This past academic year, the department and Dietrich School celebrated the vast contributions of Distinguished Professor Colin MacCabe, who taught in the department's Literature and Film programs. Not only did MacCabe bring a wealth of knowledge, theory, and practice to our department; he also helped to build the Cultural Studies program and put it in conversation with the world's most noteworthy thinkers. A film director and producer whose film credits includeThe Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger and Murder by Numbers, MacCabe is the author of numerous books on film, culture, epistemology, and literature, among them Tracking the Signifier (University of Minnesota Press,1985), Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70 (FSG-Faber & Faber, 2004), True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Perpetual Carnival: Essays on Film and Literature (Oxford, 2016). As editor of Critical Quarterly, MacCabe made Pitt English a homebase for several important initiatives, including the Keywords Project, which jas extended Raymond Williams' important 1976 book by that name. Ben Lerner, who now teaches at Brooklyn College, has been a poetry editor for Critical Quarterly; he has published a host of books in a variety of genres, including The Lichtenberg Figures (poetry: Copper Canyon, 2004), Leaving the Atocha Station (fiction: Coffee House Press, 2011), and The Hatred of Poetry (essay: FSG, 2016). At Pitt's gathering in MacCabe's honor this past year, former Writing faculty member Ben Lerner returned to Pittsburgh to offer the following toast.
The film you are about to see is a highly idiosyncratic celebration of, and history of, and elegy for, the dream of Europe, of a left Europe; when the director of the film Christopher Roth—he goes by Bobby—showed me some early footage and asked for my feedback I kept saying: look, this is really a film about Colin and your love for him. Focus on Colin. For Colin MacCabe, I told Bobby, only half-joking, is the Forrest Gump of European intellectual history. (I think this line makes it into the film). He is always there, in the room, in the frame, where the new takes place; it would be easier to produce a list of influential thinkers Colin has not been in contact with in the last half century or so than to enumerate all of those with whom he has been in direct and fecund conversation. I cannot personally conceive of a history of transatlantic modernism or Marxism or structuralism or post-structuralism or cultural studies or most of the other major intellectual and critical currents independent of Colin’s contributions (even though he would passionately denounce what many of these currents became when the current stopped and stagnation set in); certainly I cannot think of film or media history more broadly apart from his dizzying variety of activities that unite vanguard and vernacular energies.
That he is responsive to real forces at work in the popular and is insightfully sensitive to the most intricate modernist constructs—that he brings a deep knowledge of the history of English and the book into relation with emergent media—those are the constants across the startling diversity of projects. Maybe even more remarkable than any particular achievement—the things he has made and made possible—is that fact that he has never stopped and stultified; he has never become a defender of any of the -isms with which he’s been associated or become a bland partisan of some set of disciplinary protocols; part of why the Forrest Gump analogy occurred to me was because he is always in motion; and Colin’s prose itself has this motion, crackles with this energy, urgency; his sentences remind me of Stendhal (in his autobiography), their mixture of care and inspired hurry. Listening to Colin talk to you about how he was wrong about the revolutionary potential of this or that intellectual or artistic moment communicates more spirit and sense of possibility than listening to most people congratulate themselves on having been prophetic. He has written some of my favorite things about some of my favorite writers and artists and he has changed the way I think about language and media but what I value most of all is his restlessness.
Energy, urgency: The man has an usually charming sometimes exasperating tendency towards superlatives. Things tend to be the best thing ever or the worst thing ever. I remember him telling me at our first lunch that Pamela’s Diner was one of the greatest restaurants in the world. (I mean, I like Pamela’s). When he calls, there is extreme peril or possibility, whether what he’s calling about is a complex film project or one of the poems I selected for Critical Quarterly. (I was very touched the first time Colin phoned me alarmed that we might lose a poem because of missing paperwork, that Colin would feel the same agitation around one of the unknown poets I was publishing in CQ as he would about a movie with a celebrity is one of the things I value about him; his commitment to literature no matter how rarefied has never been supplanted by his forays into other media. I also love, by the way, how he has, on the one hand, a totally anachronistic relationship to the phone—he calls you up, he urgently gets you on the line, in a very twentieth-century way, not even late twentieth century—and on the other hand he was the first person I knew who got an iPhone.) Everywhere in the person, as in the work, is a conjunction of the new-old. Which is what relevance means—relevance, a keyword, "to raise or lift up again,” to see the old dreams refreshed in the latest thing. Colin is relevant, always an unlikely conjunction of the traditional and emergent. It can sometimes be a little outrageous. And yet all of this is part of the aliveness: on the one hand, in an age of standardization, he is particular, a real character, Nabokov might have written him; on the other hand, he refuses to remain identical to himself.
Ariana—my wife who is also a professor—and I were talking the other night about the phrase “academy of misery,” about Fred Moten’s description of how a lot of us end up with “some kind of warped communal alienation in which people are tied together . . . by the bad feeling we compete over,” instead of feeling like we’re doing what we love, instead of feeling like the air is charged; we were talking about our fear that we would become merely bitter instead of critical, or merely “productive” instead of fresh in our thinking and writing and teaching and so on, and so we started to name some figures who enlivened institutions and languages without becoming merely beholden to them and both of us named, among a handful of others, Colin, who, unlike the others on our list, is thirty years our elder. I am saying that whereas the retirement celebration is usually about gratitude for past accomplishment Colin is still at 75 exemplary to me for his life force.
So this film—which is the first part of a triptych—that I have not really introduced is just one German director’s wonderfully personal take on how Colin is himself a medium for exploring the recent intellectual and artistic history of Europe. There could be a hundred different takes, a hundred different ways of depicting the ideas and people Colin has brought into relation. I like how late in the film—this is no spoiler—Colin takes Akshi Singh to visit his tailor—who, needless to say, is “the greatest tailor in London” (he could only have been the best or the worst) and the tailor asks, seeing the cameras, what the film is about. It’s a film about Colin, Aks says, and without missing a beat, the greatest tailor in London says, “Oh, a film about Colin—it’s about time.”
—Ben Lerner