at Howard and other places. It's a kind of straight-forwardist
history. It's not the kind of thing that Brother Travis does - which
is a kind of interesting reportage. I think you all had a review of

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that? Because it really tries to get at the attempt of Taylor to
provide his own voice, his architectural voice within a intersecting
context of the classical, neoclassical, and so on and so forth,
Victorian and what have you, you see. And so she really does an
interesting job in that regard. And so I must say Appendx at a high-
powered theoretical level - Appendx; but I think that Thia
Blassingame's thesis is worth mentioning in this regard.
MC: I want to follow up on two things that you just brought up. You
brought up Assemblage and you brought up Jack Travis' African-
American Architects in Current Practice. In Breaking Bread, for
example, you said "...we must never lose sight of what some of the
silences are in the work of White theorists, especially as those
silences relate to issues of class, gender, race, and empire." Now,
given the context of the things that are out there that you refer to,
what do you see as the "silences" in the works of contemporary white
(and I'm speaking of white ideologically) architectural critics and
theorists that we should not lose sight of? And I include black
blindnesses and silences also in the work of black theorists.
CW: I think you have to answer that at different levels. At the level
of just form - some of the things that I alluded to in my piece need
serious, serious scrutiny /examination /deepening /refining /and so
forth. So that when we talk about notions of human proportionality,
and when we talk about the ways in which forms and styles have been
predicated on certain models of human proportionality, then we're
actually talking in part about aesthetics of the human body as well
as the shape of various buildings. And when you look at black, brown,
red bodies - look at their noses, their hips, their lips, and so
forth and so on. And when you look at the shapes of various buildings

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- now, for example I live three months of the year in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia, as you know, has its own distinctive architectural history
- you know, builds homes in a certain kind of way, it tends to be
round. It's almost eskimo-like. It's circular, with its own special
kind of tops using, of course, their available resources and the
level of technology that they have access to. That those particular
shapes tend to be associated with the Brutalist styles and the exotic
styles and the so-called Primitivist styles and so forth and so on.
And those to me are just beginning, because those are categories that
need to be actually analyzed and disaggregated and demystified and
deconstructed because they in part do serve as a kind of other form
from classical bodies and classical noses and classical hips and
classical buildings you see. And so at the level of just form and
style, that for me is an important starting point. Then, though,
beyond form and style we also have got to look at space, and where
these various buildings are put and their relation to the way in
which black and brown bodies are contained in other spaces; or the
relation between the spaces where black and brown bodies are vis-a-
vis spaces where architectural edifices are put. Then, of course,
there's the level, of course, of just sheer labor - of actually who's
building the dern things? And that has to do with a certain kind of
social history that I allude to at the very end of the piece on
"Race and Architecture." Then there's the nitty-gritty business of
the relation to the money classes and the property classes and the
ruling elites of the day. And, how do racial ideologies circulate
among those elites as they deal with the architects who must gain
some access to their resources to build these buildings? Now that
seems to be much more far-fetched than the other three, but my hunch
is that if you push that far enough there still might be some highly
mediated links. I don't know - these are all very very open-ended

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hypotheses - you know what I mean? They're very vague formulations
as to these lines of inquiry.
MC: In putting these issues in a larger context, the issues of
elitism come up. And, according to some, we are in the midst of a
"cultural war." If that's the case then, from your perspective, who
are the players? Who are the warriors, so to speak? And what is the
score in that war? And if we are not in the midst of a "cultural
war," then how do you account for the ferocious attacks being waged
in academic, political, and media outlets by media elites, by
industrial elites, by academic elites and others?
CW: I'm not sure whether war is the right word. I like to reserve war
for when people are really engaged in military combat, you know what
I mean? You know, a brother was talking about, you know, "I'm at war
with my wife." I say, "well I hope not. Have your tanks out?," you
know?
But no, I mean war for me really is Klausovitchean, you know what I
mean? We're really talking about the mobilization of the brutality
and violence and so forth. But at that metaphor itself "cultuaral
comp" is something else - a kind of cultural conflict, a cultural
combativeness taking place. I would certainly go with that metaphor,
that's very much where we are now. We're in the midst of tremendous
cultural contestation and cultural combat, and it has much to with
the fact that the legacy of the 1960's has driven conservatives and
reactionaries against the wall because the disclosure of facts and
the revealing of certain 'truths' and its very promise about the past
and the social forces that have forced us to reshape not just how we
understand that past but how we go about arranging our instututions

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under ideologies of pluralism, which are suspect, but I mean ways of
justifying the new arrangement of our universities and collleges and
sometimes even high schools and even on down to elementary school.
The conservatives and the reactionaries are very upset about this.
They want to go back to what they perceive to be the househen days of
the fifties when there was all of the, you know, the snobbish
gentility and tribal civility that mediated the very low, low level
of conflict.
MC: So they want to continue to define the terms?
CW: That's exactly right! And to define the terms in such a way that
they can push back the legacy of the sixties - which is to say the
legacy of the social movements, the legacies of ordinary people
willing to live and die for various ideals to insure that the
injustice doesn't reign in the same way that it did before they began
the struggle. And that battle is actually lost for them. That's
what's so significant about Alan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind
- because on one hand it was clear, you know, it was the closing of
his mind, because he was unwilling to accept the fact that he now
lived in a different world! And it's just the facts, you know. It's
just, there's no way that he could ever go back to a time in which
just he and his white, highly cultivated and highly cultured peers
hiding and concealing all that racism, sexism, and homophobia, could
constitute this gentleman's club - that's just long gone.
MC: Is that the loss of cultural safety which you speak about when
you refer to Mattew Arnold?

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CW: That's exactly right. Now of course they make the link, you know,
between the cultural safety and that genteel context and that safety
on the street where the barbarians are raging. The barbarians for
them - who are taken into custody, and they see six-o-clock news -
tend to be black/brown men. And we barbarians, like myself, who are
inside of the academy and poising in it by calling into question that
very narrow consensus that had served as the pillar for the
conversation that was so genteel and civil you see. Now that's gone!
And he knows that. And they're upset at the liberal administrators
who preside over the institutions that allow for the pluralism to
take place. Now, I think it's become vicious partly because they know
they're so far removed from creating a situation that they want. I
mean, you know, you read the New Criterion, you know what I mean, and
you see Hilton Kramer - he is upset every issue! You say, "Come on
Kramer, settle down brother - the Marxists haven't taken over, the
feminists haven't taken over, you know that and I know that."
MC: So there's a lot of hyperbole out there?
CW: Oh yes, alarmists. All these are symptoms of this sense of being
far removed from creating a situation that they want. And it's true
of anybody who feels themselves, you know, their backs against the
wall, is not alarmist is downright conspiratorial. You see that in
the black community as well, you know, coming up with conspiratorial
theories because their back's against the wall - there's no attempt
to be able to exercise the power to transform a situation and
therefore the alarmist/hyperbolic rhetoric escalates. And, you see
that among the right in the cultural battles going on. But, as we
know, they have trememdous amounts of power - and here we're talking
about the Kramer's, not the conspiratorial black theorists from

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within the black community. They have a tremendous amount of power
because, you know, for the last twelve years they've had political
elites who were quite conservative who took their views quite
seriously; who have tried to push back as much as they could the
legacy of the sixties but they were unsuccessful for the most part in
most universities and colleges. Even though those universities and
colleges are in no way what the progressives want them to look like,
though the right wings will tell you that the progressives are
running things. But we know it's the milk-toast liberals who're
running things.
DF: Speaking of the black community and some of the black ideology
that you spoke of both inside the academia and outside of it, are you
sympathetic to those popular addages of "keeping hope alive" and
"can't we all just get along?"
CW: You know Brother Robert Gooding Williams - you may have seen his
book, Reading Rodney King, his collection of essays. I think it's
one of the best collections of essays done on that Rodney King
affair, Rodney King verdict. And he starts off in his text saying,
"Well, you know, before Rodney King said 'Can we all get along?,' he
said, 'Look, wer'e all stuck here together.'" And it's much more that
shiboleth I'd want to come to terms with than 'can we get along.'
Because we're not gonna even begin to seriously answer Brother
Rodney's question unless we acknowledge what is the nature of the way
in which we're stuck here together. Because I think we really are
stuck here together and therefore the sheer kind of facticity of our
circumstances - which must be understood, how did we get stuck in the
way we did?; why are we hierarchically stuck so that certain folk
have more pain and misery than other folk even though we're still

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stuck together? And once we understand the historical dynamics of it,
the power dynamics of it, and some of the history of trying to
transform the nature of our hierarchically-stuck-together state, then
we're beginning to move toward an answer to the question 'Can we get
along?' Now the earlier adage that you mentioned was - now what was
that?
DF: "Keeping hope alive."
CW: "Keeping hope alive." Now with Jesse - I'm, I'm a little bit
suspicious of it because he often believes that he's the one that's
gonna keep the hope alive.
I like that, the claim itself, but I don't think you can keep hope
alive unless you thoroughly democratize the notion of how one goes
about doing it. It can't be done by any charismatic leadership, it
can't be done simply by means of a brilliant, sacrificial,
hardworking... as well as ah - how would you describe Jesse - a kind
of ah..."stage(d) senate leadership." So that I like, you know, the
basic slogan, but the question is: how do you unpack it and what do
you mean by it in relation to ordinary folk, in relation to their own
grassroot organizing their own grassroot mobilizing and so forth. So
that in a way, yes, I like that. I think we have to keep the best of
the black freedom struggle alive, the best of freedom struggles
across the border alive, which includes the intellectual dimension of
those struggles - which means building on those minds that came
before and spent the kind of time and energy to think of what was the
nature of our hierarchical stuck-togetherness. And then once we've
had that kind of vital conversation - again I think Appendx makes a

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major contribution in this regard, but so does Reconsruction in its
own way, so does Transition- you all read Transition don't you?...
MC: Absolutely.
CW: ...yeah, Gates and Appiah's operation, very important journal I
think in some way. All of these make their contribution toward
keeping alive a kind of vital conversation so that we can understand
this sense in which we're all stuck together across race and class,
understand the hierarchies, keep track of the scars and bruises of
those hierarchies, the scars and bruises caused by those hierarchies,
and then say: 'look - concretely - we have an answer to the question,
'Can we get along?' There's a sense in which the answer to Rodney
King's question is like the conclusion of an Aristotlian syllogism -
which is, you go through the reasoning and the analysis but the
conclusion is action. Action not just in the crude sense of bodies
mobilized, but action grounded on sense of history, sense of
analysis, sense of vision. So there's a theoretical element too that
action. Aristotle understood that, of course. But when you say action
in America, you know, it usually means let's go buy a keg of beer...
you know, that flat one-dimensional kind of thing, you know what I
mean?
DF: Considering the politics of "hope" and "getting along" as you've
described them - how would you place the black church, any
denomination you wish to describe, even your own, in terms of its
effectiveness in dealing with mounting cultural anxieties in this
country?

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CW: I think in some ways the black church provides one of the
elements that can serve as a response to it, in another way that
provides a large number of elements as part of the problem. The first
part would be that you have to be able to tap into and speak to not
just the situation but the needs of ordinary folk and you have to
accent those institutions that have been created by those folk which
includes the stories, the narratives, the songs, ritual, and so on.
Now, as we know, those are all quite diverse. The stories are
different, interpretation of the narratives are different, the songs,
the style of singing, and so forth. But you have to have some organic
link of that. Not organic link so much as a sympathetic understanding
of it if you're actually gonna probe deeply into the culture of
ordinary folk. And therefore the black church, in its prophetic wing,
I think will always provide a very crucial element in terms of
responding to the problem of cultural anxiety, then social misery.
Now that too becomes a part of the problem because in a crisis such
as ours, there's a tendency to do two things, and this is true for
any institution in trouble, with waning influence: you want to freeze
and become altrified and petrified and keep doing the same thing
because repetition becomes a sign of vitality even though you know
that if it's repetition without responding to new circumstances it's
also a sign of decline. But you just want to repeat over and over
again the past - hold onto to it, cling tenaciously to it, and we're
seeing that at work. The other response is to adapt and adjust your
institution to the dominant forces such that your institution will
keep step with those forces. So that, the dominant forces in our
society are market forces, and so you see more and more market
religion in the churches - from televangelism, black telvangelists,
to various word churches, non-denominational churches that claim to
be ecumenical. But what they really mean is they're just gaining

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access to peoples pockets across denominations, like Fred Price and
others. See he doesn't want to stay in one denomination because he
wouldn't have as many material posessions, he wouldn't get as much
cash. He wants everybody to come and get exploited. So that you
really do have these two deeply reactionary responses that are quite
afoot in the black church tradition right now.
But I, of course, hold on to that "prophetic slice" that will be one
element among others that, for me, would be the beginnings of a
serious and substantive response to the cultural anxieties and social
misery that you alluded to.
DF: Final question: How would you respond to those people who would
say that your recent success - your $100,000 book advances, the
travel, the notoriety, the elite academic institutions - how would
you respond to those people who say that that very association has
affected your ability to speak to the masses?
CW: Well, I haven't really had a chance to speak to the masses, you
know, so it's really in some ways untested. We know the masses are
not just one homogeneous blob out there. They have their own
different groupings and different kinds of constituencies and so
forth. But I think it's actually untried and untested at this point.
Certainly I think there ought to be great suspicion on behalf of the
larger community, but especially the black community - where any
black spokesperson or intellectual who comes with the accolades of
the dominant American cultural industry. And so I think that
suspicion is well-grounded and that just means I have to engage in
forms of demystification. So that when they in fact encounter (me),
they see that somehow this little blood got through, he slipped

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through you see, and that what they thought they were getting when
they talked about "multiracial alliance" and talk about
"Christianity" and he smiling and likes to talk about "love" all the
time and so forth - that they end up with a little radical brother on
their hands. And so if they take the whole vision and analysis
seriously, then the critique is brought to bear. Now on the other
hand, if there's evidence of a thorough-going dilution of that
radical message on my part just in order to 'go mainstream,' then
again I deserve all the criticism I can get, and rightly so. But
usually that is more a matter of a particular kind of decision that I
would make and a decision that I think would bear very little fruit
in terms of my own, you know, sense of calling. But it would keep me
honest and so I deeply appreciate that. Even when I travel now in
black communities and they read my newspaper and my Time magazine
articles, a whole lot - especially young black folk - oh, theyr'e
deeply suspicious: this three-piece suit, wearing a tie - 'who in the
world do he think he is?' They come in with their pants all the way
down on their sides, barely holding up on their knees like TLC, you
know. They say, 'wait a minute.' But then when they listen, we have
dialogue, you show them respect, you recognize that intellectual
humility is not something you're just talking about but you - it's
integral to your sense of personal collective struggle - then it
opens them up. And they leave thinking, "my God I thought he was one
of these Time magazine negro, but he end up something else." Well,
see that's demystification. Because all they have to go on is Time
magazine, and therefore they oughtta be suspicious, you know. And
rightly so. But as you know, it's always a perennial process of
accountability. And those mechanisms of accountability in a variety
of forms must always be in place and operative for each and every one
of us, and rightly so. And that's I think what it means to take

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democratic sensibility seriously as an intellectual. And we know, you
know, it takes other forms - a politician, a doctor, or other
different kinds of vocations and professions that are out there.
MC: Well, thank you very much.
CW: Thank you all very much, very much so. And you all keep up the
good work though. I'm telling you, that Appendx is something else!
It's something.
MC/DF: Thank you.
CW: Stay strong now.

APPENDX 2 CORNEL WEST INTERVIEW

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APPENDX 2 CORNEL WEST INTERVIEW