John Michael Sprinker—a member of the editorial board of this journal, co-editor of the Haymarket series for Verso, a fiercely dedicated teacher and ferociously intelligent literary and cultural critic—died suddenly, of a massive coronary, on 12 August 1999, in Port Jefferson, New York. He was 49 years old.
There are so many reasons to honour Michael Sprinker and mourn his passing that it is hard to know where to begin, or how to order all that should be said. Given this difficulty, I hope I may be forgiven for starting with some common facets of our backgrounds, determinants we recognized so clearly that the degree to which they undergirded our twenty-year friendship hardly needed to be discussed. We were both baby-boom white guys hailing from the boondocks rather than from city or suburb, from homes situated on a thin petit-bourgeois ledge between the business and professional rulers of the small universes we came from, and the racist, reactionary, yet resistant white working-class people over whom those rulers more or less directly held sway. Accordingly, even as our cold-war childhoods in such kingdoms bred a fierce desire to escape our hometowns and transcend our origins, we were also blessed and cursed with the double vision that is able both to make out what lies above and what below its location, and to discern all too clearly the unequally co-constitutive relationship between the two views.
Thus, when, thanks to the expansion and partial democratization of the American educational system in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as to our own overdetermined academic achievements, Michael and I were able to make our escape from the small towns we had known to the ‘good schools’ to which we had won entry, we arrived fuelled with a blend of high cultural ambition and gut moral outrage, whose contradictions the élite collegiate environment of the tumultuous late 1960s and early 1970s tended to occlude as much as to sharpen. At the end of the 1970s, when I met Michael during the course of my on-campus interview for a job at Oregon State University, where he was already working, he was, it is fair to say, an intellectual devotee primarily of Derrida and Foucault, and a self-confessed armchair anarchist. Later, somewhat flippantly, he would say when asked that he became a Marxist and socialist by reading Marx—and, no doubt, something of this is true, especially if Althusser’s name is given alongside Marx’s. But I would also insist on the part played by the prolonged strain felt and insight gained from Michael’s social existence, first within that small-town petit-bourgeois universe, then as sublated, via the magic of élite academic-professional transformation, within the serried ranks of the professional managerial class.