Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
This I Believed
by Michael Bérubé | ns 71-72
Sixteen years ago, in the summer and fall of 1993 when I was writing Public Access, I described myself as "a lefty middle-innings pitcher, keenly aware of living in a time when New Deal liberalism marks the leftward border of the thinkable in the United States, and committed to a pragmatic politics of the most fairly regulated markets this society can produce or imagine." The end of that passage marked me as Not Left Enough in some quarters, but it's the beginning of the passage that I'd like to explain. The middle-innings pitcher is the guy who shows up when things have gone badly awry. He's not the closer, who shuts things down in the ninth, and he's not the setup man, who takes care of the seventh and eighth so that the fireballing closer can face the absolute minimum number of batters and live to throw heat the next day. He's the schlump who appears when the starter has coughed up one hairball after another, or when the starter has coughed up hairballs and his hapless replacement has followed suit. The job of the middle reliever is to stop the bleeding and give the team a chance to rally. If they can.
At the time I wrote those words, I was thinking of the spectacular, thrilling, world-historical media extravaganza known as the PC scare, in which the hardened culture warriors of the right faced off against the mostly befuddled and muttering legions of academic liberals. Two years earlier, as a second-year assistant professor, I had stepped up and written a response to Kimball, D'Souza, et al., out of sheer frustration—frustration at my senior colleagues for not taking the right seriously, or for taking the right seriously but having no clue how to respond in a public forum. Needless to say, I didn't have any idea how to respond in a public forum either, because I had never done it; but I thought, in 1991, that the starters and their hapless replacements were coughing up hairballs, and I didn't think I could do any worse.
That was arrogant of me, perhaps, but...well, there is no but. It was arrogant, full stop. I'm still glad I did it, because I was right in one respect: my senior colleagues were coughing up hairballs whenever they tried to reply to the right's shock PC troops. But the conditions of my response had some deleterious effects on me over the short term. Because one of my desires, in intervening in the PC debates, was to explain literary theory to people who thought it was (a) a tool of leftist indoctrination, (b) nothing but obfuscatory jargon, or (c) a scary thing that might hurt literature, I wound up thinking—for at least the next few years—that I was, or should be, in the business of defending every variant of theory from every kind of attack. In my defense (which I can't help but undertake, even at this late date), I was working at a time when curmudgeonly and anti-intellectual senior faculty in English, some of whom had produced little or no scholarship in decades, could (and did!) vote against hiring or tenuring brilliant and promising junior colleagues who identified themselves as deconstructionists or feminists or queer theorists (or all of the above). That is, I took part in the PC wars not only to bear arms against the dishonest and ignorant hacks of the American right, but also to engage in side skirmishes with the theory-backlashers in my own discipline—and I did so with glee, for I knew very well who the angels and demons were.
I say this now with a mixture of irony and nostalgia, because the terrain has shifted so dramatically since then. In the early to mid-1990s, it was quite easy to give in to the temptations of side-choosing, good Us against evil or clueless Them; indeed, at times it was actually imperative. When exactly? At hiring time, for starters.
One evening when I was dining with three of my senior colleagues at Illinois, I heard one of them say that the job crisis was overblown: you write a dissertation, he said, and you get a PhD and a job; you revise it into a book, and you get tenure. It was a good deal thirty years ago, and it's a good deal now. Aghast, I blurted out, "Oh, come on—in the 1960s, back when there was a shortage of faculty, people got tenure for being carbon-based." I meant, of course, to call attention to the disparity between the achievements of some senior faculty and the demands these faculty were now making of junior scholars. But I realized immediately that the three people to whom I was speaking (a) were all pretty distinguished senior faculty, and (b) had been hired prior to 1970. One of them was my department head. So I added, sheepishly, "Present company excepted, of course." The next day, I asked one of those colleagues, Cary Nelson by name, whether I had shot myself in the foot or perhaps some place more vulnerable. We proceeded to have a long talk about the job crisis and the changes in the profession over the previous thirty years. Over the ensuing months, a number of decisive things happened: Cary got a call from someone at another department, asking him for a tenure evaluation for a promising junior feminist who had, at that point, published two books; Cary said he assumed the tenure-and-promotion was a slam dunk, but would be happy to write a letter for a young scholar whose work he admired—whereupon he was informed that the review was not a slam dunk, because some senior faculty at this institution (Nameless College, if memory serves) were dead set against tenuring a feminist. Cary proceeded to relay this exchange to me, and I did not fail to say, "Yep, I told you so." At the same time, Illinois' multiyear hiring freeze came to an end, and we advertised a junior position in American literature; neither Cary nor I served on the search committee, but we heard from committee members that 772 people had applied for the job. Many of them had books in hand; some had more than one. And then one of my senior colleagues refused to do an internal review of a young female professor on the grounds that he didn't consider feminism a sufficiently scholarly subject. Long story short, that was the semester when Cary and I started to write about the job crisis, to call for a combination of early retirements and reduced graduate admissions, and to criticize business as usual in English. And if we demonized some of our senior colleagues, we had good reason: they were demons. We simply -ized them.
That same year, the editor of this fine journal had a similar experience and wrote about it for his local alternative paper. Jeff was teaching at East Carolina at the time, and even though he had given the minnesota review a national profile in only a few short years, he had some senior colleagues who weren't too happy with the way things were going in their discipline. Jeff responded by writing an essay explaining the academic job search process for a general audience. In it, he described a terrific campus visit and job talk by one of the finalists for a junior position—a visit and talk that unfortunately met with much what's-all-this-then harrumphing from the senior faculty who thought of theory as a scary thing that might hurt literature. Jeff then proceeded to narrate his disbelief that anyone would respond negatively to so intellectually engaging a job candidate, and admitted that he could not restrain himself from surmising that the "no smoking" prohibition in his department building had less to do with public health than with the possibility that the high percentage of deadwood in the building constituted a fire hazard. Jeff sent me a copy of the essay; I admired his lucid description of what search committees do and why, and was duly impressed by the chutzpah of the "no smoking" quip—since he was still untenured at the time, and even though his deadwood colleagues were indeed very dead wood, they were nevertheless capable of reading Jeff's work in the local alternative paper. I remember thinking, "Wow, this guy has even less sense of self-preservation than I do."
I tell these tales because now that fifteen years have passed and the energetic young firebrands have become middle-aged guys sitting around telling heroic stories of their impolitic youth, it sounds silly—no, absolutely crazy—that anyone could ever have believed that the angels and demons were so neatly aligned. Theory = The Left = Intellectually Curious Scholars v. Anti-Theory = Reactionary Politics = Deadwood and Dinesh D'Souza. All good things v. all bad things. How could that be? It was easy enough (for me, anyway) to show that Dinesh D'Souza didn't know the first thing about Marxist criticism; but it was impossible (for me, anyway) to dismiss Tony Judt's devastating 1994 takedown of Louis Althusser as the work of a know-nothing right-wing hack—because it was in fact the work of a sophisticated and widely-read leftist intellectual. And yet we weren't crazy, and we weren't simply self-flattering, either. Back then, we really did have senior colleagues who got tenure for being carbon-based, who hadn't changed their lecture notes in decades, and who, we believed, needed to step aside and enjoy retirement so that lean and hungry new PhDs could take their place. All we wanted to know from our distinguished older colleagues like Frederick Crews and Morris Dickstein was, Which side are you on? And every time Crews or Dickstein (or figures like them) wrote something we didn't like, we knew that they were the enemy of the people—and that the people, united, would never be defeated.
Then in 1996, three things happened. In February of that year I finished writing Life As We Know It; in May the Sokal Hoax rocked the academic left; and in June I read in the pages of this fine journal a review essay of my book Public Access in which it was decided that because I had noted (correctly, by the bye) that postmodernism had its critics on both the right and the left, I had somehow reinforced the "left-right equivalency thesis" that underwrote the Reagan Administration's support for Central American death squads. Thanks to the Sokal Hoax and that review, suddenly I no longer thought of myself as a middle-innings reliever for the left. I realized, as I certainly should have realized earlier, that there are dozens upon dozens of professional franchises on the left, some of which I wouldn't pitch for if you paid me. And thanks to the experience of writing Life As We Know It, I began to think and write more about disability and public policy—learning, in the process, that one rarely knows ahead of time where one will find one's political allies and enemies when the subject is disability rights.
I took the Sokal Hoax personally, even though I was not involved in it, for two reasons. First, because in writing about my son Jamie I was also trying to write about the intersection of disability, genetics, and social policy; accordingly, anything that worked to delegitimate humanities scholars as analysts of the sciences seemed to have ominous implications for my attempt to intervene in (for example) bioethical debates over prenatal screening and selective abortion. Second, because the Sokal Hoax happened—at least on my reading—partly because the editors of Social Text, some of whom I count among my friends (and one of whom, Bruce Robbins, I consider a dear friend indeed), read Sokal's essay not for its merits but for its (apparent) side-taking in the Science Wars: for Stanley Aronowitz and Andrew Ross, against Paul Gross and Norman Levitt (who are duly chided as "right-wing critics" in one of Sokal's footnotes). I never believed that the publication of Sokal's essay implied that Social Text's editors were radical relativists who believed that gravity was just a "social construct," whatever that might mean; but I did believe, and continue to believe, that it testified to the existence of an academic subculture in which pledges of allegiance take precedence over intellectual rigor. Philosopher David Albert noted this in a 1997 discussion of the hoax. Disputing Sokal's post-hoax claims to have found something deeply rotten at the core of cultural studies or theory or postmodernism or any of the other targets of his parody, Albert suggested instead that the hoax worked on "another level":
The character of the opposition (if there is one) between mainstream analytic philosophy of science and science studies or cultural studies attitudes towards science doesn't seem to me to be helpfully characterized in terms of a disagreement about the philosophical propositions like realism or anything like that. You can find people indisputably within the standard mainstream analytic philosophy of science position, people like Nelson Goodman, whom no one in the poststructuralist camp is going to beat for anti-realism, or relativism, or social constructivism, or what you will. I think the way most people reacted to Sokal's piece was on another level. For them the article pointed to something alarming about standards of scholarship in certain quarters, and standards of argument, and highlighted how much could be gained by simply declaring allegiance to certain kinds of agendas. There was an enormous gap between what he presented himself as doing and what was actually interesting about what he was doing. (254)
The Sokal Hoax got me to brush up on my astrophysics and start reading more widely in science studies; it also led me to think about how much can be gained, in the world of contemporary criticism, simply by uttering pledges of allegiance. And I kept thinking that thought all through the long aftermath of the hoax, in which many people pledged allegiance to Sokal not because they knew anything about science or science studies but because they believed he had confirmed their darkest suspicions about cultural studies, theory, postmodernism, jargon, the academic left, or whatever was most bugging them at the time. It was, in retrospect, a festival of side-taking.
But to return to my first reason: in writing Life As We Know It, I was hoping not merely to contribute to the nascent field of disability studies and to offer a compelling account of my son's life; I was a bit more ambitious—or arrogant—than that. I hoped, as I explained in a follow-up essay on the Sokal Hoax, to show that Down syndrome is at once a matter of nature and of nurture, or, in John Searle's terms, both a social fact and a brute fact—and that it might serve as a demonstration case for why we should think of "brute fact" as an observer-independent realm that gradually gets carved—by us humans, working in the dark as best we can—out of the realm of social fact. I took sections 43 and 44 of Heidegger's Being and Time as my starting point for that argument, but I had more immediate goals: I was trying to reply to The Bell Curve, taking Steven Jay Gould's Wonderful Life and The Mismeasure of Man as my models, hoping to show that if the lives of children with a chromosomal nondisjunction could be vastly improved by policies of "early intervention" and "full inclusion," then surely the same could be said, a fortiori, for every nondisabled child born into poverty or a racially discriminatory society.
Over the next decade, the lessons of the Sokal Hoax turned out to be invaluable—even when the issues at stake had nothing to do with the issues that animated Alan Sokal. In the Balkan crisis, for example, there was no way to predict where one's political allies and enemies would be. When the United States and NATO finally intervened in Kosovo, long after the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre in Srebrenica, I initially opposed the war—until I heard the lunatic arguments of some of my nominal allies, who were not merely opposed to dropping bombs from 30,000 feet (as many reasonable people might be) but were actually convinced that Milosevic was being persecuted by the Western powers because he was Europe's last socialist. Or that the Serbs were the victims all along, valiantly struggling against a terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army, Islamist allies of Bosnian Muslims, and agents provocateurs sneakily blowing themselves up and staging massacres of their neighbors so as to provoke the intervention of Western Europe and the US. After reading a few of Diana Johnstone's accounts of the war, I decided that even if supporting intervention put me on the side of Madeleine Albright, John McCain, Margaret Thatcher, and the editors of The New Republic, it was better than dithering in the face of mass murder and ethnic cleansing on the side of Tom DeLay, Noam Chomsky, Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Buchanan, and far-right Russian nationalists. I have since decided that the Balkans are the place where the time-honored tactic of guilt-by-association died, because everyone in that conflict had deeply unsavory allies; accordingly, it was impossible—or merely irresponsible—to choose a side on that basis.
I experienced a sense of déjà vu all over again in the run-up to the US war in Iraq: though I opposed that war on the grounds that it would shred international institutions and devastate millions of innocent Iraqis, I acknowledged that the removal of Saddam Hussein was a desirable and legitimate goal that could not be accomplished by the Iraqis themselves, and if there were some method of overthrowing Saddam that did not shred international institutions and devastate millions of innocent Iraqis, I would approve of it. I also approved of the no-fly zones that protected the Kurds from genocide, and of the renewed UNSCOM inspections that would determine whether, in fact, Saddam possessed the weapons of mass destruction recklessly attributed to him by the Bush and Blair governments. That position put me at odds with the leadership of the antiwar movement, which held the inspections and no-fly zones to be imperialist incursions on Iraqi sovereignty, and which was willing to countenance opposition to Saddam's distinctive brand of fascism only when, in the 1980s, the US seemed willing to tolerate it in the pursuit of realpolitik. In the dark days of 2002-03, some of my friends advised me sternly that it was madness to criticize "our side" as the Bush-Cheney administration made its plans for war. I replied that insofar as the antiwar leadership was opposed to war in Iraq, it was on my side; insofar as the antiwar leadership opposed no-fly zones and inspections, and dodged the question of whether Iraq would be better off without Saddam and his psychotic progeny, there was no meaningful sense in which it was on my side. After Saddam was toppled, insofar as the antiwar leadership argued that the war was illegal and fought on false pretenses, it was on my side; insofar as it actively cheered the Baathist, Islamist, and Shi'ite "resistance" and likened it to the French Resistance in World War II (as in Susan Watkins' essay, "Vichy on the Tigris"), it was most certainly not on my side.
The problem with thinking of yourself as a middle-inning reliever in such circumstances is obvious: you run out onto the field and you realize that no one called you out of the bullpen in the first place. Indeed, you're not even on the team; you're in the wrong ballpark; you might even be in the wrong sport altogether. There is no "I" in team, as the cliché has it. More to the point, there is no "team" in criticism.
But I don't draw from this the conclusion that each of us can speak only for him- or herself. Though I have grown allergic to pledges of allegiance, I have not developed any taste for declarations of independence. On the contrary, the more I work in disability studies the more I see independence as simultaneously indispensable and inadequate. Indispensable, because the disability rights movement is built on the desire that people with disabilities might lead more independent lives in more accommodating environments; inadequate, because even in the most accommodating environment there will be some people with disabilities who cannot live independently—and some who will always require surrogates and guardians to represent them.
My son represents himself quite well in many situations and needs help in others; though he works on "independent living skills" in high school, his parents work on the assumption that he will not live independently as an adult. I mention this not to ground my remarks in the details of my life but to remind myself that although independence is indispensable to criticism, it is not a modus vivendi; and its overemphasis—in public policy, in Rawlsian social contract theory, and even in little essays like this—can lead us to overlook the mundane and inescapable facts of dependency in our daily lives. So I now think I was foolish and mistaken to suggest, even half-jokingly, that my critical work is that of a lefty relief pitcher. I don't pitch for any team—neither the ones that want me nor the ones that don't. But all the same, I'll continue trying to represent people like Jamie as best I can, in whatever medium I have at my disposal. Although I work in a discipline that is exceptionally wary of the indignity of speaking for others, I have learned just enough about disability to try to respect the dignity of others who cannot speak for themselves.
Work Cited
Albert, David Z., John Brenkman, Elisabeth Lloyd, and Lingua Franca. "Lingua Franca Roundtable." The Sokal Hoax: The Sham that Shook the Academy. Ed. Lingua Franca editors. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000. 253-65.
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