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.

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.

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.

I don't want to overvalue Donald Trump as some historical rupture, and to admit that I do think Trump is an indication of a fairly profound change. But the change started a while ago, and it has taken a while to appear. Global capital, particularly western capital, has been in decline since the late 60s and early 70s. The softness appeared in the 60s, the profit rate fell off the table in 1972 - 73, and there have been very uneven recoveries. This has been an ongoing weakening of the productive economy of accumulation at a global scale, of capital's capacity to expand.

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.

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.

There are places in the world where it's easier than in the US to be a person who produces theory and not require the university for sustenance. And there are still places in the world where there is lively poetry communities largely divorced from academia. That's been destroyed in the US. In the US, famously, there were a lot of counter-spaces that lasted into the 60s and 70s, like the Black Arts Movement. They were systematically broken, often by the government, and the workshop arose in their place.