Michael Sprinker, the Teacher: Intellectual History, Proust, and Marxism

Anthony T. Vaver Michael Sprinker, the Teacher. Intellectual History, Proust, and Marxism My first course with Michael Sprinker, in the Spring of 1990, was a proseminar on Marxist aesthetics. The course was an extension of a previous course taught by Michael in the Fall of 1988, in which he covered classical aesthetics, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, working his way through Lessing, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, and up to Adorno. This classical aesthetics course was a reaction to some colleagues' accusations that Michael had been favoring Marxist literary theory at the expense of traditional literary criticism . Michael took the challenge seriously, but his response went beyond the scope of what his critics anticipated. In piecing together two courses on classical and Marxist aesthetics, Michael countered his critics by using these courses as a forum to demonstrate the deep roots of Marxist criticism in traditional Western philosophy and criticism. Michael often used the classroom to work systematically through some of his most challenging and innovative ideas, so a chronicle of some of his engagements in the classroom with the problem of art's relationship to society can provide some insight into the trajectory of his thought that is not necessarily apparent in his writings alone. Michael began the Marxist aesthetics course with Hegel's Aesthetics, both to show how Hegel set up the philosophical conditions for creating a Marxist aesthetics and to introduce the themes that would run through the thought of the Marxist theorists we would subsequently cover. Michael then proceeded to show how Marxist criticism reworked the basic tenets of Hegel's aesthetic, in a crucial way. Whereas Hegel saw the development of thought, or the Idea, as the main determinant of the historic differences between artistic forms, Marxist criticism emphasized instead the role of the shifting relations of the material in the production of art. This shift in emphasis, Michael noted, hinges on Marx's axiom in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness," which essentially reverses Hegel's emphasis on the Idea to account for the historical dimensions of artistic production (263). With this critical difference in mind, Michael moved away from Hegel and into Marxist aesthetics via Lukács and his speculative attempt to link the production of aesthetic objects to the social structures of given epochs. As we continued to read through the texts of theorists like Jameson, Benjamin, Greimas, and Eagleton, Michael sought answers to a series of questions: Does literature have formalist features that can be described systematically? How do these formal features relate to socio-historical processes ? What is literature's relationship to ideology and ideological structures ? The course ended with Michael's conclusion that literature is socially 136 the minnesota review determined, but what is not historically contingent is the text's own insight into the ideology of the society that produced it. The particular relationship between a text and its society can be studied and apprehended through systematic, theoretical processes. This conclusion set the stage for Michael's attempt to draw out the insights into late nineteenth-century French society provided by Marcel Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu. Michael's turn to Proust in the Fall of 1990 was both an engagement with a figure who receives regular, albeit limited, commentary from many classic Marxist theorists and an attempt to apply scientific Marxist principles to a work that seems to resist such analysis.1 Not only did Michael confront the challenges of working with Proust as they were laid out within a Marxist critical tradition, but he faced pedagogical challenges as well. How does one approach teaching such a massive novel whose author conceives its entire trajectory and the society portrayed in it as a whole, while students are forced to follow the novel in a linear, progressive unfolding through the course of their reading? Few Marxist theorists ever attempted to engage Proust's novel in an extended manner. Walter Benjamin, perhaps, is representative of the attitudes of Marxist theorists towards Proust when he suggests that the "greatness of his work will...