Chapter Six—
Looking for the Interstices

Bennett M. Berger

In the spring of 1982 I was invited to give a talk at the University of California, Los Angeles. When I asked (as I often do on such occasions), Why me? I was told that the students there were curious about how I had survived, flourished, and even prospered as a sociologist doing (in that old phrase) my own thing, relatively unconstrained by any one of the several schools of thought that compete for dominance in contemporary sociology. So I began to think about that.

Surprisingly, the thinking turned autobiographical—in the sense that C. Wright Mills meant when he spoke of the intersections of biography and history shaping the course of lives. I say "surprisingly" because the dominant norms of sociological practice discourage autobiographical thinking. In sociology, autobiography is usually regarded as risky, embarrassing, and tasteless for all sorts of familiar reasons (narcissism, subjectivity, and so on). We sociologists are taught to flee from the first-person singular, both for methodological reasons and as good scientific manners: "Art is I; science is we," says Claude Bernard. Yet, oddly, it is also a truism of the sociology of knowledge, as well as elementary sociology, that ideas are existentially based. It seems, therefore, to be sound sociological practice—even good academic manners—to try to put one's audiences in an optimally skeptical frame of mind by giving them all the evidence one can muster to distrust the ideas one is about to convey, instead of (or in addition to) laying out in advance all the methodological reasons they should be predisposed to trust the benignity of one's prudence, rigor, balance, integrity, and scholarly scrupu-

lousness. With respect to the choice and formulation of theoretical questions, I see giving all the evidence one can muster as a conceptual (or prehypothetical) approximation of the empiricist's injunction that hypotheses be falsifiable.

Please regard the above as a bit of ideological spadework in defense of autobiography. But there are other, more familiar bits of ideology in its behalf. Even the conventional wisdom now asserts that knowing something about who a speaker (or writer) is contextualizes a discourse or a text and hence adds to it dimensions of meaning otherwise obscure or hidden. A printed page, for example, usually tells readers only what its author thinks he or she wants them to know, unless they are skilled at reading between the lines, which usually takes years of experience. Oral delivery adds dimensions of meaning, some of them unintentional, through the physical presence of the speaker and his or her accent, intonation, and body language. Autobiography adds a different dimension by equipping readers to make inferences from, and interpret, what a writer says; and it implicitly invites them to do so in a way that perhaps discounts what the writer says in terms of what the readers have learned about who he or she is. Nevertheless, even the most candid autobiographer projects distorted images, usually providing only selective information chosen to induce readers to make the inferences and interpretations he or she wants them to make. It is indeed a risky business. Still, I find it surprising that social scientists who chatter on abstractly about the importance of context (or who in fact do take the trouble to specify objective contexts) do not more frequently provide their audiences with specific autobiographical data, thereby enabling us to make more intelligent contextual inferences—as if we were all stupid enough not to make those inferences in any case.

I will practice what I preach and provide you with some data. I was born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx, in an immigrant Jewish family low enough in the lower middle class that its respectability was far from secure. Actually, we must have been pretty poor. I can remember the electricity being turned off in our apartment for nonpayment of bills, and I recall going to the grocery store when I was about ten and paying for my corn flakes with Depression relief stamps and feeling humiliated by the experience. It was not one of those Jewish families rich in Talmudic tradition and teeming with Tevyes or Workmen's Circle intellectuals. Although my mother, born here, managed to get herself an American high school education, my father's education ended before he was twelve, when he came to this country. I don't think he ever had a

friend of his own—that is, someone who was not the husband of one of my mother's friends. He was a very primitive man, interested only in money because he never had enough of it, and was recurrently insulted and humiliated by those who had more. I observed some of these humiliations during a few of my teenage summers when I would help him carry some of the samples of fur trimmings for women's coats from his employer's factory in the fur district of Manhattan to the garment center ten blocks north where he would try to sell them to coat manufacturers. He liked to use big words (usually mispronounced) where little ones would do, and he particularly admired people who had reached "the pinochle of success." My sister-in-law once said to me, in awe rather than with malice, "you know, Bennett, your father has no redeeming virtues."

There were almost no books in our home. One of the few I remember was a Winston dictionary with several thumb-tabbed appendices from which I memorized such things as the twenty largest cities in the United States, the capitals of all the then forty-eight states, and the twenty longest rivers in the world. My brothers and I were typed early. My older brother was the smart one, I was the sensitive one, and my younger brother was the practical one with a good head for business. My older brother was in fact smart enough to graduate from high school before he was thirteen, but I was the first member of my family to get through college—although no one would have predicted it from my adolescence. My reading was limited to such books as The Hardy Boys series and The Circus Comes to Town, until I was around seventeen. I was barely a C student in high school, perhaps in part because I stuttered badly and rather than having to face the terror and humiliation of reciting in class, I frequently feigned ignorance. I did not begin to deal successfully with the stuttering until I was into my twenties, had left the parental household, and had a regular sex life. In the film version of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest there is a fragile young stutterer among the inmates of the mental hospital who spends a night in bed with a woman squirreled into the hospital exactly for that purpose. In the morning he emerges from the room beaming, and although the point was not telegraphed in any of the familiar Hollywood ways, I anticipated, when he opened his mouth to speak, that he would not stutter.

I do not mean to suggest it was a terrible adolescence; it was not. I had lots of friends, and I almost always had a good-looking girlfriend. I was a good dancer, and a fine athlete, often elected captain of my teams. The summer I was fifteen I hit a ninth-inning inside-the-park home run,

with the bases loaded, in front of maybe a hundred people, including my mother, father, and girlfriend. Students of youth culture know that things like that are far more important to a kid than doing well in school.

Near the end of World War II, at eighteen, I was a private in the Marine Corps stationed on the island of Guam. When the fighting was over my company commander assigned me to administer an official Navy library that had just arrived by ship from San Francisco in several enormous wooden crates, which I can remember unpacking with a crowbar. (I do not know why I was so assigned; it could not have been my intelligence: this Jewish boy endured the shame of scoring higher on the Marine Corps' mechanical-aptitude test than on its general-intelligence test.) They gave me a rectangular frame building with double screen doors and shelves along the walls, and I spent much of the next year as a librarian. There was not much patronage at that jungle library, and I had nothing to do but sit there day after day, week after week, and read books, I who had hardly read any before. I read voraciously, without taste or system, anything that for any reason got my attention—classics, recent fiction, plays, history, current affairs. Doors leading out of the provinciality of my experience began to open, and that started me dreaming about getting educated when I became a civilian again. One more thing about that tropical library: they assigned me an associate, a black Marine from Harlem (we were both New Yorkers among the rednecks) who was a trumpet player, and before long we organized a band (I was a pop singer—it is common knowledge that stutterers do not stutter when they sing) that played in officers' clubs all over the island.

My first political experience came the summer before I went into the Marine Corps, when I got a job as a singing busboy at a resort hotel in the borscht belt owned by the grandmother of my girlfriend. About two weeks into the summer my fellow busboys delegated me to ask the old lady for a small raise in our wages. She fired me on the spot, calling me a communist and, worse than that, a traitor to her and her granddaughter. It had a happy ending, though, because I hitchhiked into the nearby Catskill mountain town where small theatrical agents from New York moved their offices in the summer, auditioned for a job as a singer at a better hotel, and got the job. I made more money and I did not have to bus tables.

My real introduction to politics came when I started Hunter College in the spring semester of 1947. A campus pol came up to me one day in the cafeteria and asked if I would like to be on the student council.

Sure, I said. Next thing I knew I was on their slate, and without lifting a finger I was elected. I thought it was fun, so in the fall I ran for reelection, this time campaigning hard. I lost by a fairly wide margin. I supposed I was a radical because most of my friends were, although at that time I was not certain what that meant. Some in my peer group were reputed to be "members of the party"; but my closest friends regarded them as mostly silly doctrinaires, and therefore I did too—especially when, after a literally sophomoric discussion of love, one of them told me he knew he was in love when he met a girl he "wanted to buck the system with."

I was reading a lot to compensate for the neglects of my athletic adolescence and to catch up with my friends, most of whom, it seemed to me, had been intellectuals at least since puberty. I denounced my college president as a cultured anti-Semite (I still think he was: in one of his books he had said that it was not difficult for him to understand why, for aesthetic reasons, a gentile would not want to marry one of the "daughters of Sarah") and participated in Henry Wallace's campaign for president in 1948, oblivious to charges that it was dominated by communists. I was still only vaguely cognizant of the differences between Stalinists and other parts of the left; I would have been more worldly had my literacy come only two or three years earlier.

My girlfriends contributed a lot to my education. They were always English majors (I was in political science), highly literary women who tended to mother me, seeing in me a diamond in the rough who could profit from the nurturance of their greater sophistication. I began to read poetry, and in my senior year I published my first real article, on W. H. Auden, in the college literary magazine.

The summer after my junior year in college I hitchhiked from New York to Berkeley to see a childhood friend (keeping a journal as I went). Berkeley was beautiful and summer-cool, and I had no wish to see a goodlier place. So I came back to become a graduate student, knowing absolutely nothing of what the University of California had to offer. It was as far from the Bronx and from home as I could get, and I had the instinct to sense that if I stayed, I would be sucked into the vortex of the family, not yet having the strength or vision to know what I wanted and hence ill equipped to resist what my parents wanted for me. Besides, I liked going to school, and I had become reasonably good at it. Since there was nothing else I wanted to do, I thought I would stick with it, although I do not remember considering an academic career then. I thought I was interested in studying political behavior, but at that time

Berkeley's rather traditional political-science department did not teach political behavior, and an adviser there sent me to the Department of Sociology and Social Institutions, as the sociology department was then called.

I sort of grew up with the Berkeley sociology department. (Some years ago when a magazine editor asked me for one of those brief bios that accompany an article I said that I was born and raised in New York City but grew up in California, to which I remained grateful.) When I arrived, the department had maybe a half-dozen sociologists, but they included Reinhard Bendix and Robert Nisbet, who encouraged me and from whom I learned a lot. During the years I was a graduate student there the faculty added Phillip Selznick, Herbert Blumer, Seymour Martin Lipset, Kingsley Davis, Leo Lowenthal, William Kornhauser, Nathan Glazer, Lewis Feuer, and, in my last year, young Erving Goffman and Neil Smelser. Others joined, too, and I could have lunch with these guys or drop in and chat without having to make an appointment three weeks in advance. For many of them their eminence was still ahead, so I was not intimidated by their not yet formidable names. There were several schools of thought, and a little bit of several of them rubbed off on my eclecticism.

During the six or seven years I was a graduate student at Berkeley, the university commanded only a part of my attention. The rest of it went to the demimonde of San Francisco and the bay area that came to be known as the "beat generation," through which I got to know people like Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Mike McClure, and the late Max Scherr, founder, editor, and publisher of the Berkeley Barb . I was a marginal part of that crowd, with one foot in the academy and one in bohemia. The sexual anarchy of my bohemian life scared me, I think, and in 1956 I got married (probably to escape from sex); in 1958 I got a Ph.D., and after a year of lecturing at Berkeley I went off to my first real job, an assistant professorship at the University of Illinois, Urbana, where I spent four happy and productive years learning the professor business.

But perhaps the happiest stroke of my continuing historical luck (the library on Guam, falling in with intellectuals at college, falling into Berkeley sociology at the start of its rise to eminence—that Millsian intersection of biography and history) was that I entered the job market at a very good time; even mediocre Ph.D.'s were getting good jobs. In retrospect it seems an unimaginable blessing that I never suffered a single day of assistant-professor anxiety. My senior colleagues at Ur-

bana and the graduate students there quickly made it plain that they were glad to have this young turk from the newly eminent Berkeley department. My first book was well received; I published some articles and review essays, and after three years at Urbana I was promoted to tenure without even knowing that I was being considered for it. When I think of the recurrent ritual humiliations to which assistant professors are now periodically subjected in the system of faculty review at the University of California, I wonder why any intellectual of independent mind would seek an academic career; it is hard for me to imagine anyone getting through it without lasting wounds, deep bitterness, and a taste for revenge.

Despite the successful years at the University of Illinois, when the opportunity came to go back to northern California I grabbed it. I became chairman of the growing sociology department at the University of California, Davis, just as the free-speech movement and the student revolution were beginning down the road at Berkeley. But I was already in my mid-thirties by then, a married man with two small daughters and lots of grown-up responsibilities. In the privacy of my mind, though, I was still the perennial student, the perpetual kid, someone who had hardly done anything but go to school as a marginal outsider. Suddenly at Davis I was a boy imposter, recruiting faculty, playing the politics of FTEs (full-time equivalents), conferring with deans on weighty matters of medical schools and law schools, sitting on important committees judging the incompetence of research institute directors old enough to be my father. Few sociologists have anything good to say about chairing a department, but for me it was an important growing-up experience to be in administration, managing an academic unit and bearing responsibility for its operation and welfare.

Well, there are several pages' worth of autobiographical bits. What is it they contribute to a contextual understanding of my work and the way I go about it? Here is what I make of them: the fact that my family was poor and New York–provincial gave me my persistent identification with have-nots and my distrust and discomfort with men of power. But the humiliation I remember at the grocery store suggests I had aspirations toward middle-class respectability. That was my mother's influence, I think. She was the only woman of her generation in our extended kin group who spoke English without a Yiddish accent. That, along with the fact that she wrote a fine English script, gave her high prestige in our extended family, which compensated somewhat for the

fact that her husband was never able to support her in the style she thought she deserved. She repeatedly would advise me to be cautious and discreet for the sake of my future, to wait until I was somebody before I opened my mouth too wide or too loud.

The stuttering, of course, was a continually painful embarrassment, and it was probably the beginning of my feelings of isolation and marginality. But it also gave me valuable early experience in coping with isolation and accommodating to it. Moreover, it made me hypersensitive to the rhythms of language. To evade blocking I had to rehearse silently and carefully what I wanted to say, choosing words and rhythmic structures that enabled me to get through a sentence without facing a crisis. To this day, when proofreading a manuscript back from a typist, I can immediately detect even the most minor error (for example, a misplaced comma) because the rhythms are not right.

That I was well coordinated and good at sports had, I think, two important consequences. It gave me confidence in my body, in my physical presence, which I consider valuable. Even more important, it gave me a sense of competence that is hard to fake. On the field and in the game, athletic competition is beautiful and moving because it provides one of the too few models where the criteria of performance are clearly central to the tasks at hand. It surely contrasts with intellectual life in that respect, and I think it helped give me my critical eye for sociological performance. I also learned a good bit about jazz phrasing from my friend the black trumpet player in the Marine Corps, and I think those rhythms are in my prose. Instead of using an outline, I hear chord progressions when I am writing well, as if I were soloing with rhythm support. Singing in public also gave me a sense of performance and some experience in overcoming fear.

That I almost certainly would never have gone to college had it not been for that library in the jungle made me sensitive to historical accident and skeptical of the determinisms claimed for macrohistorical variables unless I could see the way they operated in relatively intimate, close-up interaction. My experience in campus politics gave me a sense for the discrepancy between effort and reward and insulated me to some extent against the pieties of the Protestant ethic and the unfelt clichés of political speech—even political speech I agreed with—which are inauthentic because they are political, that is, uttered to win applause or other approval rather than communicate truth or feeling. (Almost all speech is to some extent political, of course, the present instance not excepted.)

The fact that I had a very late literacy made me feel that I had a lot of catching up to do. For many years my peers always seemed smarter, better educated, more sophisticated than I was. That I had to fake a lot under those conditions to maintain my face made me sensitive to the ways in which other people faked a lot to maintain theirs. I still feel more comfortable questioning the authority of authors and lecturers than I do authoring and lecturing myself.

Women have been very important in my life, and I have learned a great deal from them. I was part of a class of six hundred men fresh from World War II to enter a previously all-women's college with eight thousand female students and a heavily female faculty. In a sense I experienced being a member of a sexual minority. Some of the female faculty were hostile to us on the grounds that opportunities for female academics depended on the existence of women's colleges, which our presence threatened. I had my first sociology course from a woman; its subject was mainly women as a minority group. The women students, though, were happy to receive us men, two to four years older than they, battle-scarred and worldly-wise. I began to have a rewarding sex life. That I was athletic, intelligent, and eager, but unlettered, unsophisticated, and "rough," was looked on, I think, as romantic, even sexy, and I think that I was deeply strengthened, in obscure ways I still do not fully understand, to discover that attractive women frequently seemed to prefer me to other men whom I regarded as far more attractive than I was. I mention these matters for two reasons. First, when feminism came on strong around 1970, it was not a new experience for me; I had been significantly exposed to it more than twenty years earlier. Second, my favorable predisposition to feminism was strengthened by my gratitude to women not only for having played an important part in my education but also for having provided me with a good bit of security and ego support at a time when I needed both, to compensate for my amateurishness at intellectual life and help overcome the stuttering.

At Berkeley I finally got the education I was seeking. But unlike many graduate students, I was never anybody's boy or protégé. Reinhard Bendix was my main mentor, and I learned much from him, but unlike many of his other students I was never his research assistant, and I did not work in his style; hence I never had to get used to deferring to him. I learned a lot from Phil Selznick too, but he threw me out of his class once for sassing him, and I was not rehired as an assistant on one of his research projects after spending a year with it, doing my usual carping. Bill Kornhauser helped me with my dissertation, but we tangled over

matters of form. Bill was a very formal assistant professor in the fifties (eventually liberated by the sixties) and I had to go over his head to Reinhard to get approval for my using the first-person singular. My dissertation itself did not arise out of the interests of any of the sociology faculty. It was another historical accident. I was looking for a job, and a business administration professor with a grant to study the Ford Motor Company was looking for a sociology graduate student to study the families of its workers. I got help from my committee with questionnaires and criticism of drafts of chapters, and financial support from the Institute of Industrial Relations, but I had almost no direct supervision in the research. I had to find the problem by myself, and the conception and execution of Working-Class Suburb were largely my own.

I do not mean to suggest that I was a deliberately recalcitrant or rebellious student, vain about my "independence" from influences. I was no more rebellious than the average anti-Parsonian in the fifties, and that was the mode at Berkeley then. Besides, I was in fact dependent on all sorts of things, like the goodwill of my teachers, assistantships, and (failing those) little jobs in bookstores on Telegraph Avenue and auditing courses for a commercial note-taking firm, which helped me learn to write concisely (as well as pick up a little economics and psychology) while putting bread on my table.

I was consistently ambivalent, with no milieu to which I wished to commit myself wholly. After a time I developed defenses against seeing that lack of thorough commitment as a vice or flaw (which armed me against those who later, in the sixties, continually urged "commitment" as if it were some unambiguously transcendent virtue). There was a lot about sociology that was intellectually timid and crushingly boring, but I stuck with it; there was a lot about bohemia I did not like, but I stuck with that too; there was a lot about New York intellectual life I wanted to distance myself from, but when invitations came to write for Commentary, Dissent, The Public Interest, The Nation , and the New York Times , the thousands of miles between them and me made it seem safe to do for a while. And there was a lot about marriage I did not like, but I was a scrupulously dutiful husband for what seemed like a millennium.

In fact, I actively sought discrepant, even contradictory, reference groups, eventually needing the contradictory reinforcements to counter or neutralize the claims that groups (occupation groups, families, ethnic groups, political parties, friendship networks) increasingly make on one's loyalty and identity. It was not the individualism of isolation or detachment I sought; conservative theories of mass society had per-

suaded me early that the unaffiliated person was not an individual but a cipher, all the more vulnerable to manipulation by centralized power. What I looked for was something closer to Georg Simmel's conception of the individual, who exists at the intersection of his or her group affiliations and (something Simmel did not emphasize) at a historically located biographical intersection.

The stuttering, I think, was the beginning of my search for the interstices. Being a Jew in the Marine Corps helped too; I had my first taste of anti-Semitism there. My late literacy made me feel like an imposter among intellectuals for a long time, which perhaps helps account for my greater respect for physical and sensual grace than intellectual sophistication. That I had been a jazz and pop singer and an athlete (and enjoyed both) made me marginal to those of my colleagues who would have thought it quaint in an academic. But having been an athlete and a singer also gave me my firm connection to, and taste for, popular culture and developed my ear for cliché: when watching television and bad movies I can often anticipate dialogue, annoying my family and friends by reciting a line before the character on the screen does.

The marginality and the historical out-of-jointness continued. I was an occasionally noisy radical in the silent, conservative fifties, but by the time the sixties rolled around I was already a successful young academic, too old to be a student radical but too young to be avuncular (which struck me then—and still does—as bad taste). By 1965 I wore orange jeans, began to let my hair grow long, and helped design the first (so far as I know) psychedelic poster to recruit graduate students to a university department. But I was also writing prudent and circumspect essays. The chancellor at Davis called me his hippie sociologist—and promoted me to full professor. There was something unsavory in that. By the mid-1970s, when the New Left had factioned away its communal solidarity, when the counterculture had declined into open and honest therapies, when men's barbers had become hairdressers, and when almost everybody agreed that the country was taking a sharp turn to the right, I was rereading Marx, discovering the neo-Marxists, and trying to find what was interesting in ethnomethodology and be seriously theoretical about the empirical study of culture and ideas. I began to conceive culture as a kind of communicable disease, carried on the backs of live bodies as they staggered through time—a disease I could not begin to understand unless I could identify the groups of sufferers that carried particular strains of it.

In retrospect, I think that my work has frequently defined itself

against the dominant wisdom in my reference groups of intellectuals at particular times, thus reflecting my sense of marginality to them or, more accurately, my tendency to alternate between approach and withdrawal, involvement and detachment. In the fifties, when intellectuals were inveighing against the power of suburbia to transform its residents into mindless conformists, I showed that automobile assembly line workers liked suburban living and that it did not change them much, although, like my peers, I did not like suburbia. In the sixties, when there was a lot of concern with youth culture and the solidarity of generations, I tried to show that subcultures and countercultures were only tenuously connected with chronological age, a variable whose impact was often confounded by more powerful structural factors like ethnicity and class. I tried too to show that the concept of generations had a largely elite referent and that the rhetoric of generations was an ideological device deployable in the struggle to capture "the spirit of the age." In the seventies, when the conventional wisdom had it that the counterculture was dead, and communes passé, I spent several years, on and off, doing field research to discover how the counterculture survived in rural communes by adapting its ideology to the circumstances in which it had to live, thus maintaining the long adversary tradition for yet another generation to inherit. Throughout, my tendency toward involvement is represented by my attraction to topics of current cultural interest; but my tendency toward detachment is apparent in my always being less interested in the events or facts themselves (about suburban living; about youth, age, and cohort solidarity; about communes and countercultures) than in the ideas espoused about them and the cultural ambience in which the espousers moved.

Now that I have provided a selective answer to some of the relations between my life and my work, I want to turn right around and warn you to take nothing of what I have said at face value. Please do not misunderstand me; I have not told you any lies, at least not intentionally. But the account has been severely selective. I have not told you, for example, that along with the marginality goes a certain alienation, to which I am now fairly well accommodated. Still, I regret that expressions of ritual solidarity embarrass me and that I can hardly ever feel like a full participant in them. I am not a good conductor of ceremonies, which means that I am not good at domestic life. I think I would find it easier to be the head of a large corporation than the head of a family.

The facts are all true; the events recounted are not fictious. But I have also imputed values and meanings to those facts and events, and in doing

so I have done a job of ideological work, which is (far more often than not) adaptive or group-serving for collectivities and self-congratulatory for individuals. Not without some justice you could regard these pages as an effort at persuasion—even seduction. My colleague and friend Joe Gusfield might call it a rhetoric, a drama in which I have cast myself as Mr. Nice Guy, who raised himself up by his own bootstraps but never lost his identification with the underdog; the intellectual whose home runs proved he was no sissy; the fancy writer and talker still overcompensating for that stutter; the former ladies' man who affects gratitude but is really boasting. The modest late starter who had to hurry to catch up with, and pass, those who began with greater advantages is really gloating; the vaunted marginality or alternating in-and-outness is really no more than a sly and cynical gutlessness. And despite my mother's voice still at my shoulder counseling prudence, my disdain for the reward system that has so well rewarded me could turn out to be simple ingratitude or a more complex ambitiousness and pride that reaches beyond the academic reward system to a still more prestigious transcendence: hubris. By taking the role of the other, in this case a hostile other, I am trying to show that the autobiographical data I use in order to do self-congratulatory ideological work could well be used by a hostile ideological worker to cut me up. That is as it should be.