Even as I've become more reticent about the political possibilities of the academic space, I want to note that students have played significant roles in insurrectionary activity across the globe for decades and centuries, and I don't think that we've crossed some threshold where that's never going to happen again. We still need to take the university space quite seriously.

I don't want to be hubristic about art's possibilities. I don't think that art has a causal relationship to revolution. I do think it's a way people coordinate or orient their own often-inchoate experiences, sometimes willfully. With "The Masque of Anarchy," one of the things I note is that many political movements over time have made use of it as a way to orient themselves and to narrate what they were doing.

For a long time, early industrializing countries were absorptive. They were endlessly able to absorb new labor inputs to keep expanding. This was both an economics and a worldview. Here in the United States, we have the Statue of Liberty sitting in the harbor in New York, which says in huge letters, We stand for absorptive capital. A poetic version: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses." But what it means is, Come here, we'll absorb you. We absorb these inputs and add them to our growing economy, and we manage this with liberal democracy.

People do make considered choices about whether they want to fight, and how, and they do so from disparate circumstances. But I think there are two important frameworks in which those choices get made. One, their degree of immiseration. The greatest predictor of who will engage in criminal activity is poverty, which tells us that the decisions people make about how unlawful they're willing to be are decisively based in their own experience of immiseration. The second framework is that when people choose to act, they inevitably act where they are.

People often say, "Riots aren't revolutions." That's true. The vast majority of riots never become revolutionary. On the other hand, show me the revolution that started without a riot.

I'm trying to mediate between individual agency and structural determination. I accept that people make individual choices, quite thoughtful, quite careful, quite difficult choices, but they don't make them without constraints that shape what choices are possible and provide the intensity of the push toward choosing.

The university is one of various funding structures by which people who want to do theoretical work stay alive, the same way that people go to grad school, not because they think it's going to change the world but because there's no patron system anymore, and they need some scaffolding of support while they're trying to figure out how they can proceed in their lives. I think that's utterly legit. A lot of our better theorists and thinkers, that's what the university is for them.