the minnesota review n.s. 58-60 (2003)

Introduction

This issue is devoted to the work of Michael Sprinker. It is devoted to his work in the full sense of the word, not only as we usually define it—articles and books—but his teaching, editing, and comradeship. His work was tireless, intellectually acute, and unerringly generous. It was unrelenting up to the moment of his death in 1999, too young at forty-nine, when he had travelled to Stony Brook, though stricken with cancer, to conduct a dissertation defense.

Readers versed in theory will know Michael Sprinker's work on Althusser, as well as on a range of other modern critics such as Benjamin and de Man. And they will probably be aware of his prodigous work editing for Verso, Cambridge University Press, New Left Review, and this journal, and compiling collections such as The Althusserian Legacy, Edward Said: A Critical Reader, and Ghostly Demarcations. Those who were graduate students and colleagues at Stony Brook from the mid 1980s through the 1990s will know of his work as a teacher, conducting the theory “proseminar” and directing myriad dissertations. Yet others will know him as a presence at the annual MLG (Marxist Literary Group) summer institute or at other academic fora. For those who do not know his work, this cluster of essays provides a sense not only of his thinking but of the intellectual example he held for many.

Michael was born on February 8, 1950 in Elgin, Illinois, near Bloomington-Normal. The oldest of five children, he had, as he used to describe it, a fairly typical midwestern, working-class upbringing (though his father later had a successful small business). He attended Normal Community High School and, in the summers, caddied at the local golf course for the rich people in town, a key detail in his own story of coming to class consciousness. Academically, he hit the ground running; always an ace student, he went to Notre Dame for a year, then transferred to Northwestern, where he studied with Erich Heller and from which he received his BA in 1972. From there, he went to Princeton, where he finished his PhD in a precocious three years, at age twenty-five (MA, 1974; PhD, 1975). He got his first job at Oregon State, where he joined colleagues Rich Daniels, Robert Wess, and Peter Copek (asst. prof., 1975-80; assoc. prof. 1980-83).

During his time there, Princeton was hardly a hotbed of theory, but one somewhat fortuitous circumstance made a particular impact on Michael: Hillis Miller, taking the train down from Yale one night a week, gave a seminar. Michael attended the seminar and ferried Miller back and forth from the train. Miller provided his entry into the terrain of deconstruction, and Michael became part of the new generation embracing the turn to poststructualist literary theory. Though he is justifiably known as a Marxist theorist and commentator on modernist literature, Michael began his career as a deconstructive Victorianist, notably with the book "A Counterpoint of Dissonance": The Aesthetics and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Johns Hopkins UP, 1980), which places Hopkins in the lineage of poets like Valéry and Mallarmé who foregrounded the struggle of language and analyzes Hopkins' poems in derridean terms of presence and absence. One notable essay from this time is "Fictions of the Self: The End of Autobiography," the closing chapter of the collection Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, edited by James Olney (Princeton UP, 1980), which marshals the theoretical lineage from Vico through Nietzsche and Freud up to poststructuralism to examine the textuality of the self.

Michael continued his march through contemporary theory during the late 1970s and early 1980s. He attended NEH summer seminars with Paul de Man (1979) and with Edward Said (1981), and published prolifically, with a stream of essays in boundary 2, diacritics, Salmagundi, MLN, and elsewhere. Though still engaging deconstruction—indeed, de Man is a touchstone through much of his writing—he took a more critical stance. At first he considered Foucault, notably in his influential 1980 boundary 2 essay, "Textual Politics: Foucault and Derrida" (no. 10 [fall 1980]: 75-98), which has affinities with Said's work of the time in finding Foucault's historical archaeology superior to Derrida's linguistic focus. And he progressively turned leftwards. In a 1980 MLA paper, "The Ideology of Deconstruction: Totalization in the Work of Paul de Man," he held that "Deconstruction ... mirrors the effacement of ideology under the mantle of technical rationality which is the principal feature of ideology under late capitalism .... Deconstruction is the specular image of the society of the spectacle" (qtd. in Paul A. Bové, "Variations on Authority: Some Deconstructive Transformations of the New Criticism," in The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America, ed. Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983], p. 3).

Michael's turn to Marxism had several roots. He occasionally remarked that his reading of Richard Ohmann's English in America: A Radical View of the Profession (Oxford UP, 1976) changed the way he thought about literary studies. And he began his long march through the Marxist classics, from Marx to Fredric Jameson, who became a central influence on Michael's thought. Or, in Michael's telling of his own working-class roots, his class consciousness was something that had been there all along. One can also safely assume that Michael's thinking changed because of his colleagues at Oregon State, in particular Fred Pfeil, with whom he took over the editorship of minnesota review, and who together added the subtitle "A Journal of Committed Writing." A pivotal moment was a year on fellowship in London and Paris in 1983. In Paris, he worked on Sartre's then untranslated Critique of Dialectical Reason, and in London he hung out, as he told it, in the New Left Review offices. He also began his engagment with Althusser's thought, publishing "Politics and Theory: Althusser and Sartre" (MLN 100 [1985]: 989-1011), an engagement that threaded through his next two books and continued to his last essays, notably "The Legacies of Althusser" (Yale French Studies 88 [1995]: 201-25).

After returning from abroad, he moved to SUNY-Stony Brook, first teaching the theory proseminar in spring 1984 (assoc. prof. 1983-88; full prof. 1988 on). From his new perch on the east coast, he began working for Verso (formerly New Left Books and the book publishing arm of New Left Review), which was distributed by New York-based publishers Schocken, then Routledge, now Norton. In the late 80s, after his customary seminar on Thursday night, early Friday morning he’d take the train to the publishing offices, and he helped establish Verso as a presence in the American book trade. With his comrade Mike Davis, he began the Haymarket Series, and he became a commissioning editor, a job that gradually took up more of his work time through the 1990s. While committed to Althusser's credo of "philosophy as the class struggle on the level of theory," Michael was also active in and a founding member (in 1986) of the political group Solidarity.

As anyone who was at Stony Brook during the 1980s and into the 90s will aver, Michael was a major force there. He schooled almost all graduate students passing through its doors in theory, from the philosophical lineage of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel to the contemporary lineage of de Man, Jameson, Eagleton, and Fish, among many others. Through the late 80s he taught seminars on poetics, aesthetics, and modernism, and through the 90s on the Marxist tradition and Benjamin. He read and directed half a faculty's worth of dissertation on a varied range of topics such as on medieval allegory, the eighteenth century origins of the novel, or jazz age culture. And he parlayed the work of most of his students into their first publications, many of them reviews in the minnesota review, which he moved to Stony Brook in 1986 (he turned the journal over to me in 1992).

Capping off his numerous articles and reviews, in 1987 he published Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism (Verso, 1987). The book sorts through the thicket of the ideological valence of literature, working out Althusser's brief comments on the "semi-autonomy of art." But it also follows a broad itinerary from Ruskin's aestheticism, through the Chicago school of "neo-Aristotelian" critics, the Prague school, and Hans Robert Jauss's aesthetics of reception. And, rather than dismissing deconstruction, it attempts to fuse the thinking of de Man on aesthetic ideology with Althusser. (As Andrew Ross remarked in a review, though the hero of the book is Althusser, the most citations are to de Man.)

Alongside his teaching, Michael was pivotal in the founding and operation of the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook. He did a lot of the legwork to attain funding in 1987, and he eventually served as associate director under its director, E. Ann Kaplan. In the fall of 1989, he spearheaded the conference "The Althusserian Legacy," which gathered a cohort of the major Althusserian thinkers from around the globe, including Etienne Balibar, Michele Barrett, Alex Callinicos, and Gregory Elliott. It resulted in the collection The Althusserian Legacy (co-ed. Kaplan; Verso, 1993), a major reassessment of Althusser’s work. On the heels of the conference, he also sponsored a visit by Jacques Derrida, during which he conducted an interview, the first in which Derrida talks about his teacher, Althusser. It is appended to The Althusserian Legacy.

Michael's writing at the time focused on diagnosing "the current conjuncture in theory" (in an article so-titled in College English 51 [1989]: 825-31). Part of his diagnosis was polemical, confronting the culture wars, notably in "Commentary: 'You've Got a Lot of Nerve'" (in Shakespeare Left and Right, ed. Ivo Kamps [Routledge, 1991]: 115-28) and "The War against Theory" (in PC Wars: Politics and Theory in the Academy, ed. Jeffrey Williams [Routledge, 1995]: 149-71). And part of his solution was the rigor of the philosophy of science, evident in his critique of Fishean pragmatism in "Knowing, Believing, Doing—Or How Can We Study Literature and Why Should We Anyway?" (ADE Bulletin 98 [1991]: 46-55), and in his favoring the work of Roy Bhaskar in "The Royal Road: Marxism and the Philosophy of Science" (New Left Review 191 [1992]: 122-44) He also gathered the collection Edward Said: A Critical Reader (Blackwell, 1992), which includes essays by Tim Brennan, Partha Chatterjee, Abdul JanMohamed, Benita Parry, Bruce Robbins, and others and concludes with a revealing interview of Said (conducted with Jennifer Wicke).

While Michael continued to write and teach with unabated energy, he came to have perhaps his greatest influence through his indefatigable and savvy editing. Indeed, many of the books that Michael catalyzed as commissioning editor at Verso—such as Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1991), David Roedigger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991), Andrew Ross's Strange Weather: Culture, Society, and Technology in the Age of Limits (1991) and The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society (1994), Bruce Robbins's Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (1993), Michael Bérubé's Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (1994), and Michael Denning's The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1997)—shaped the contours of contemporary cultural criticism. In the late 1980s, Michael also jumpstarted a Cambridge UP series on "Literature, Culture, Theory" for which he marshalled books by Don Bialostosky (Wordsworth, Dialogics, and the Practice of Criticism [1992]), Pierre Macherey (The Object of Literature [1995]), and Robert Wess (Kenneth Burke [1997]), among others, and students such as Michael Bernard-Donals, James Paxson, and me.

In November of 1991, while on leave at Irvine, Michael was first diagnosed with cancer—multiple myloma, which acts on the bones, and some studies suggest is spurred by DDT of the kind sprayed on golf courses in the 1960s when he was a caddy. He was forty-one, athletic, and obviously had a great deal of vitality to do all the work he did; after exercising, he had gone to the hospital because of severe back pains, and was hospitalized for several months. Still, he continued to write, edit, teach, and lecture, amid chemotherapy and bone marrow treatment.

In the early 90s Michael culminated his project, begun in the late 1980s as anyone who attended his seminars will recall, on modernism and capitalism, with History and Ideology in Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu and the Third French Republic (Cambridge UP, 1994). The book is one of the most concerted demonstrations of "the ideology of the aesthetic," showing how Proust’s text gives us a specific kind of knowledge of the climax of what Eric Hobsbawm called "the age of empire" and what Arno Meyer called "the persistence of the old regime." Unsurprisingly to any reader of Imaginary Relations, whose chapters often begin with epigraphs from pop songs such as "Don’t know much about history," the book begins with an epigraph from Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing." Michael had wanted to title the book "Money for Nothing," but the staid Cambridge powers-that-be blanched.

A branch of his investigation of modernism and captitalism was the legacy of imperialism, and Michael regularly taught and wrote on texts by Tagore and Salih as well as English staples such as Conrad. Two of his notable essays on imperialism and literature are "History and Ideology: Lord Jim and the Problem of Literary History" (in Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology, ed. James Phelan [Ohio State UP, 1989]) and "Homeboys: Nationalism, Colonialism, and Gender in Rabindrath Tagore's The Home and the World" (in Reading the Shape of the World: Toward an International Cultural Studies, ed. Henry Schwarz and Richard Dienst [Westview, 1996]: 202-23), and he also co-edited the collection Late Imperial Culture (with Kaplan and Román de la Campa; Verso, 1995). In the mid 90s, Michael was also at the center of a controversy in postcolonial studies over Ahmad's In Theory, particularly over its criticism of Said. Michael's judicious assessment of the stakes in the quarrel can be found in "The National Question: Said, Ahmad, Jameson" (Public Culture 6 [1993]: 3-29).

In the late 1990s, Michael turned to teach and write more on Benjamin and Brecht. One of the last essays he wrote, before his death in 1999, was a short one for this journal, "Brechtian Realism" (minnesota review 50-51 [1999]: 223-25), in which he takes Ken Loach's films, such as Riff-Raff (1991), as exemplary for a genuinely political art. And one of the texts he found particular value in was Benjamin's "The Author as Producer," which turns aesthetics around, calling attention not to the work itself but to the author's position in production. Michael also returned to the intersection of deconstruction and Marxism in another of his last essays, "Art and Ideology: Althusser and de Man" (in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen et al. [U of Minnesota P, 2001]: 32-48), and in the collection he gathered, stemming from New Left Review, Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacque's Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (Verso, 1999), which includes chapters by Ahmad, Eagleton, Jameson, Macherey, and Derrida.

The essays here give you a sense of the various dimensions of Michael Sprinker's work, as well as the range of people that he worked with, as teacher, editor, colleague, or simply correspondent. Together they testify to his unique presence, intellectual force, and genuine comradeship. And they testify to the cost of his loss, to us personally as well as to the practice of criticism.

—Jeffrey Williams