Remembering Michael Gurevitch
By Saswat Pattanayak
College Park, Maryland
March 29, 2008
My teacher is no more. Professor Michael Gurevitch passed away this morning.
As I fight my tears in disbelief, I am also smiling at my various imaginings. In my little world of unbridled imaginations, Prof Gurevitch was Woody Allen's Side Effects and head of McLuhan's Global Village. He was the moderator of the noise in my world of blogs. He was the caricaturist of the planet myspace. Prof Gurevitch was the professor without the difficult words. He was the guide with the greatest wits. He was a scholar who knew his roots. A teacher ever willing to learn. He was the one who I always wanted to emulate. And I shall always do.
So what if he is no more in this world? Certainly, he will be missed terribly by his most loving family; he is going to be missed on the corridors of the College in Maryland by his colleagues. He is also going to be missed at the committee meetings and classrooms by the graduate students, no doubt.
But more importantly, it is his presence that will be felt forever as media studies will continue to be researched upon. It is his contributions to global comparative analysis that will help shape future perceptions as the world shrinks even further. It is Professor Gurevitch's staunch refusal to limit to the dichotomies that will pave the way for eliminations of schools of thoughts in a deeply divided world of media theories.
And personally for me, he shall reside in my mind and heart, in my pen and keyboard, in my thoughts and actions, than he will ever likely to be missed.
Before I attended the very first class with him, it was my beloved professor, Dr John W Cordes who offered me an introduction. So deeply in love with Prof Cordes' class that I was, I was slightly apprehensive of leaving the room for the next. Prof Cordes asked me, "Whose class is next?" I said, "Dr Gurevitch's". I remember very vividly the reply given by Prof Cordes: "Oh is it? I am so jealous and you are all so fortunate that you shall now be attending to a lecture by Michael!".
Prof Cordes is always a man of very few words. Although intensely philosophical at heart, he is always concise, and although deeply theoretical, he spoke s a little. And yet, when he offered such a rich tribute to a living professor that one usually reserves for the legends and myths, I could not wait any longer to meet with Prof Gurevitch.
The professor at the Media Theory class was not visibly impressive. He was not dressed in a suit. He was not articulate in his words. He was not polite enough to be the quintessential gentleman. He was not elite enough to be a full professor of a research university. On the contrary, he was the most casual presence in the classroom. He was extremely sarcastic when it came to most thoughts. He was the one who would turn the student's question upside down and then ask the student what is meant by turning a question upside down.
For Prof Gurevitch, asking the question was not enough. Asking the right questions was crucial. Watching the TV was not inducing violence. Getting afraid of the televised cops was. Presidential elections were not important enough to be in the media. Media were more important for the presidential candidates to continue the fanfare. Would violence stop if there were no video games? Would everyone be so obsessed with their presidents if the television attended to more important issues?
Is it the driver or the bus that's saying hello to you when you step inside? Why are people so polite in their interactions? Is it because the society is so highly segmented so as to lead to instrumental relationships? Are we gossiping more about the celebrities than our neighbors? No, gossiping is not bad. We have just been overlooking the scene outside the windows, if at all we open it once in a while.
Prof Gurevitch was equally sarcastic of the ideologies. And no, the ideologies were not in the communist countries. When media focus on President Bush, they are doing the duty of presidential coverage. Why are media considered unfree when they focus on the presidents in a totalitarian regime in those countries?
If media are supposed to make us informed citizens, we can ask how well do they perform their role. Perhaps we can test the people if they are well informed, and the professor would chuckle to himself. Then he would be generous to the ambitious freethinking scholars and say that the level of information and level of informed people perhaps do not provide the required comparative scale, but they merely show there is a disconnect somewhere.
Does the disconnect start at the dining room? Why is it that in the American society, sanctity of privacy is so highly regarded that the public sphere almost goes amiss? Why should people discuss politics over food when they can rather watch television? How different is it in a country like Cuba where people watch televisions in communities? Is it a good thing that people cannot afford individual TV sets? What have we done to community radio? How do we know what the housewives feel as a collective experience? Is there a distinction between citizens and consumers? If the democracy needs citizens, do we have a democracy existing today? Have the media not turned us all into consumers? Why do students remain silent inside the libraries? Why is there a "Do not Talk" signboard at a place where debates must naturally should take place?
Prof Gurevitch was never short of questions. When he asked me what was my blog all about, I asked him to go through it. He stressed that he does not even have any interest to write emails to people. He does not believe cell phones are tools of liberation. And yet, the next time I saw him after that was at an informal gathering of bloggers. I walked upto him to pay him respect and give some company as he was the only old man conspicuous by his presence sitting by the corner leaving few empty benches ahead of him. He said he was there to feel the pulse of the blogs. "Can you lend me the video you took of the blog conference you said you had attended in Washington DC last month?"
Prof Gurevitch decided to remain in my committee. Yes the dissertation is about the blogs, but I shall address the issues of noise, he said. I was absolutely thrilled and remained grateful. I am yet to know if the blogs are the vehicles of some sort of liberation, or some sort of noise, but among many words of wisdom that I have learned from Prof Gurevitch, I ever so closely remember the most is his note of caution to me: "Do everything that you must, but take a pause once in a while in life's journey and look back. Who knows, you might discover you were wrong in some ways. Then move forward again."
Prof Gurevitch's own life was a saga of pause and play. In an academic world of strict schools of thoughts, he had to choose his sides only to later disown them gracefully. Earning a doctoral degree through quantitative empirical analysis only to show merits of theoretical qualitative scholarship later. A Marxist scholar who would on more occasion than one publicly deny the allegation. As the Howard Zinn of the media studies in my view, Prof Gurevitch was deeply saddened by the orthodoxy and elitism pervading the Marxist scholarship today. To the classroom he would often digress from Marx and go beyond to Hegel, and as my good fortune, he would then think for a while and say, "hmm..Saswat would have a clue about Hegel, I am sure".
He knew throughout of my spiritual and emotional love for Karl Marx and Marxist-Leninist philosophies. He was never the one to dismiss the merits of a system that many in American academia swear has failed. He was more concerned about the collective amnesia regarding the constant failure of the democracy that is being heralded as a success. Democracy was a failure in the US as glaringly as it was in India. Who are the ones researching about it? I brought to him texts that were apolitical in many ways to walk the safe lanes. He instead brought his notepad and wrote down the names of the scholars I had proposed. Gayatri Spivak was one of the many he would subsequently go to read about. Feminism was not the solution, and film studies he would stay clear of, but like the blogs, his initial resistance was not so much a denial of his want, as to test how well committed were the arguments in favor of various schools. Once convinced of the arguments, he would go one step further to provide support. I remember clearly how on the day of defense of my Comprehensive examination he asked me in the end, "I am going to ask you a question that I have not asked anyone before." I was naturally most curious and very apprehensive. He then went on to say, "Frame a question yourself that you would like to answer because you think the question is important, and then answer it yourself." I was stunned, and delighted at the same time. Was it not just the greatest compliment I had ever received in my life? Or was it perhaps the most difficult question I had ever faced? Either way, it was a lesson I shall always cherish in life, and a wisdom I shall pass along as I keep growing up.
Prof Gurevitch had a sarcasm towards the so-called free society that never really left him. He knew well that the free society was free depending on how much means of freedom one owns. Closer home, he knew how free he was in the classroom depended on how much was he going to be allowed to be. Even with his public shyness from academic radicalism, he often was branded in political terms. In the entire University of Maryland Systems, he was the most qualified of the professors to be offered the least compensation for his contributions. A couple of years back when I had checked into the public disclosure of annual salaries of the university community, most faculty members who were not even full Professors were being paid three times more the amount than Prof Gurevitch himself. Not that he ever discussed why it was so, but he certainly alluded to the fact that even the professors in the free society needed to buy themselves some grants as well. These are the times when there are way less grants for critical studies research, and lot more funding for administrative researches. In this world of unnecessarily positive fancies, where undergrad students research, and lot more funding for administrative researches. In this world of unnecessarily positive fancies, where undergrad students would much rather hear of a beautiful career of television anchoring than learn about media monopolies and exploitations, it was only natural that critical media scholarship was about to slowly go defunct.
A former colleague of the legendary Stuart Hall, Prof Gurevitch relentlessly continued his scathing yet constructive attack on the corporate media and conclusively proved that "Media Studies" was not about studying media alone, it was about ripping apart the media as well. Media have always been active agents of the ruling classes everywhere in the world. It is time to honestly critique their roles and needs. Prof Gurevitch in his inimitable wit suggested a website in the classroom during the time none of us had an idea it existed. Nakednews.com is also a media, in fact it offers the very latest news, except that it is more candid about the fetishism surrounding television news. We laughed, but learned it to be true as well.
Amidst the laughter and learning processes, there are millions of words he spoke, and spoke well. Thousands of examples he offered that brought life to a field yet to be systematized. Evidences he suggested which brought to surface the reality that human beings are not scientific, how can the media be?
And beneath all his teachings, and erudite research, he was forever a simple man who had good words to say about different cultures, a winning way to speak with the students, a collegial comrade to his beloved college. And as I recollect the person who perhaps was closest to him in academia in his later years, Prof Kathy McAdams, saying to me, "Did you just take a class with Michael? Did you not simply love him?" I realize that not only have I been so fortunate as having attended his class, I have always and shall continue to love him as a human being I have been proud to have known in this life.
