When Brian Dillon and I met for this interview, at the garden of the pub near his house in Southeast London, he pulled out the tattered copy of his new book, Ambivalence, that he has been using for all his recent readings and appearances. On the interior cover, Dillon had scrawled a list of locations and page numbers, and various passages in the book have been highlighted or annotated. I love how this particular copy has become a living document and version of the story.
Ambivalence, published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo this May and in the US by New York Review Books on September 8, is an account, written from memory, of Dillon’s education. From his primary-school days in Dublin, his college years at University College Dublin, and his PhD candidacy at the University of Kent in Canterbury, Dillon traces his enduring interests in literature, art, and culture—leading not to a conclusion about how he became a writer, but continuing to ponder how he came to love the things he loves. In bookshops and libraries, in front of the television in his living, or in pubs in Dublin, the narrator of this book—alternately called “he” or “B,” though clearly based on Dillon—creates what he calls a “starchart” of coordinates, including 1980s pop music (and articles about it in the NME), Virginia Woolf, French theory, and Marcel Duchamp.
Ambivalence is a story of getting through the education system, in tandem with the sort of self-education that offers a path through culture that we curate ourselves. Pondering television shows, music, fashion, art, and literature, B’s appreciation of, and desire to connect with, culture may be familiar to many: the narrator’s trajectory, Dillon seems to suggest, has always existed. Instead of modeling a predictive world in which people who read this also read this, Ambivalence offers a framework for integrating the disparate things we read, listen to, and look at into our understanding of our own education. How we are made by what we love.
—Orit Gat
Orit Gat: There’s nowhere else to begin but by asking this: What made you look back at your education?
Brian Dillon: I think a couple of things. Years ago, my friend Michael Bracewell said to me that he wanted to write a book about his own education at what he describes as a minor private school in the late 1960s, early ’70s. He never wrote it, but I always wanted to read Michael’s account of what it was like to be partly educated and partly educating oneself in that period. His period would have been Warhol, glam rock, punk, and so on.
This conversation must have been stuck in my head when years later, I spoke with Fitzcarraldo publisher Jacques Testard about what my next book should be. I was supposed to write a different book. I was going to write a book about the Barbican Estate, where I was living. I was interested in writing about the life of a building. I abandoned that project, partly because I was teaching, and it began to weigh heavily on me that I was teaching at a British university, and before that at an art college, at a time when education in general, the humanities in particular, and arts even more specifically, were all under concerted attack in the UK and elsewhere. I thought that I should write something about education. It’s hard to describe because I don’t think that I ever wanted to write a prolonged inquiry into what is the value of an arts education?
OG: I don’t think that’s what you wrote.
BD: Yeah, I hope it’s not. Had I written the sort of polemical book that I wanted to write, originally, I don’t think it would have been quite that. Because at some level, and I think this is obvious in what I did write, I’ve never really believed in the fundamental value of humanities or arts or literary education. The question, as soon as I started to think about this, was: What is it like and what does it mean to be a student, not a teacher?
The experience of learning is, it seems to me, one of the things that’s missing from the big arguments about the nature and future of arts and humanities education. That interior experience of being in your mid-teens to mid-twenties, let’s say, and having something invested in this thing, in this project or institution or adventure, and not really understanding what that is.
OG: That adventure being culture and an immersing of oneself in the arts? Let’s talk about what that feels like in Ambivalence. You start when the character—you mostly call him B; you sometimes call him I or me—is in high school.
BD: I suppose it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that I would write about being aged sixteen onward, but it seemed important to ask where this person has come from. And where he has come from is, first of all, a formal education. He—
OG: —Shall we call him “he”? I mean, I love that he is “he.” We can go back and forth.
BD: Should we deal with the “he” and “I” question first?
OG: Yes. Especially in the context of writing about your teenage self. It draws on the confessional, on autofiction, on Barthes? But also, it introduces an experimentation with the voice that feels quite unique in your practice, but also seems quite unique in general, because it never pretends that B is not Brian.
BD: If you were to try and define it, it’s not autofiction, but it’s not not autofiction in some way. Yes, the way Barthes writes in his sort-of autobiography Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, that was like a kind of excuse or a permission for me to be able to do it. But the main thing was that I started writing a first-person version of this and quite quickly ran up against two things. First, that the voice sounded like me.
OG: Like grown-up you?
BD: It sounded like the voice of my last three books. It sounded like Essayism, Suppose, a sentence, and Affinities. It sounded like Brian Dillon, middle-aged critic and essayist and so on. That was simply kind of boring. But the second thing was much more troubling, which was that I felt as if I was in danger of writing the book in which the middle-aged, usually male, critic or essayist looks back fondly, but mostly ruefully, at his younger, pretentious self and sort of indulges but mocks that artistic, culturally minded self. And I just didn’t want that tone. It suddenly struck me that I should try writing in the third person. And as soon as I did, it felt to me, and I hope it feels to other people, as if somehow that was getting closer.
OG: OK, so let’s go back to high school. Much of this part of the book does not discuss your formal education—more your personal, self-education. Do you think your teachers had a sense of how much you were reading outside of your studies? Where was your education really coming from, if not school?
BD: When I was sixteen or seventeen, I had one teacher for the Leaving Certificate, for whom I wrote an essay that was plagiarized from J. G. Ballard. And another essay that was plagiarized from articles in NME and various other music magazines. So, yeah, I don’t think they knew. Thinking about this question, of where my education really came from, the answer is very straightforward: from things that have vanished, or almost vanished. Television, magazines, libraries.
In the 1980s and into the early ’90s, television in the UK and Ireland, especially after the introduction of Channel 4 in 1982, was a place one could discover all kinds of extraordinary, extreme, avant-garde music, cinema, and occasionally literature. You could stay up until two or three o’clock in the morning and watch Godard and Fassbinder movies, and at the same time, you would read the music papers, the New Musical Express in particular, and you would not just discover Cabaret Voltaire, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, and the beginnings of rap, house, and techno. You would learn about a constellation of writers and thinkers, everything from the most horribly obvious—people were still enthusing about Burroughs and Kerouac and so on—to Barthes, Baudrillard, Lacan, Deleuze. And that would then take you to the library.
All of this is horribly well-rehearsed by people of my age. In a way, there’s nothing unusual about it.
OG: There are always versions of this process, right? My best friend in university in the 2000s, this boy who was getting a degree in literature, would read Pitchfork obsessively and then torrent every album he read about because there were no longer record shops to go to. In praise of illegal downloading, that was his path to discovery. Now it would be BookTok, or (though I resent this) an algorithm recommending you something.
In your book, the emphasis on self-education is really important and interesting to me because that path to discovery has kind of remained consistent.
BD: I say it’s well-trodden, this idea that you had Channel 4 and the NME and the library. And the way the narrative about that period usually goes is to say that this was a golden age that didn’t exist before and that has now disappeared. But that possibility and tradition of adolescent and young adult autodidacticism have existed before and carried on. You know, you can trace it all the way through the twentieth century right up to the present day. It’s just that the forms, the technologies, and the contexts—the spaces in which it happens—change.
That process is partly a kind of escape from your immediate circumstances, and an opening-up. And it’s true that there’s a pathway. But one of the things, one of the great things about being, you know, sixteen or seventeen and discovering all these things, is that you don’t have a map. You don’t have a lineage that you’re following. I think that it’s true still. Students will still arrive at university with the most idiosyncratic ideas of what the most culturally important stuff is. Part of your job as a teacher should be giving them the pathway to a much more systematic, broad, and detailed understanding of what surrounds that. It should also be to give students resources to hang on to the absolute weirdness and misapprehensions that they’ve developed by late adolescence about art, culture, or music.
OG: Is this what happens to B in the book when he arrives at university with all these preconceived ideas about culture?
BD: By the time this person goes to university, he hates a lot of things, you know. Mostly music, but also fashion, books, and movies. How and why I hated things was quite hard to write about in the book, but it is one of the most important things to B. He has such a precise—and probably scared—idea of what is important and what should be taken seriously.
That’s one of the reasons why he, B, or I, was so attracted to theory. One of the thrilling things about theory was that it kind of gave him, or I, a vocabulary with which to reject all kinds of mainstream literature, art, culture.
I first read Barthes at age sixteen in Rathmines Library in Dublin and immediately recognized first that here was a lexicon for thinking about the world. Especially about popular culture, obviously, reading Mythologies. That lexicon allowed me to see through things and to mount a rational, but, much more importantly, critical, assault—not just critique in a scholarly academic sense, but assault on the culture around me. The violence of that critique was really important. It was important to condemn, and even better to condemn out of hand!
OG: Is there a sense of politics to this rejection, this critique?
BD: I wonder. I think it’s definitely true that I was, to a certain extent, an apolitical young person, except in my head.
OG: That is also an important way to be political, right? To develop a set of ethics and a way of seeing the world.
BD: One of the things that I hoped Ambivalence would accomplish is a description of a state of mind, and of occupying a world that was simply one version of how one might be political and transformed by reading political thinking. By writers or activists who were much more obviously engaged, and would alter your way of being in the world, even if you weren’t putting your own body on the line. I was at the library reading Paul Virilio and Baudrillard.
The idea that politics, that the realm of the political and the possibility of a kind of collective liberation didn’t only belong to the obvious organized versions of left-wing politics, was a really important idea and feeling at the time, because one of the huge arguments among people of my age was about whether, for example, feminism was part of Marxism, you know? Whether class struggle could explain and subsume the position of women or LGBTQ+ people, or whether questions of race were also explicable, or perhaps only explicable, in terms of class politics. Another large part of the enthusiasm for those theoretical writers, Hélène Cixous or Jacques Derrida for example—or the beginnings of post-colonial theory and criticism in that period—a lot of that is directed against a closing-down of all those forces and struggles by the traditional left.
OG: Does this happen in the classroom or at the library?
BD: It happened time and again in the classroom. That’s partly what my education was, especially from my undergraduate tutor and later PhD supervisor, Thomas Docherty, a great Glaswegian Marxist intellectual. All of that is bound up also with the period of post-modernism, of which it is now possible for many people to think of as an entirely apolitical and frivolous intellectual moment. But, at that point, it was absolutely a question of interrogating those large meta-discourses that flattened, excluded, or ignored how interwoven those issues are.
OG: Should we end by talking a bit about teaching? Both about your own teachers—one of whom, Docherty, or “TD” in the book, is very present in your writing—and your own experiences teaching?
BD: I think the great skill and possibly the great tragedy of the teaching I experienced was, in a way, that it taught me and my classmates to be intellectuals and not academics. Part of my disillusion with academia was prompted by discovering, especially when I moved to the UK in the mid-’90s, that academics were not necessarily intellectuals. And that the project of the study of literary texts or of the study of culture in a larger way was, for my new colleagues, not necessarily an intellectual one—that it wasn’t urgently a large project of political, personal, and aesthetic liberation. For my earlier teachers, I think that it was an ethical project. They wanted to send us out into the world with some vocabulary and resources to alter that world, not to mirror it or make our way in the academy.
My own experience of teaching has mostly been really, really exciting. Partly because I taught at art schools that didn’t have the same kinds of constraints, and maybe lacked the anxiety that literature and the humanities programs had about what they were doing and what their future would be or what their past had been. But these schools also didn’t fall quite so quickly under the thumb of managerialist regimes that took over universities, certainly in the UK. By the time I moved to the UK, the process of the managerialization of education was well under way. This includes the precariousness of junior colleagues and part-time staff, and has also now reached a zenith in universities’ relationship to AI, and how they want to adopt a neoliberal ideal of what it is that humans produce and what it is that we’re not needed for. In Ambivalence, there’s a comic portent of that when the president of University College Dublin, at our graduation in the summer of 1991, tried to sell us the university credit card.
We’re now at a late stage of that process. Despite all of that, my experience of teaching has been that there are pockets not necessarily of resistance, but of ignoring. Docherty, who was my teacher at UCD and Trinity in Dublin, and who, as you say, is a big presence in the book, made an argument in some of his later work that there is the official university and there is the unofficial university that carries on in unsupervised classrooms. What happens in the classroom and not in the university structure happens despite the institution. The university exists despite universities.
