Sara Marcus

DC

So just maybe start with Political Disappointment, the book. I think one thing that kind of strikes a lot of us who have read it is how much music plays a central role. You even talk about how you might not have intended to start from an interest in music, but then it kind of seeps in, and there's a very rigorous theoretical framework for why music might play such an important role. But knowing you personally, I know that you also have very personal investments in music. You were a musician in a past life, right?

SM

I mean, I still noodle around.

DC

Can you tell us about what you used to play in the past and what you still do, what kind of music you still make? I don’t even know the names of the bands you were in, and we’ve known each other for decades now.

SM

They’ve been lost to obscurity. Rightfully so. But okay: I started playing piano as a very young child, spurred by a competitive spirit: My older brother played and I wanted to catch up to him. He taught me a bit, and then I had lessons. I got into playing punk rock in high school. My best friend was a drummer—his name is Mat, he’s now a recording engineer in Baltimore. He taught me the basics of playing drums, and then I joined a band with some of my good friends who needed a bassist. Our friend Hugh was singing and playing bass, and our friend Saran was playing drums, and then Hugh wanted to just sing on more songs, so he taught me his bass parts. And then Saran wrote a few songs that she would sing, and she taught me her drum parts, and we would all switch instruments.

That was my first real band. We were called AKA Harlot #1, because it was the mid ’90s and we were a Huggy Bear–loving Riot Grrrl band from Washington, DC. We played our second show ever at Fort Reno, which is this storied summer concert series in DC, Fugazi plays there every year and it’s been going since the early ’80s. I almost want to say that we opened for Trans Am? Some real band. Hugh was very well connected in the DC scene; he went on to be in the band Black Eyes, which was a Dischord band.

Anyway, we were a band for about a year. My friend Ginger Brooks Takahashi joined that band the summer after our first year of college, and then we were a quartet. Ginger and I started playing together in our senior year of college, in a duo band called Boys of Now. Ginger played bass, I played drums, we both sang, and we auditioned several guitarists and didn’t really like any of them, so we just stayed a duo band. The year after college, we moved to Philly, we played around in town and around the Northeast, we put out a cassette, and we put out a seven-inch with three songs on it. Our big adventure is that we went on tour with The Need in 2000—the great queercore duo band from Olympia.

Then that band broke up and then I joined this band of boys in Philly called Persons, playing poppy, Talking Heads–y, super fun music. And then I moved to New York and played in various bands over my years there. One was called Castles, one was called The Long Lost, one was called Luxton Lake. And then I put my drums into storage to finish Girls to the Front because I just didn't have the time to practice and play shows. I lent my drums to somebody who I haven't gotten them back from, and gave up my rent on the practice space and just focused on the book. I think it was the right move, but I do miss playing in bands.

I haven’t had a band since leaving New York, other than this quick moment as a grad student in Princeton when I played in a professor band. There are some dads in South Bend who, when we get together at barbecues, we’re like, "We’re totally gonna be in a band, dude, we’re gonna do it." [Laughs.] But I don’t know when we’re going to have the time because, like, Sunday you have to get the kids to ice skating, and Saturday you have to... It’s hard to find time.

DC

I relate. And I love how talking about how you’re gonna be in a band someday is its own genre of conversation.

SM

We need a name, though. If you want to have a fake band with people, you need to at least name it and maybe make a t-shirt even if you can’t practice. I should definitely move forward on the name and the t-shirt situation.

DC

I like that it’s very clear in your mind that the drums are still lent out to somebody. The intentional lack of closure there is really kind of moving.

SM

I told my students recently whom I had lent them to. I don’t know how this came up, but I was telling them that story and I was like, "I have no idea how to find her." And they were like, "What is she called? What was her band?" And I told them and they looked it up and they were like, "We found her. You can still talk to her and get them back."[Laughs.]

And I was like, "That’s amazing, but I don’t even have anywhere to put them now." But I would like to get back my ride cymbal, because that was a legendary ride cymbal. I went to this third floor walk-up place up above Times Square and took out every cymbal on the shelf and played them and listened to them and then I picked one that I liked. And none of them had prices written on them, and it turned out I had chosen the most expensive cymbal. I couldn’t afford it, but it was too late: I had fallen in love with the sound of it. It was a heavy vintage Zildjian jazz ride cymbal with this rich, deep, almost syrupy sound, and I was just like, "I need it." [Laughs.] I put it on my credit card. I really miss that cymbal.

DC

Wow. So I hear the ambivalence in your voice when you say, "I think it was the right decision to put aside music and focus on Girls to the Front."

SM

Well, to put aside playing. One thing that’s important here is that I wasn’t a very good drummer. I loved playing drums, but I was only okay. I was friends with all these people in great bands. Anybody could have invited me to be in a band, and they mostly didn’t, because I didn’t really keep very good time. [Laughs.] And I worked, but I think there’s an inborn capacity issue where with certain activities you hit a ceiling, and I hit that in drumming.

DC

It feels like a lot of the people who kind of came through that scene have also turned and moved on to writing or turned to writing as a parallel practice. Did you see that already happening when you were making music? Was that in the cards for you clearly?

SM

I knew that music was secondary to writing pretty much the whole time. There was maybe one or two years when I was practicing drums every day and taking lessons and trying to see if I could get good enough to make music the center of my life. But even while I was working on that, I was also writing freelance music criticism and journalism, and sometimesI would send a friend some random email, or write a memo for a political group I was in, and people would be like, "You’re such an amazing writer, why are you not writing more?" Nobody ever said, "Why are you not drumming more?" [Laughs.]

So, you sort of get your cues. For a little while, the route to becoming a better musician had looked like more of a sure thing to me than the route to becoming a better writer. It was obvious that you could reliably become better at playing an instrument just through practicing a certain amount every day. The input-output equation was very clear to me there, maybe because that was how it had worked for me with piano up to a point, but it was harder for me to see how that worked with writing. The thing is, it does work with writing, but it's not as visible. With piano and even with drums, you can apply yourself to a measure or to a figure and keep at it until you have it right. And that isn't how writing works at all. But you do get better with practice; it's just not visible the same way, and certainly when you're 22 and you've just gotten out of college, it’s much harder to visualize that arc.

DC

Was the indirectness of that equation appealing to you at all?

SM

No. It seemed very unfair and opaque and I wanted to have a clear plan of, like, if I practice two hours a day for this long then I'll get here at the end. And I think it was not really until my first time going to MacDowell, when I was reading and writing for eight or 10 hours a day—which wasn't my life otherwise, I had jobs—going to MacDowell for six weeks when I was writing Girls to the Front changed all of that, because that was when I understood the difference. With writing, getting better isn’t a question of doing something for two hours a day and seeing improvement at the end of the week. It's more about getting yourself deep into the writing and staying there for weeks at a time, and then something different does happen.

DC

Now that you’ve been writing for so long and you’ve thought about that winding, mysterious path one follows to become a better writer, do you notice yourself having become better in any way?

SM

I think the thing that gets easier and better is the ability to write it badly first and to not be held back by that. It sounds arrogant for me to be like, "But then I did get to be a better writer." Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I’ve just become more confident. I was about to say it doesn’t feel like I’m jumping off a cliff every time, but it still does. But now there’s this part of my brain that’s like, "Yeah, but eventually you’ll find what you’re really trying to say here.”

DC

There's a professional cyclist who talks about how the hills never get easier, you just get faster, but it just always feels equally hard climbing those hills. Which I think about all the time. Yeah. I don't know. And so now you've ended up in the English department at Notre Dame, which makes a lot of sense on the one hand, but it's also, it wouldn't have been obvious to me that that would have been the route you would go, say like 10 years ago. Especially because music does figure so much in Political Disappointment, but also in your wider writing, your criticism. The journal you edit is about music, right? So, what led you to an English department as a place you wanted to land?

SM

I only applied to English departments when I was applying to grad school. In retrospect, musicology might have been a nice place for me to land. Maybe the problem was music theory. In college I took Music 210, which you probably took also, which is a lot of chordal analysis, harmonization, composition. I loved doing it and thinking about things that way, but I didn’t have a framework for understanding how it fit into my political and aesthetic interests otherwise. At that point I was also taking a lot of classes on literary theory and queer film and video, and being super energized by that. I couldn’t figure out how the music piece connected. I think what I’m describing is music remaining extracurricular to my academic interests for a really long time in a way that it didn’t have to.

DC

Right.

SM

Deciding to apply to graduate programs in literature was, on one level, about prioritizing my scholarly interests in literature and cultural history and politics over my investments in music, which I considered less “academic.” But at the same time, that application process was always driven by my desire to go to Princeton, in large part because Daphne Brooks was there. I knew her work from the EMP Pop Conference scene, and she was doing such brilliant things at the intersection of music and performance, literature, cultural history and politics, and working in academic and nonacademic and para-academic settings, while being based in an English department. So even as I might have consciously thought I was choosing literature over music, my identifications and aspirations were clearly shaped by a wish that I wouldn’t be required to choose.

And then I got to grad school and started writing about music again, and getting positive feedback about it. If I was writing a paper, I might put in a little bit about music, just because I couldn’t help myself, and people would be like, "That stuff is great." That, plus Daphne Brooks’s example, helped me see that not only is it possible not to choose, but insisting on an interdisciplinary approach enables you to say something that would be harder to get at if you were just talking about one specific kind of object.

DC

You’ve mentioned, maybe in previous interviews, that people always say to you, "Oh, you're writing about Political Disappointment. That seems really timely." And which kind of leads to this question of, are we sort of perpetually politically disappointed? Is that something that's resonant in an evergreen way? But in your book you also clarify that there is a permanent, almost intrinsic disappointment to being part of any kind of civil society where a part of politics is making compromises and maybe no one is happy all of the time and maybe no one is ever happy. And it seems like, as you see it, that's not necessarily the kind of political disappointment you're looking at. You're actually looking at moments when there is a pronounced waning, maybe, in a collective sense of possibility. Is that right?

SM

Well, I’m looking at moments in the wake of times when it seemed like something could change in a real way. Those moments of possibility usually end without the degree of change that had seemed possible actually coming about. And so Political Disappointment is the story of what people did over the course of the 20th century with the leftover and untimely desires that remain in the aftermath of those closures of possibility. So, yes, that's a slightly different thing from, your person didn't win the election, or your person did win the election but then didn't pass the law you wanted them to. The question about whether it's an evergreen is a difficult one, in part because we haven't been in our current political predicament—which I see as primarily what's been going on in American politics since 2016—we haven't been there long enough for me to be able to say whether the letdowns of the past seven years are of the same order and in the same mold as the 20th-century ones that I discuss in the book, or whether it's a different kind of thing created because of a more thoroughgoing breakdown in a shared understanding of reality; or whether it's based in a real apocalyptic sense of an environmental endpoint of the livability of our planet, which really could very well change the tenor of what political non-attainment feels like and how it’s experienced.

There might be a contrast between our current condition and the 20th century, where in every case I look at, disappointment opens up on a certain hope. I didn’t mean to write a book that said that. I was really writing against what I saw as an intellectually dishonest and politically unsatisfying overinvestment in hope on the left. I saw a lot of left thinking that was either utopian, on the one hand, or thinking about failure as radical, on the other hand. In both cases I discerned a block against actually tuning into the experience of not getting something that you’d thought you were on your way to getting. I really just wanted to sort of map that out without the limitation of a frame like melancholy or grief, both of which had been written about a lot already. I felt that melancholy and grief already came to their object with a predetermined sense of, number one, what the feeling was going to be like—melancholia is a particular affective flavor—and number two, the quality of the loss itself, because grief concerns itself with an irrevocable loss.

And both of these were things I wanted to leave open, because I thought coming to the project with those lenses was going to inhibit a fuller portrait and mapping out of what the 20th century looked like for left aspirations and their disappointments. What I found, almost against my will, was that almost everybody in the 20th century thought there would be another chance to do it better: that this disappointment was not for once and for all. And I’m not sure yet whether that is just something to look back on with wistfulness—“Gee, it must have been nice to feel that about your disappointments"—or whether, when people now can’t see a way forward, that might just be our failure because we’re too mired in the moment. I would need another 10 or 20 years before I could even begin to have an informed take that. This is why I went into the academy instead of writing quick takes, because I’m not great at just hazarding a guess. I feel more comfortable digging into an archive and having a slow take.

So, is disappointment an evergreen? When people say to me, "Oh, you’re writing about political disappointment, that’s so timely," they have in mind something a lot less particular and specific than how I define the term here. But I think that that’s part of what makes it helpful, because it’s like a funnel to get them into thinking about the specific ways political nonfulfillment played out in the 20th century.

DC

It’s interesting that you’re mapping disappointment and the specific way you’re articulating it to a uniquely twentieth-century condition. With the suggestion that we have just enough perspective now that we can feel relatively confident that this is about the 20th century—whereas you’re feeling like maybe possibly where we are now is an entirely different ballgame?

SM

I can’t rule it out.

DC

You can’t...

SM

When the book was partly done, everybody would be like, "Well, of course you’re going to need a coda where you talk about the present day.” But I just don’t have the epistemological arrogance to say whether the cycle is continuing to the present day in the same form.

DC

I want to come back to that, but one question that kept coming to mind was, how does your framing of disappointment, as you see it, fit in with Sianne Ngai’s idea of Ugly Feelings? A feeling that’s not grand and prestigious, that doesn’t motivate towards action, but that leads to almost like a blockage or inaction. Which, I don’t mean to say that your articulation of political disappointment clearly, immediately registered as an ugly feeling, but rather I was curious to hear how you see your theorization of disappointment brushes up or intersects with her framing.

SM

The phrase of Ngai’s that’s so helpful there is "restricted agency." She draws this link between the feelings that she identifies as ugly feelings, such as envy, or what she calls “stuplimity”...

DC

And there’s like a paranoia maybe.

SM

She's like, these are feelings, they're emotional experiences that are perfect for literature and art, because literature and art themselves are operating under a notion of a restricted agency. If you have an idea of the aesthetic, it's often going to be an idea of a realm that isn't easily instrumentalizable toward a political outcome. And the feelings that Ngai is writing about either resist instrumentalization or else they're ambiguous: They could be mobilized just as equally toward the left or to the right.

One of the things I loved so much about Ugly Feelings was that she’s writing during the heyday of affect theory, when people are trying to map out, "Well, what's our account of affect? How is an affect different from an emotion? How is it different from a feeling?" And Ngai does this wonderful thing in her intro where she talks through all the debates and all the different ways that people talk about them. And then she says something like, "The difference between emotion, affect and feeling will be at some points in this book less important than others, as people may glean by the fact that I basically use the words interchangeably." [Laughs.] She’s like, "Yes, I know what Brian Massumi says, and I know what all these people say. I’m just going to say that it’s not that useful for what I’m doing, and here’s why." She was like, the difference between an emotion and affect for these people is that an affect is how someone else would talk about that emotional experience, and an emotion is how the person having it would talk about it: It’s the difference between first person and third person. And she says, "Precisely that slippage is actually one of the things that’s interesting in the feelings I’m writing about. So instead of trying to resolve the conflict, I’m just going to let it vibrate"—that’s not exactly her language, but she says she’ll let it remain operative in the book.

DC

So then as you see it, is disappointment something that resists instrumentalization in that way?

SM

One reason I loved the restricted agency in Ngai so much is because of how it pushes against a tendency in academic writing to overascribe political efficacy to your aesthetic objects. And in addition to my history as a musician, I also have a history as a political organizer. When I first lived in New York, I worked at a foundation that funds community organizing. So, I have some professional training in what makes change happen, and a strong interest in how books and other forms of culture play into that. But I don’t have a ton of patience for the common academic argument that says something like, "This book models a new way of relating and therefore makes it possible. Hooray, hooray." And so I found the willingness to think about restricted agency in Ngai’s very refreshing and courageous and honest.

DC

That’s super interesting. You talk about the intergenerational aspect of Political Disappointment, and intergenerational collaborations. I was wondering if you could speak a bit about how your experience of parenthood has factored into how you’re thinking about this?

SM

Yes, I did say that you could ask me that question. [Laughs.] And now I have to answer it.

DC

You can rescind the permission you gave me.

SM

No, I gave you permission to ask about it because I thought it would be interesting to think about. It's something I haven't really thought about before. There is this intergenerational piece of my argument in Political Disappointment that comes in most strongly in the last chapter about the AIDS epidemic, where I talk about listening for the dead and being in coalition with one's ancestors and assembling a lineage to which you can hold yourself accountable. And so some of the heaviest work that I did toward the end of this project, trying to figure out what all this writing I’d done over the past nine years added up to, and what it might do for the world, ended up having to do with locating myself in a lineage. How do I acknowledge all of the people in this book as ancestors to whom I'm accountable?

In the last chapter, I’m writing about Marlon Riggs’s dream about Harriet Tubman [that he talks about in Black Is…Black Ain’t (1994)], and I’m writing about David Wojnarowicz driving across the New Mexico desert and thinking about his friends who have died, and then listening to Tracy Chapman on behalf of his friends who have died and doing a sort of duet with her. I’m thinking about their engagement with their ancestors, and my engagement with their engagements, what it means to understand their engagements as an inheritance to take on with gratitude and responsibility. In that sense, I don’t come to this book as a parent; I come to this book as a descendant.

But also, I remember a moment at the very beginning of this whole parenting business, I remember very clearly having a sense of all the containers around me dissolving. Ordinary times fell away, and it felt like I was embedded in eternity in this totally unstructured and terrifying way. I’m not even talking about giving birth, I’m just talking about finding out that I would be a parent. In that moment, I’m neither parent nor child. I’m just sort of formless. And there’s a little bit of that quality that I am accessing and trying to convey somewhat in that final chapter. I mean, it gets very mystical.

I tried to signpost the end of the book and explain what I was doing, but I think it still does get a little woo by the end.

DC

Without being, “And disappointment opens up to hope.”

SM

Disappointment opens up to what Wojnarowicz calls, in the tape, the feeling of being placed between “the long, long road up ahead of me and the long, long road in the rearview mirror.” He calls it a... What does he call it? A mortality hallucination? Yeah: "Then suddenly feeling like it's a moment of, of aa mortality hallucination, where I realize just how alive I am and also the impermanence of it. [Finds page in book and sings along: Still ain’t got a job, and I work in a market.] Yeah, I'm alive, but, you know, I could be dead in another year from now or two years from now. [sings: I’ll get promoted and we’ll move out of the shelter.] And I won't see this road, and I won't see the sunlight, and I won't see these fast trucks driving by—the long, long road up ahead of me, and the long, long road in the rearview mirror."

And that brings him this intense peace in that tape, which, as any of us who are familiar with Wojnarowicz knows, was pretty elusive for him a lot of the time. I love the “mortality hallucination.” I’m not even sure what he means by that, unless it’s something of the formlessness and void and located-ness. Now I really am getting into mystical shit. So you should bring me back to earth. [Laughs.]

DC

Reading your book got me thinking a lot about recurrence. You talked earlier about a lot of political disappointment in the 20th century, having that sense of people who had experienced the disappointment nonetheless still feeling they’ll be able to do it better again. We haven’t kind of lost all hope. The disappointment doesn’t equate with the hopelessness. In terms of political movements at least.

And then you’re also connecting that to cultural records, music, literature. And so that got me thinking a lot about trends in music and literature and the ways that things return. Ryan McNamara’s joke about how culture stopped in the ’90s. Jason Farago’s recent piece in the Times about how nothing is new. And we can debate all that and argue all of this, but when cultural moments come back and there is a gesture towards the retro, I think we tend to have a very different feeling about that than we have when a younger generation takes up the mantle of a political movement that an older generation, for whatever reason, put aside.

As we all know, that Tracy Chapman song has become very much a part of our lives again thanks to the Luke Combs cover. And those of us who experienced it the first time around have been a little bit, maybe, taken aback. For many reasons which we won’t get into here. But on top of the obvious problematic aspects, there is the sense, when culture recurs and loops back, "That this isn’t enough." Or, "Who do these kids think they are?" There’s a sense of loss of authenticity or maybe a thinness in innovation or inspiration, as opposed to politics where maybe there’s a sense that we absolutely need a next generation to drive things forward.

SM

But I don't think I would want to see a total throwback political movement either. We create new things in the guise of old things, often because those are the forms that are available to us. I think that Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire says something to that effect, in writing about the 1848 revolution in France. But it can't just be a rehash. I do interviews with high school students a lot who want to interview me about Girls to the Front, and they always say, "How could we bring Riot Grrrl back now?" And I always say, "You’ve got to look around at your own life and make something that speaks to the current moment and speaks to your frustrations. Take inspiration from Riot Grrrl, but don't just revive it."

I think part of what I love in the archive of disappointment in the 20th century is that there are so many moments of people referencing past moments of disappointment in dealing with their own, and finding material and finding resources and finding wisdom, or finding a useful comparison to bump the present off against in trying to come to terms with their own moment.

So as for the romance of the all-new or the rupture, I didn’t read the Farago piece, but I think it was probably easier to think about innovation and newness as positive in the 20th century than it is now, when our only hope for species survival seems to be sort of a rolling back of progress in some way, and going back to something simpler. Maybe that’s why the shock of the new doesn’t inspire people as it used to. Or maybe, as I saw some people saying on the internet, it’s just that there’s no money and people can’t all live together in the East Village like they did in the ’ 80s to live cheaply and have a crazy drag troupe or whatever. But even now, some of the most amazing performance is happening in drag, and it’s getting demonized and criminalized.

So that’s what we do to things that are new and different. Not what we in this room do, but what America does.

SM

Maybe it's time to...

DC

I think maybe it's time to...

SM

Give the...

DC

Open it up for...

SM

Space for other people.

DC

Yeah. Are there any questions in the room?