I worked with Michael during his pre-paradigm days, meaning prior to the publication of Ethnography Unbound (with et al. 1992) and Public Sociology: Between Utopia and Anti-Utopia (2021). When I started at Berkeley, he was finishing Manufacturing Consent (1979) and spending a lot of time in Budapest. That was okay with me. I revered him and avoided him in equal measure. I was afraid that if I ran into him, he’d say, “Where’s that paper?” From 1979 until I graduated, we communicated more through written correspondence than in-person meetings. We were never personally close, even after I became a professor, but my regard for him has never wavered. I may not be the best exemplar of furthering his paradigmatic contributions to Sociology and the Social Sciences. But his influence on me is immeasurable. 

Michael was annoyingly emphatic about having a well-defined research question. Underlying his routine rejections of my research questions was his then-inchoate belief about how method embodies theory, and vice versa. Ours was a weekly intellectual scrum about why this or that question was not a well-defined research question. Factual questions might be the start, but in general, such questions lead to desultory wandering in the normative fields of Sociology. Our conversations led me to rethink how methods are taught, how theory is taught, and how disciplinary norms are embedded in both theory and method.  

I took undergraduate classical theory with Michael (because I missed the graduate offering due to entering off-cycle). Classical sociology meant Karl Marx and Adam Smith. We did a drive-by of Weber and Durkheim. Reading Marx against Smith was the illumination of concepts, arguments, and paradigms. The point was not to learn rote texts and interpretations but how to read, glean critical analysis (not critique), and be curious about meanings. He would hate to hear me say this, but in a way, it was not unlike some discussions in a corner of symbolic interactionism applied to theory.   I hear him groaning in disagreement. His lectures were mesmerizing. His nerdiness was fabulous. He was brash, his hair stood up in curled coils, and his passion was infectious. It was an intimacy of reading, writing, and engagement. Unforgettable. 

Michael was my supervisor in an area called structuralism for my QE exam. Marx, Foucault, Freud, Lukacs, and Althusser among others. Sure, I wrote a field/area study, but the crux of what I had to say was in two typed pages in the form of an abstract/summary on how structuralism cognates totalities and forms. He was big on the short summary.  He went bananas with excitement.  He wanted to talk at length, we had coffee, and he ended our meeting with a caution: do not dwell too long in this stuff, as you will never find your way out.  

For various reasons, my dissertation was never published as an essay or book. I now regret some of my decisions I made back then because the thesis is a tribute to Michael’s openness to Gramsci, class cultures, and the limits of class structure paradigms. It was an incipient critique of the limits of Marxism with respect to race. If I started Berkeley as a committed Marxist/Leninist who studied quantitative methods, I graduated with a wider vision of paradigms, Marxism, and theory, due in part to my working with Michael.  

After his retirement event in 2023, I wrote this private tribute—he sees a speck of dust, and having thoroughly investigated its nature, evolution, and having asked a productive research question about that speck of dust, Michael theorizes the totality of the social formation, the architecture of this dusty world. And moving in the conceptual and dialectical reverse, from totality back to the speck of dust, he affirms the truths of both dust and totality. Transformative politics and advances in disciplinary knowledge need both kinds of truth.