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

Jeffrey J. Williams

Teacher

To anyone who heard him in seminar, at the back of a lecture hall, or on the other side of a restaurant, Michael Sprinker's voice is unforgettable. A baritone with a midwestern nasal tinge that pierced through even a crowded room, his voice carried. During a lecture, he would sometimes subtly raise it, with a concordant raise of his right index finger like a conductor's baton, so you knew where the italics were. An extension of his voice, his laugh was somewhere between a hearty chuckle and a staccato cackle that was unmistakably his own.

And Michael had a distinctive manner of speaking. It was both decorous and rude. He spoke with unusually precise enunciation, combining an exacting, learned diction with a relish for the profane. An honors philosophy major in college, he ranged effortlessly over the knotty terrain of philosophical concepts from Aristotle to Kant to Derrida, and his phrasing was marked with literary tags, like Dickens' "in short" or Althusser's "in the last instance," and britishisms like "at university." But also an erstwhile factory worker, he frequently parsed his favorite intensifier, "fucking," into a sentence, and was wont to begin a question, "I hate to put a turd in the punchbowl, but in the third critique Kant actually says ...."

One of the distinctive if not peculiar turns of phrase that he used was calling someone "my teacher." He never said "my professor in college" or "my mentor," but pronounced “he was my teacher” with a certain formality. Some of the people that he accorded that status were Erich Heller, from whom he took classes at Northwestern, Paul de Man, with whom he took a 1979 NEH summer seminar, and Edward Said, with whom he took a 1981 NEH. It was a designation that carried his respect not for academic position but for intellectual integrity and force.

When I first met him in 1985 (I was a first-year graduate student at Stony Brook), I recognized the cascade of his speaking as that of a working class "lad"—another word he liked to use—who learned many of the words through reading and school, and held onto them with a relish that those to the manor born don't appreciate in quite the same way. It is not that he was uncomfortable with the words; rather, it was the payback of a smart working class lad who has worked harder and thus knows more than anyone else, and who, with a seamless, muscular intelligence, takes possession of them and makes them his own. There was no falseness in Michael. Although he was a Princetoney graduate (as I liked to call his alma mater, usually rewarded with a cackle), he never forgot, nor desired to forget, where he came from. Rather, he did not let the empyrean heights of academe forget.

Michael never abided the discriminations of class—and for him class encompassed the other discriminations we experience, whether of race or gender or anything else—as evidenced by the vast range of students he had, brown or white, men and women, with or without academic pedigree. That, probably more than any other trait, is what made him a great teacher and earned the trust and loyalty of his students. He treated people as he found them, whether the secretary at the Humanities Institute, his unpedigreed students at Stony Brook, or his colleagues. The other side of the coin was that he didn't "have time"—another of his phrases—for academic pieties and intellectual pretenders, and made it clear to them that he didn’t. This did not always endear him to his colleagues or to some of those he encountered in the profession at large, and he sometimes aroused as strong antagonism as he did admiration.

Michael's primary discrimination was who "did the work," and one of his mottos was, "at the end of the day, it's the work that matters." He had an unabashed respect for the intellectual tradition and reserved a certain decorum for it. One sign of his sense of decorum was that, though he didn’t own a suit, he always came to class or to a lecture in a pressed shirt and tie. (This, too, I took as a sign of a working class lad; as another of his students, Mike Hill, once observed, you can tell the rich kids because they dress down, whereas working class kids dress up for school.) Another was the dedicated seriousness with which he approached the work, whether it was a neophyte question in a seminar, a three hundred page book manuscript, or a Jameson article. And he was tireless in doing the work, seemingly a force of nature, even when undergoing bone marrow treatments still writing, editing, and teaching.

A corollary to his belief in the work was that, when entering an intellectual forum, you should "leave your ego at the door." As he put it, "A lot of academics, they give a paper and everyone tells them it was 'interesting.' But your friends aren't doing you any favors if they don't tell you when you’re wrong, because your enemies sure will." And he didn't hesitate to tell people when they were wrong, a code which not everyone appreciated and which bristled against some of the normal expectations of academic decorum. He didn't shy from a fight, and sometimes saw the world in terms of friends and enemies. Like most people's, his strengths were his weaknesses, his rude bluntness inseparable from his integrity.

At the end of his life, Michael was drawn more and more to Benjamin and Brecht. (If he had a theoretical path, it went through de Man, then Althusser, leavened with Aristotle and philosophy of science, moving to Brecht; or his object of study moved from Victorian literature through Conrad and Proust to Ken Loach films.) Part of his polemic was recovering Benjamin's Marxist phase, not as a misguided infatuation with Brecht but as essential to understanding Benjamin. The essay that he foregrounded was "The Author as Producer," in which Benjamin corrects a leftist tendency to think expressing our political views is enough; rather, our position in production determines our politics, so we have to change the relations of production. One way to understand Michael's life is that he took Benjamin's caveat to heart and worked relentlessly to change the relations of production. He was "the teacher as producer," and particularly in his work with Verso, "the editor as producer," marshalling a range of left books, from those by Michele Wallace to Andrew Ross to Aijaz Ahmad. One can glean the extent of his work as producer in the dedications and acknowledgments in several shelves of books.

Under his tutelage, Michael made you want to do the work. His seminars followed a relatively traditional format, but were intense, heady, shot with adrenalin. He lectured for two hours, and I've often thought, while one can hear some of his inflections and decipher the coordinates of his thinking in his writing, that his brilliance shone most in his lecturing. After the lecture was our turn, and we—in my cohort students like Jim Paxson and the late Ron Phillips—would have combed through the third critique or de Man or Proust for the past week to launch a counterargument. One worked hard for him to say "fair enough" or, even better, "I take your point."

As a teacher, he paid the highest compliment that a teacher can pay to his students: he took us seriously, however inchoate or nascent our arguments were. While he was not always patient with his colleagues, he was almost indulgent with us. He obviously identified with his students, not the visceral identification of trying to stay hip—in fact, he was a lifelong Elvis fan capable of a spontaneous rendition of "Blue Suede Shoes," whereas we were Elvis Costello fans—but the deep political one, with the future and with those who don't have a full franchise. Yet.

He fought for his students, whether for an assistantship or a job, or a pass on comps, or some other nettle. In 1986 or 87, we had a graduate student strike, and Michael characteristically showed up each day for the picket line. At one point he physically blocked the doorway—and, before he was ravaged by years of chemotherapy, Michael was a formidable physical presence, a brawny 6'1" who was not afraid to stand in someone's way—and berated a colleague for thinking of crossing the line. And he fought for others, at one point for the secretary of the Humanities Institute to be granted a medical leave, at another for one of his junior colleagues to gain tenure. He travelled from Massachusetts where he was undergoing chemo to attend the tenure meeting, by legend got into a shoving match with one of the old guard, and helped sway the vote for his postmodern colleague. Michael's rude loyalty came at a price, no doubt costing him some academic rewards.

For me, Michael was the kind of older brother you wished you had when you were growing up, the kind who, if in a ticklish situation, you would run down the street to get, and who would come back to "put paid"—again one of his phrases—to the argument. The other side of having an older brother who was fiery and larger than life was that you sometimes saw over his shoulder the antagonism he induced. But, like a younger brother, you had watched the other moments too, and you understood his code and admired its sense of justice, or simply its fearlessness.

Whatever his lack in the normal social graces, Michael was unavailingly generous. Though he had a strong personality, paradoxically he was surprisingly selfless, and he gave of his time, energy, and means. He went to lengths for people, whether students, friends, or someone who corresponded with him about an article or book. For students, he famously returned papers or dissertation chapters—at one time he was on over thirty committees—rarely after more than a couple of days, with long, single-spaced comments, or he made calls for jobs, or he set up publications. Likewise, for those whose work he edited, he combed through their manuscripts and put his finger on the problems, and ushered them into print. His favors weren't always academic: more than once he lent his graduate students (including me) money, and I remember picking him up at the airport on his way back from a Verso meeting in London when he appeared with a baby in his arms, the child of one of his African students, whom he ferried to the states. When you are in graduate school, you tend to think that most professors act the way your professors do, and that's the way the profession operates. Of course it doesn't.

Of all he gave, what I remember most, and most feel the loss of, is his conversation. Michael relished talk, and it is the places where we talked—in seminar, on the phone, in his flat in Boston, during a car ride, over dinner at a fancy restaurant, or over a beer at a seedy bar—that still frame my memory. I expect that anyone else who knew him will remember the various places too, where his voice filled the air. He relished telling and hearing about the latest book in postcolonial studies, or a recovered eighteenth-century text by Schiller, or a recent conference at Duke. He relished stories, about jobs or politics, about friends' and students’ lives, about new TV shows or songs. And he relished jokes, on or off color, and usually moved conversation along with a string of barbs—like the dozens, again a working class thing.

More often than not, conversation with Michael was also punctuated with advice. He liked to give advice, whether on an argument you were thinking through, a job, or buying a car ("After the revolution, we’ll all drive hot cars"). He would listen for a long time to some predicament I’d lay out, whether on the phone or in person, waiting until I was entirely finished, then start, "Look, ace, this is what you have to do." I especially remember one bit of advice he gave me, and I've often returned to it, sometimes repeating it to students and friends. It was just after I’d gotten my first job at East Carolina University in the early 1990s, and I was embroiled in the PC wars. It seemed I’d been sent from central casting as a PC professor, because I was affiliated with left groups, on top of which I taught theory, plus I talked like a New Yorker (as one of my colleagues told me, "What’s the difference between a yankee and a damn yankee? A yankee goes home") and wore a high proportion of black. The NAS—the National Association of Scholars—was then gathering steam and held an organizational meeting on campus. I went, I confess with intentions exceeding intellectual curiosity, and got into a heated argument with a history professor who made the claim, common at the time, that the de Man scandal was evidence of the wrongness if not totalitarian leanings of literary theory. I found it more than ironic that, claiming the platform of scholarly standards, he adduced an inaccurate, tabloid version of the facts of the de Man case, and from it employed the kind of syllogism that anyone taking an introductory logic class would debunk (de Man was a collaborator; de Man was a theorist; therefore, theory was corrupt). And I told him so, in a few more words.

Michael listened, occasionally with a "yeah, yeah" to hustle the pace ("no wonder you like Tristram Shandy, you can’t tell a straight story"), occasionally with his inimitable cackle, and then, when I'd finished, he said, "You were never on the debating team when you were in high school, were you, ace? When you're in a debate, you don't try to convince the other side; they're never going to agree with you. You try to convince the judges and the audience." I've often thought of that advice, for politics inside and outside academe, even if I've not always been able to keep it.

For those who don't know Michael's work, I fear that I've not done justice to his writing, his unpacking of Althusser's dictum that "philosophy is the class struggle at the level of theory." But I think the way he carried himself, the way he so vitally and indomitably was, is part and parcel of his work, and his legacy an example of how we should conduct ourselves as intellectuals, particularly if we are against inequality, oppression, and the tacit discriminations of class. Michael was against them "all the way down," in every facet of his life, whether in explicating the history of Marxist aesthetics or the way he acted toward those without pedigree or position. We still have his writing, but there's a hole in the intellectual world without Michael. For myself, I can't get over missing being able to call him on the phone, or to have dinner with him and hear him cackle, and to have him correct me, praise me, and teach me something.

Jeffrey J. Williams is editor of the minnesota review.