the minnesota review n.s. 45-46 (1995-96)Jim Neilson and Gregory MeyersonPublic Access Limited(on Michael Bérubé's, Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics [New York: Verso, 1994])In television "public access" refers to a channel reserved by cable companies for community broadcasting. These broadcasts typically include city council and school board meetings, along with a variety of sometimes eccentric locally produced programs. (The Saturday Night Live skit "Wayne's World" parodied such programs.) Michael Bérubé, however, has something more consequential in mind. Recognizing that "[t]he smear campaign against contemporary scholarship in the humanities has successfully set the terms for . . . public discussion," Bérubé declares "that the political, cultural, and social context of academic 'theoretical' debates needs to be broadened and 'popularized'" (ix, 37). "To enable public ccess," he writes, "we need ... a public address system." Public Access represents 's "initial attempts to help set up the PA" (38). Publishing essays in the New Yorker, Harper's, the Village Voice, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bérubé has worked tirelessly to refute know-nothing attacks from the right and to eliminate the confusion and fear surrounding contemporary literary and cultural theory. Especially noteworthy for its clarity and timeliness was "Public Image, Ltd.," an attack on D'Souza, et al. that Bérubé published in the Voice during the height of the PC hysteria. In the essays collected in and revised for Public Access, Bérubé continues this criticism, decrying the right's "well-documented indifference to fact" and "their refusal to abide by common civilized standards of criticism and review" (16). He identifies the dishonesty and the reactionary politics that undergird so much of the right's assault upon higher education from "the aging Hitler Youth hijinx of Peter Collier and David Horowitz" (95) to the "snarling, foaming-mouth rhetoric" of the New Criterion (90) to the "anti-intellectualism and deliberate obfuscation . . . [of] journalists, neoconservatives and the 'liberal' cultural right" (61). Bérubé emphasizes the urgency of the crisis in higher education, explaining "that we are facing a drastic shrinking of resources, the defunding of the humanities, the wholesale elimination of entire academic programs and departments that aren't directly helping us compete with Japan" (112). "If you're interested in democracy, in or out of the academy," Bérubé declares, you have to be concerned with the question of which constituencies American universities will continue to serve and how, and whether universities will work to reduce socioeconomic inequities in American life, or whether they'll work to exacerbate them. That's what the stakes are, finally. (37) From such observations Bérubé concludes that the academic left must actively pursue a program of public debate. "A media-conscious left, a left that knows how social signs can be appropriated and reappropriated," Bérubé writes, "may be capable of deliberately wresting cultural meaning away from the New Right on its own ground" (146). Bérubé agrees with Tony Bennett that the left should be "talking to and working with what used to be called ISA's rather than writing them off from the outset and then in a self-fulfilling prophecy, criticizing them again when they seem to affirm one's direct functionalist predictions" (qtd. in Bérubé 148). One reason left academics haven't reached a broader audience, according to Bérubé, is that they haven't made their writings accessible, for "[w]hen you say things like 'hegemony is leaky' and 'nobody has the phallus,' you tend either to get blank unmeaning stares or cries that we should be burned at the stake for muttering occult pagan incantations" (171).
Bérubé even questions "whether academic literary theorists can write in a 'public'
voice in the first place" (x), given their tendency toward the verbose and the arcane, and
given a professional system that doesn't recognize such non-scholarly work. Leftists' public
access, therefore, depends, first, "on our ability to make our work intelligible to
nonacademics-who then, we hope, will be able to recognize far-right rant about academe for what
it is" (176), and second, on our ability "to reconceive both the professionalization of
cultural criticism and our putative client relations, so that public work can be recognized as
a form of professional work" (168).
While the right can take advantage of well-funded think-tanks, foundations, periodicals, publishing houses, and radio and TV outlets, the academic left has only a small and frequently token franchise on the public airspace. The consequences of this disparity were apparent in the PC crisis of 1990-91, as the mass media repeated horror stories about cadres of thought police imposing their totalitarian philosophies upon an unsuspecting nation. Bérubé acknowledges the disparity in public access that caused such fantasies to be taken seriously, noting that whereas the right could depend upon "the neocon daisy chain familiar to PC-watchers," the left "had only quarterly journals in which [to] conduct analyses of the PC wars" (7, 6).2 Despite this recognition of the right's material advantages, Bérubé presupposes it is within the left's power to gain public access. He thus overlooks the concentrated ownership and interlocking directorates of mass media firms. Here's an example of the configurations of media ownership circa 1986, as documented by Michael Parenti: Ten business and financial corporations control the three major television and radio networks (NBC, CBS, ABC), 34 subsidiary television stations, 201 cable TV systems, 62 radio stations, 20 record companies, 59 magazines including Time and Newsweek, 58 newspapers including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, 41 book publishers, and various motion picture conglomerates. . . . Three-quarters of the major stockholders of ABC, CBS, and NBC are banks, such as Chase Manhattan, Morgan Guaranty Trust, and Bank of America. . . . independent daily newspapers are being gobbled up by the chains at the rate of fifty or sixty a year. Ten newspaper chains earn over half of all newspaper revenues in this country. Five media conglomerates share 95 percent of the records and tapes market. . . . Eight Hollywood studios account for 89 percent of U.S. feature film rentals. Three television networks earn over two-thirds of total U.S. television revenues. Seven paperback publishers dominate the mass market for books. (27-28) One reason Bérubé fails to acknowledge these institutional constraints is due to the belief, increasingly common on the left, that institutions have no essential class character. His description of cultural studies Marxism-a "sugar-free, low-cholesterol, no-fat, decaffeinated Marxism Lite" that "denies the primacy or unity of 'class . . . [and] no longer believes . . . that the ruling class owns the ruling ideas" (141)-is a fair summary of the politics of Public Access.3 Bérubé's argument that non-scholarly writing be considered in the professional evaluations of faculty applies only to those with full-time, tenure-track positions at research institutions. While this plan may allow a few academics to write for more general audiences, it does nothing to reconfigure a system premised upon an exploitive division of labor comprising an elite few whose privileges depend upon countless others "teaching three or four classes a semester, working part-time at $1500 to $2500 per course without benefits, or employed in non-tenure-track jobs that require them to relocate more often than most American workers" (22). Tied to a view of the university as a plural public sphere, Bérubé thus disregards its capitalist nature.4 For a brief moment in the late 60s/early 70s there was-arguably-some space for leftist discourse within the mass media. This temporary accessibility was the result not of discursive rearticulation but of mass struggle. Since then the media (and political culture generally) has moved steadily to the right. The reason so much leftist discourse appears in scholarly journals is because it has been excised from the commercial media, as Bérubé himself acknowledges: The number of responsible generalist forums for recent academic work has been steadily dwindling for about a quarter-century-roughly the same period of time during which American criticism has engaged feminism, gay and lesbian activism, African American studies, and varieties of Continental literary theory. One after another, Partisan Review, the American Scholar, the New Republic and, most emphatically, the New York Review of Books have almost ceased to cover academic developments post-dating Stonewall, Black Power, Sexual Politics, and S/Z-or, worse have undertaken series after series of attacks on them. (59) To redress this situation, Bérubé seeks to keep "left-like positions alive and thinkable via the circuitous route of legitimating the center" (10-11), a task that is to be achieved by "delegitimating the purveyors of the PC scandal, especially their claim to occupy the moderate center of the academic debate" and by "disseminating the academic work of the cultural left through whichever plural public spheres are still available to us" (80-81). Bérubé's agenda, then, is premised on the notion that these public spheres can be expanded by a strategy of aggressive popularization and that through this expansion the left may recapture centrality. This position is based on the liberal pluralist assumption that all positions have potentially equal access to discursive power-if the left would just stop marginalizing itself with self-negating Marxist rhetoric. Bérubé's position draws on postmarxist notions of institutions as sites of struggle or contested terrains, ideas which rest on the pluralist view of institutions as level playing fields. Besides serving to reinforce the myth of public accessibility, Bérubé's attempt to recuperate the center requires that he position himself and the academic left, as he qualifies it, within the bounds of acceptable discourse. This strategy is necessary since, in Bérubé's words, we are "living in a time when New Deal liberalism marks the leftward border of the thinkable in the United States" (33). But when has a position to the left of New Deal liberalism ever been granted credibility and accorded substantial public access in the U.S.? In order to gain access to the center Bérubé attempts to establish his own moderate credentials. While admitting to "draw[ing] on Marxist criticism (or democratic socialism) for an understanding of culture and society," Bérubé does not expect national policy debates "to produce revolution-or to guarantee workers a living wage and affordable healthcare and daycare-but to haggle over ways of fiddling with the mixed economy" (33). Likewise, he declares that "because mixed, planned, and free economies don't usually promote radical democracy on their own, they have to be nudged and nagged by a chorus of egalitarian voices inside government and out" (34). Bérubé's rhetoric here is inconsistent and difficult to reconcile with the social urgency apparent elsewhere in Public Access. Although he is genuinely outraged by the right's persistent attack on virtually any policy that may promote a more egalitarian society, Bérubé argues that such outrage-and arguments for any kind of radical change-must be muted for the sake of coalition building. This pragmatism means accepting capitalism as a given and asserting that reforms such as affordable daycare and healthcare and living wages are off the agenda. Consequently, all we can do is haggle, nudge, nag and wrestle with ways to fiddle with the mixed economy. Following Bérubé's advice, we would end up wrestling over marginal concerns while leaving the savage inequalities of capitalism untouched. Likewise, when Bérubé asserts that mixed, planned and free (!) economies do not promote radical democracy on their own, he means that economies have no necessary character and can be rearticulated in the direction of European social democracy by a nudging and nagging left. This account is extremely misleading, since the kind of social democracy Bérubé endorses requires conditions favorable to capital accumulation and since such conditions depend upon massive exploitation on the periphery and "benefit" at best a minority of working class people in the core. According to the logic of capital accumulation, even these benefits will be lost, as is now happening throughout the European strongholds of social democracy.
In striving for public access, Bérubé must, given the ideological limits of the mass media,
disguise his position as centrist. Thus he defends postmodernism against attacks by "critics from left and
right [who] spent a good deal of their time forming two neat, separate lines to take turns
bashing [it]. . . . On the left, Terry Eagleton . . . on the right, Hilton Kramer"
(124).5 This
left-right equivalence bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the centrist equations common in mass media political
discourse, as in Georgie Anne Geyer's identification of the two poles of American extremism as "the
militias on the far right who hate and want to destroy government" and "academic leftists in American
universities who are using their pseudo-Marxism to 'deconstruct' America." As Béubé surely
knows, the left/right extreme thesis has been fundamental in mystifying and legitimating U.S. state terror
in support of, for example, the "governments" of El Salvador and Guatemala. Consistently, civilian
governments complicit in mass terror have been described in the mass media as caught in the middle between
the extremes of left (Marxist guerillas) and right (death squads). Or in a slightly different version, the
atrocities of left and right are equated and attributed to "civil war." This is a frequent media
representation, as Allan Nairn points out in recent press accounts of
Guatemala.6
Rather than viewing left and right extremes as flipsides, then, we should see liberalism and conservatism
as flipsides. Both are unequivocally commited to free enterprise, capital accumulation on a world scale,
and anti-communism. And both have participated about equally in the criminal history of U.S. foreign
policy. Since gross inequality fundamentally constitutes capitalism, attempts to alleviate it, such as
liberalism, are bound to fail sooner or later, as is strikingly the case in Sweden. Because leftist
analyses of this inequality are blocked by our media, the persistence of inequality or its worsening will
be blamed on victims. So we go back and forth between a punitive, laissez faire individualism and a
slightly fuzzier version. We should not exaggerate even this difference, since in our era of flexible
accumulation, liberals and labor parties often are more successful at implementing austerity than their
conservative counterparts. The two positions, while very different in appearance, thus generate each
other.
no right of free speech, either in law or practice, existed until a basic transformation of the law governing speech in the period from about 1919 to 1940. Before that time, one spoke publicly only at the discretion of local, and sometimes federal, authorities, who often prohibited what they, the local business establishment, or other powerful segments of the community did not want to hear. (qtd. in Chomsky 346)7 The centrist, status-quo reaffirming nature of Bérubé's program can also be found in the proposals he has made addressing the ongoing crisis in higher education. For instance, in an essay he wrote with Gerald Graff, Bérubé focuses on "ingrained academic operating habits that are as educationally dubious as they are financially wasteful" (B1). Graff and Bérubé suggest that "universities are better off doing the cutting themselves, with educational objectives in mind, rather than letting legislators do it for them" (B2). They propose that universities better coordinate their course offerings in order to reduce duplication. And they conceive of academic semesters "having a theme that would unite courses across a department, a college, or a whole university" (B2). One of the striking features of their proposal is its acceptance of the inevitability of downsizing. They do not even consider offering a strategy by which faculties and students might oppose the economic assault on higher education. In an attempt to face the current situation and to preempt the coming attack, Graff and Bérubé make much the same argument that legislators and business managers do, declaring for instance that the current "system is a prescription for confusion; from a financial point of view, it constitutes gross mismanagement" (B1). Their argument thus can be used by cost-conscious administrators to justify the very cuts in research and teaching that Graff and Bérubé oppose. Similarly, in Higher Education Under Fire, a collection of essays he edited with Cary Nelson, Bérubé suggests that institutions "should devise legally sound early-retirement packages for those faculty members who are neither effective teachers nor productive scholars," that "[m]any graduate programs should reduce the number of students they admit," and that "[m]arginal programs should be closed" (21). Rather than proposing solutions to keep faculty employed and to maintain educational opportunities, Bérubé and Nelson adhere to the agenda of corporate restructuring. Most troubling are their suggestions to limit graduate admissions and to close marginal programs. If this proposal had been made by a right-wing politician about undergraduate education-that is, if in order to address the problem of unemployed university graduates it was proposed that fewer students be admitted into college and that marginal schools (i.e., community colleges, poor private institutions, and inferior branches of state universities) be closed-this politician would rightly be accused of denying educational opportunity to poor, minority, and non-traditional students and of increasing elite advantage. But since it's been made by academic leftists, this proposal has been greeted as a pragmatic attempt to lessen the exploitation of graduate students.8 However, to increase standards for admission into Ph. D. programs at a time when affirmative action is under legislative and judicial attack and student loan programs are being drastically scaled back, is to exacerbate existing race and class division in higher education. With schools able to choose prospective graduate students from an ample pool of gifted twenty-somethings, age discrimination too is likely to increase. One probable consequence of the Bérubé/Nelson proposal, therefore, is a younger, whiter, wealthier graduate student population. Their proposal also undervalues graduate education in the humanities. Especially within recent years a graduate education in the humanities may equally be a political education, a means by which students learn to read the historical, social, and economic truths hidden and distorted by capitalist culture. Bérubé and Nelson's proposal ignores this important justification for maintaining the wide availability of graduate studies in the humanities. Bérubé and Nelson propose to reduce enrollments in graduate programs, making the demystifying and consciousness-raising potential of these programs available to a privileged few; ironically, their solution to the crisis in higher eduction is, in effect, to limit public access. Ultimately, whether arguing for greater public access for academic leftists, for a more cohesive plan of course offerings, or for a reduction in graduate programs, Bérubé does not address the most serious consequences of the restructuring of higher education-an increasing divide between elite and non-elite schools and the growing unavailability of a college education for lower and middle class students. Instead of addressing the roots of the class and labor exploitation within current higher education reform, Bérubé suggests using existing public forums to call for moderate policy changes. And he overlooks activist strategies such as union organizing, work slow-downs and strikes, the use of alternative media, mass protest and civil disobedience. However well-intentioned, Bérubé's plan to gain public access and to rearticulate cultural meaning functions mostly to assign significance to the marginal work of literary and cultural theorists-without requiring that they involve themselves in the necessary and potentially professionally harmful work of political organizing and protest. Notes
Works Cited
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