Jacob Conrad -----------------------
[The following interview appeared in Political Affairs, January 2003. For copies please write pa at p... or Political Affairs, 235 W 23rd St., NY, NY 10011.]
Editors note: Tony Kushner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and a gay activist, has written a number of plays, including Angels in America, Part 1: The Millenium, Angels in America, Part 2: Perestroika, Slavs!: Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness and Homebody/Kabul. In addition, Kushner has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the NEA, the Whiting Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also received a Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Fellowship and a medal for Cultural Achievement from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. Angeles in America is being made into a HBO film directed by Mike Nichols. Kushner's new play Caroline or Change will open on Broadway in September. Kushner was interviewed by Joe Sims.
PA: You emphasize the need to speak the truth and advocate an art that is engaged and commited. You also suggest culture is partisan. But, in theater and in the cultural world many say that culture should not be political. Why is this?
TK: I think in general there is a powerful tradition of denying the existence of politics in art. The easiest answer is what Barthes or Brecht says, that the denial of ideology is an ideology--a bourgeois ideology. The way you protect your interests is by pretending you are not speaking from a historically determined or dialectical place, but rather from some position of immutable truth that lies beyond history and critical thinking. And we like to pretend--since we pretend these truths exist--there are means of getting at those truths. Religion is one example, it is supposed to be a discourse that lies completely out of the historical framework, and art is another.
There is an anxiety that generates an attack on the notion that art is political, that art is partisan. It is a fantasy of being able to protect the purity in art, a fantasy of being able to outlast the vicissitudes of the present moment, a way of guaranteeing immortality in art, which of course increases its market value. Something that can be thought to have a life of 50 or 100 or 500 years must be worth more than something that is only of value for an instant. We know a 600 year-old statue is more valuable than one made the other day.
For American artists specifically, it's a conservative gesture that seeks to deny the extent to which democracy has succeeded. One of the ways it succeeded is in the creation of people who think politically, who have a deeply bred political common sense and an understanding of political struggle. By creating the arena of civil rights, we made public a certain kind of struggle that in other countries, even democratic countries, are hidden or in a nonpolitical arena. In America, it is all in the courts, the legislature, out on the streets. It's a civic event; it's part of the life of the state. And I think when artists deny politics a place in the theater, a place in the museum, it's a way of denying what is powerful and important as an accomplishment of American constitutional democracy.
PA: Is McCarthyism still a factor in this denial?
TK: Yes, I think McCarthyism is still certainly alive. We just had an example of it in political life rather than artistic life with the Not in Our Name statement against the war in Iraq. A journalist, who I think is actually rather well-meaning, discovered the Not in Our Name statement was organized by a group called Refuse and Resist, which was organized, although not exclusively, by people who are part of the RCP [Revolutionary Communist Party]. So an alarm was sent out, and an article appeared in Salon saying, "Are you aware that Not in Our Name is a front for the RCP?" [This] is a) completely untrue and b) red-baiting in the grand old McCarthy tradition. There is still this notion of guilt by association. I think McCarthy, the HUAC and that whole period of the red scare traumatized this country. We haven't completely recovered.
I imagine it is also operative in art. There is a fear maintained to this day that government funding for the arts is used as a tool of censorship. It's not censorship where artists are arrested and hauled off to prison. One knows certain kinds of expression simply aren't going to get funded. If you make a decision to say certain things, you realize you are probably going to be denied funding.
PA: Setting aside the problem of funding, at one point there was a broad left movement in theater, literature and Hollywood. Wouldn't you say that if the organized left wants to have influence it must engage in the arena of broad popular culture?
TK: Yes, and that still goes on. For instance, with the gay and lesbian struggles, we've triumphed on a cultural level primarily through the medium of popular entertainment. When the Christian right accuses Hollywood of peddling a homosexual agenda, they are completely correct. This is, in fact, the only thing that we've triumphed in. We've failed totally legislatively. Every time we try to pass a lesbian or gay rights or an anti-discrimination bill and certainly in the struggle to get married, we've endured terrible defeats. We are going to continue enduring them until we get a federal government that rises to its historical role, as the protector of minority rights.
But on a political level we have failed to make common cause with other groups. On a cultural level, you can't turn on television without running into lesbians and gay men. There's an enormous amount of progress that is changing this country and the world. But it's not of the organized left.
When you talk about the organized left, it's hard to know exactly what that means. I think the most activist people on the left, the people with the most radical disenchantment with capitalism, with the deepest belief there must be another way of organizing human relationships, people with a really deep understanding, a lived understanding, have fallen in love with a marginalization and a powerlessness.
PA: They've fallen in love with marginalization?
TK: I think so. People on the left constantly decry the lack of identifiable left voices on television, and in some mainstream discourse. We have been shoved to the side, and it's really a debate between the center and the far right.
That certainly is the case in legislative bodies. I don't believe that's simply a conspiracy of giant corporations. We also have lost the ability to speak in a way most people understand. There has been drifting apart of left intelligentsia and "the people," the middle class and the working class. We've become irrelevant and in a certain sense become comfortable with that. It allows us to spin fantasies that have no need to be reconciled with reality, which is an easier thing than to have to actually take responsibility for changing the world. To be a critic of the world is an easier thing than to be an activist. In a way, we have gone back before Marx and abrogated the fundamental tenet: philosophers are felt to understand the world, the point is to change it.
I worry we have drifted away. Because of the crisis of theory, because of various other kinds of crises, we have become less capable, and more and more used to being not capable.
PA: Let's talk about the crisis in theory. There is a character in your play the "Oldest Living Bolshevik" who decries the lack of a theory. Do you think that the left feels it can't proceed for lack of a grand explanation for moving forward particularly in light of what happened in the Soviet Union?
TK: Yes. I think it's complicated, because I don't know that a meta-theory can really ever have credibility again. I don't know it ever should. In my play, Homebody/Kabul, I found myself surprised in arriving at [that conclusion]. Any theory that seeks to explain all of history, and offers a single prescription for the incredible variety and the complexity of human behavior, has to rest on an oversimplification of people. Human beings are both communal beings and individuals, and to lose sight of one or the other is problematic. On the other hand, I think that in the absence of some grand theoretical ideas that can assist people in the interpretation of their own lives and suggest directions for change, we become lost.
I still believe deeply in the socialist tradition, which has taken many, many forms over the last 1000 years. But it's the notion of economic justice, something like social justice, something like a recognition finally of the communal as well as the individual, the communal basis of wealth as well as property rights. These are powerful ideas have persisted for centuries and clearly aren't gone. There is clearly great value in them. I think [what is needed is] an articulator, someone who redeems Marx from the mess Stalinism made of Marx, and in a sense Marxism made of Marx, or, a group of theories that will in a sense replace what Marx once was, because it was a theory.
PA: But did it ever claim to be all encompassing or to be the truth?
TK: I think, in a way, yes. Because it is dialectic, in a way it proclaims to be the truth in the sense that Kant and Hegel claimed the truth. It's a methodology for arriving at an unfixed and constantly changing truth. The truth is not a fixed object that lies in the past waiting to be discovered and held on to forever. The dialectical method is a way of extending reason to its absolute limits and discovering that its limits extend much farther than one would have ever imagined. It is a way to think one's way out of the nightmare of history. I think to that extent it's intended to be a grand scheme. Marx had those kind of protean ambitions, in the same way that Freud did and other thinkers of the 19th century--it was a time for that kind of thought.
The French deconstructionists are right to point out that there is a consonance between colonial ambitions and empirical empire-building ambitions, and the giant continental-sized theories of the grand thinkers of the 19th century.
It's extremely difficult to grope one's way back to what was there originally. But the work is still immensely powerful, and all you have to do is read history to see what astonishing power, the articulation of not just Marx but also Rousseau, Hegel, Kant, and what these people did by naming something. Before Rousseau, people fought for freedom but didn't know what it was they were fighting for. By giving them the name, he created the preconditions for the French Revolution. Naming is a tremendous power.
There are still principles that are so utterly irreplaceable and international. It really takes us back to 1917, and earlier of course, to look at where things went wrong. In a certain sense they went wrong in exactly the way Marx warned they would: there can be no socialism, no Communism in one country, national socialism, national identity, and national boundaries are the problem.
Effective internationalism and solidarity are so unbelievably important. The labor theory of value still holds; the notion of profit being unpaid labor is still critical. So it's how do you get all that and rescue it from the bloodbath it became mired in by Stalinism, and how do you look through it to find where it went wrong. A lot of the voices of those big battles at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century [need to be listened to]. The voices of Antonio Gramsci and Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky even, who knew exactly, at least on paper, what the errors of judgment were in Leninism. I think there is a lot of reinvestigation and reformulation that needs to happen.
PA: We have been discussing how to create a socialist alternative in the wake of these difficulties. It is like the question you posed at the end of your play Slavs, What is to be done? So how, as an artist and an activist, do you see moving forward?
TK: I was on a panel on Saturday with two Russian playwrights. The moderator read this quote from Stanley Kunitz, who I think is one of our greatest poets ever. Kunitz said that it's always the job of the artist to oppose the state. I thought about it and said I wasn't sure if that was entirely the case.
We are in a very complicated moment. It seems to me there are two areas of judgment, one is the notion of a revolutionary vanguard party that will pave the way and a rejection of democratic norms. I have a deep conviction that democracy is a good idea. All the problems of democracy can only be solved by more democracy. If there is hope, it lies in a radical vision of democracy as a universal enfranchisement. I think the big question of revolution versus evolution, which was so much a part of what 19th century political theory was about, speaks directly to the question of violence itself. I'm not a pacifist, but I wrestle all the time with my reasons for not being one. The question is about the tempo of change. Is it tolerable for current circumstances to remain the same, and how abruptly must they change? Speed is obviously necessary to save lives. But is it so necessary that a revolution is justified? And what does one make of the history of revolution, which is unfortunately a very depressing history?
So those are the questions. I think there is a question of a revolutionary fantasy and an anarchist fantasy. And I think that an exploration of those things that are problematic is what I want to work on, both as an artist and also as an activist.
What is the role of the left now? It is going to be very bad for everyone if the Republicans get hold of the Senate. The Democrats have behaved appallingly, but why is the Democratic Party, which I believe is not identical to the Republican Party, behaving so badly? Again, who is to blame? There are a huge number of progressive people in this country. Why are our voices not being heard? In part it's because we tell ourselves, and teach each other, that the machinery of American constitutional democracy, is of no value. Consequently we abdicate the field of legislative and presidential power to the middle and the right. We gave up at some point on constitutional democracy. That was a mistake.
PA: But don't you think that there is a growing movement in the unity between the left and center in the labor movement and in the peace movement? Over 100,00 people marched against war last April. Compare that the beginning of the Vietnam War.
TK: We learned from [the Vietnam War] and we remember it. The right is caught up in fantasies of WW II and has skipped over that. On the left when [we] think of war, [we] still [are] thinking, as we should, of Vietnam. So we are starting out having learned a lot, and there are changes and positive signs. But there is a lot of work to be done.
I mean take the globalism movement, the anti-globalism movement--in a sense it's both--is incredibly exciting. But it is a little bit disturbing. The extent to which it seems, at least in the demonstrations that I've gone on, to be fueled primarily by a kind of an eco- anarchism, is immensely romantic. And I can understand, I mean I'm 46--I don't mean to be condescending to anybody--but if I was 19, I wouldn't be terribly interested in who won as Senator of Minnesota. It's much sexier to put on a bandana and throw a brick through a Gap window. But where that's going to lead, I don't know.
As an incitement, as an advertisement, as a calling of attention, it is extraordinary. Where it goes from there, I think, is a big question. And I think that what you are saying is absolutely true. There are important connections being made between the left and left of center, between liberals and radicals. But there is still an immense amount of work to do to try and find a left that actually wields power.
We want to actually be able to say you are not going to bomb, because we won't let you. We can do it because there are enough progressive courageous representatives in Washington to say, "go fuck yourself," when another Bush comes back and says, "I want you to pass this resolution." I believe [we need] like 150 more Barbara Lees, then we'll be somewhere. Until we get that, where are we? Why aren't there 150 Barbara Lees? There are more than enough people who are progressive. By my sort of intuitive estimate, around 30 to 40 percent of the population really is certifiably left, so why do we feel there are six of us?
I was involved in Act Up, and one of the great lessons was that it was only about an achievable agenda, about getting things done. People worked on so many different levels. It was direct action, but it was also incredibly smart infiltration. It wasn't about hanging on to some cherished notion of being on the outside or being in opposition. Because if that's all you are, then when do you stop opposing and start creating?