In memoriam

To: Retort
From: IB
6 xii 02

Tomorrow evening, at the December Retort, with Ann, we shall be raising
our glasses to the memory of Mike Rogin. Has it really been a year since
Scott wrote from Belgium: 

I just arrived in Brussels from Paris, where I attended the funeral at
Pere LaChaise. The ceremony was very simple, half an hour long, with
about two dozen people, maybe 30. The ceremony opened with a blues song
that Mike, I assume, had been fond of; his coffin was there; and a
picture on top: in it, Mike was posing with his hands in his pockets, his
head slightly cocked, in front of a seascape of some sort--and there he
was looking as he does, smart and defiant and playful all at once.
Francoise Verges (a former student) read from Mike's book on Jackson, a
woman spoke in French about her connection to Mike, Ann's sister spoke,
and so on: there were about a dozen short testaments. The most moving one
for me was Tim Clark's. He gave a wonderful description of what it was
like to have Mike as a friend, what it was for Mike to bring out your
thoughts--to understand all at one with a rush of his hand to his
forehead that half-baked idea that you had been trying to explain to him
(this was Tim's image). The final word was a reading of Mike's last
published piece while he was alive--a piece on September 11 and post that
appeared in the London Review of Books (I think). Then everyone made the
final round around the coffin, hugged Ann, and we went to the 'Mur de
Federes,' which is a plaque to the communards who were massacred in the
1870s. It was a favorite place of Mike's and Ann's, from what I
understood. Then everyone met up again at Ann's and Mike's house to eat
and talk more. 
    
And from the archive:

Eloge for Michael Rogin

Just before I moved to Berkeley in 1985, a renegade philosopher, trained in American studies under F.O. Matthieson, warned me not to be fooled by the Berkeley mythos. I would find, he said, an essentially conservative town and campus, run by businessmen, engineers and - he did not elaborate on this - optometrists. Still, he went on, there were comrades to look out for. And this black sheep of the Boston social register immediately named Michael Rogin. Within days of arriving in Berkeley I met Michael, at Nora Pauwels and David Lloyd?s place. He was standing, cheroot in hand, at Ann?s elbow. While Ann and I launched into a heated exchange on linguistics, I got my first dose of the Rogin powers of attention, and his exacting ear.

Soon after, I attended the memorable but embattled seminar of Lichtman and Kupers at the Wright Institute, just a block from here. I perceived that I was standing in the rubble - at least at the Wright Institute - of a grand project, a project I had first heard about in London from Peter Sedgwick, Victor Serge?s translator - of a radical, psychoanalytically informed, fully historicized, political psychology. Michael Rogin?s work was, of course, a key part of that enterprise. Just how explosive it was, and potentially dangerous to our masters, became clear during Rogin?s Warholian moment of notoriety upon the publication of ?Ronald Reagan?, the Movie. Some of you here this afternoon were present, I know, when Mike electrified Wheeler Hall with his discovery that Edward Teller?s plans to put nuclear-powered laser weapons into space had found an audience in the White House because it was an uncanny re-run of an old Reagan sci-fi movie script. 

Soon after that, in the long defunct second-hand Book Consortium just off Shattuck Avenue in North Berkeley, I stumbled across a couple of old issues of Sheldon Wolin?s democracy [lower case d] containing one of Mike?s great pieces, and another marvellous essay by Hanna Pitkin on representation and direct democracy, which to this day circulates among the staff on the Berkeley campus. And alongside the essays of Mike and Hanna appeared David Noble?s enabling reinterpretation of the Luddites. So it was a disappointment, though hardly unexpected by those who inhabit the world of small magazines - unsubsidized by advertising or powerful institutions - to discover that democracy had also to be filed under that poignant category, ?short-lived journals?. And so by these and other traces, I became aware gradually, as one must as a late-comer, of the history of the local membership, long scattered, of an ?invisible college?. 

E. P. Thompson was once accused of a ?certain kind of silence? in his writings in the matter of hard economic analysis. Edward replied, ?My work falls into place within a wider discourse, a collective project?.You see, I have comrades and associates; they are better at it than I am.?

Michael Rogin was better at what he did than anybody any of us can think of. He has the refuge of the grave now, in a dark hour for America, but Mike?s work was far from finished. That is the shame of it: his voice has been stilled at a moment when it was never more needed. Just before he died, he promised to send to the crew here a ?Letter from Paris?, in the wake of September?s events. But it was not to be.

The fear we harbor is that there will be nobody who can continue Michael Rogin?s work. But in this matter, if not in others, we have too little faith. For one thing, who could teach like Rogin? And his students are legion. For another - and this is a sure thing - his writings will endure. Some of them seemed, in any case, intended for the future, like messages in a bottle, flung into the teeth of a storm. And fetching up who knows where.

Last summer I was in Norwich, in Waterstones bookstore at the University of East Anglia, an outpost of American Studies. I came across a young student leafing through Michael?s great book on minstrelsy and Hollywood, Blackface, White Noise. She was gathering material for a course on American film. ?Excuse me?, I said, ?But have you seen the epigraph?? She turned to the front of the book and, above the dedications to Ann and to the memory of Michael?s friend Jim Breslin, found the epigraph, which happens to be the concluding words on a plaque fixed in 1949 to the walls of Norwich Castle by the socialist city council in commemoration of Robert Kett?s uprising - four hundred years earlier, in 1549 - against the first round of enclosures, and in reparation for his execution as leader of Norfolk?s peasantry in their attempt ?to escape from a servile life into the freedom of just conditions?.

?How does he know about the plaque here in Norwich?? she asked. ?And what?s the connection??

?Well?, I said (more or less), ?we are a motley crew, of all degrees and colors, and there are some from Norfork and they are in connection with California. And among them is Michael Rogin. It is a collective project, it is a very old project, and it is not over. Rogin understood the connection between Kett?s rebellion, the struggle against slavery and racial oppression, and Hollywood?s images.?

Though in his own work Michael was without peer, in the larger project he was only one among many companions. And though our friend and comrade is now gone, the memory of his friendship and the legacy of his work we shall carry with us on that road, whose end is the freedom of just conditions.

Vale.

Iain Boal

Berkeley

20 i 02