Public Access Limited

Jim Neilson and Gregory Meyerson Public Access Limited (on Michael Bérubé, 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 access," he writes, "we need ... a public address system." Public Access represents Bérubé's "initial attempts to help set up the PA" (38). Publishing essays in the New Yorker, Harper's, the Village Voice, and the Chronicle ofHigher 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, neoconservarives 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 uni- 264 the minnesota review versifies 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...