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I'm your host, Matt Delson, and I'm Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow. And I'm delighted to have as my guest today Jack Palmer to discuss his book, "Sigmund Baumann and the West Sociology of Intellectual Exile" published by McGill Queen's University Press. Jack is lecturer in Sociology at the University of Leeds, and he's also Director of the Baumann Institute. So Jack, welcome to the podcast. It's really great to be chatting with you. I know I would like to have to you. So can you start by telling us a bit about yourself and in particular, how did you come to Baumann? Because we've probably all got that story of how we came across a writer like Baumann. So how did you come to Baumann? Yeah, well, I think my story is probably quite common in that I came to Sociology through Baumann. So I was an undergraduate student, not in Sociology, and I had a really great supportive dissertation supervisor who gave me a tip to read modernity in the Holocaust. And you need a Baumann's winter in the morning, kind of at the same time. And I was extremely taken by it. I was writing a dissertation at the time on hate media and ruined genocide. And I sort of gradually snowballed and picked up more books by Baumann. I think one of the early books was Wasted Lives. And I really remember very clearly that sense that a kind of language, an interpretive framework was being provided for things that I felt I'd been able to sense that couldn't articulate. And you've talked to people. And I think Baumann kind of has often served that purpose for people. And I think professional sociologists, and I count myself among them now, underestimate the importance of disability to resonate with people who are perhaps uninitiated but interested. So that was the start as an undergraduate student. After that, I studied for an MA in social and political thought at Leeds, which was run out of the Baumann Institute. I was fortunate to be a student on a module that Mark Davis ran, which was a module entirely on Baumann, and the development was thought kind of module, which I think is very rare these days. And then after a year out working in call centers and various things like that, I carry on to my PhD, which was a study of the sort of trajectories of modernity of Burundi and Rwanda in central Africa and about the entanglements of modernity with colonialism and genocide. And though I thought I might be kind of moving away from Baumann, he remained kind of constant there. So I think, yeah, that's how I came to Baumann, which is at the same time a story of how I came to sociology. Yeah, it's a wonderful way of putting it in. You're right, we all have that story. I like you, I came. I was a psychology student when I first read Baumann, and many people have that where he just opens a different world to you. So one led you to write this book on Baumann then. Okay, so part of the reason that for writing the book, I have to say is circumstantial. So at the time I was kind of in between fixed term contracts, I was coming to the end of a teaching fellowship. I just published the book of my PhD thesis. This is around 2018. So I was looking for a new project and also a means of subsistence at the same time. So I was thinking about putting applications together for postdoc projects. And I'd always been interested in working on Baumann specifically, rather than just working with his thought. But I think three things kind of led to the development of the project itself. The first of which, slightly morbidly was Baumann's death in 2017. Shortly thereafter, there were discussions in the department that I was based, still am based at the university. It leads about the development of Baumann's archive, this personal archive. The Baumann archive includes his personal papers alongside your Nina Baumann's. So there was this kind of nascent biographical term, I suppose, in the study of Baumann. Isabella Wagner was working on her biography. She was published in 2020. They were Polish language biographies. Arturo Dormoswowski and Darius Rochak. So there was a kind of an interesting balance of life as well as in his work. And what I wanted to do was develop a project that allowed me to understand the kind of implications of life and work in Baumann's case. So the relationship between his social position, his intellectual networks and his ideas. And relatively, I think, after he passed away, it became possible for a sort of reckoning with his legacy as a whole. But I think many of the books on Baumann were written during his lifetime, and they always, by necessity, had the challenge of surviving his kind of prodigious record of publication. It became possible, I suppose, to now think sort of behind, the stand behind the work rather than the midst, and it was still being produced. Even though we still find bits and pieces, you know, from the archive, for example, and published things or publications that we knew nothing about. It just sort of hit spring in court. But I think, yeah, it became possible to address the question of legacy and what the entirety of this work might mean. And for that reason, I sort of saw my project as part of a trend towards revisiting the more obscure periods of his work. So I see my project in the book as part of a project of returning to Baumann's sort of earlier writings, those writings composed while I see this in Poland, or the early period of his employment at the university of Leeds, the short period of time he spent in Tel Aviv between '69 and '71. I think there'd been a tendency in the literature on Baumann to kind of, well, sometimes explicitly ignore this period in the run-up, you know, kind of taking their point at the party from 1989 in books, like Modernity and the Holocaust, for example. So that was part of the project as well. My argument in the book, and we'll get onto this, I'm sure, is that when you revisit this kind of work, there are all sorts of surprising things in there which are useful in a contemporary sense. And one of those things, the things that may surprise readers of the book is that Baumann had a lot to say about themes of colonialism and decolonization in, well, I think so, in the '60s and '70s, particularly. And it seemed to me that there was a way of framing Baumann in debates around the decolonization of sociology and social football broadly, the critique of Eurocentrism, framing him in a way that was perhaps a little more nuanced and has been the case. So I'm very sort of influenced by and sympathetic to these debates around decolonizing sociology and the critique of Eurocentrism and sort of central tenets of my own work. But I've developed an interest in how the critique of Eurocentrism and the problematization of the West have often figured as imminent critiques, i.e. from within Europe itself and some peripheralized regions and figures. And Baumann, I think, is a very interesting figure in that framework. So I had each of those sort of currents, I suppose, threading to a proposal that I wrote for a leave-at-home trust, early career fellowship, which I was fortunate enough to cure. I held it between 2018 and 2021, sort of over the period of COVID, lockdowns, and so on. And therefore, the project sort of changed slightly as I was doing it as sort of various limitations were imposed. But ultimately, I think it remained true to the spirit of the individual, the image, ozel, and that's what's present in the book. Yeah, that's great. Very interesting. So let's get to the actual book. And I should say this is a wonderful book you've written, Jack, and a book that I'd really recommend to have one. And as we're probably going to see in our conversation, even, I've read a lot of Baumann in my time, and I'm very familiar with him. I mean, for someone like me, there were new things I learned about Baumann, particularly new ways of seeing him. I hadn't thought of further. And particularly, even if listeners are not familiar with Baumann, they'll gain something from learning about these, as you say, these sort of moves around the conversation that we're going to talk about. But let's get into the book and unpack some of this stuff. So at the very start of your book, you start the book with three vignettes about Baumann. So can you tell us a bit about those vignettes and why they're a useful way to introduce your understanding? Yeah. So as you say, there are three of them, and I will kind of introduce them first, and then I'll come back to why they're important or why they're sort of taken as a starting point. So the first vignette is about a review that the historian E.P. Thompson wrote of Sigma Baumann's first English language book, which was a strange book. It's called Between Class and Elite, and it's a reworking of Baumann's PhD projects, which is written in Poland in the '60s. And it's about the English-labor movement, which Baumann had an interest in. He was able to work on the English-labor movement through various sort of travels to the UK in the '60s. Well, '50s and '60s, actually, so first the LSE, and then he was Manchester during the '60s for a short period. But E.P. Thompson's review is textbook example of academic brutality. It's a really horrible review, really snide, kind of condescending. Clearly sees no redeeming features in the book that Baumann's written. What you kind of detect as well, below the surface, and this is where I picked up on it, is a kind of subtle xenophobic positioning of Baumann as an outsider. As somebody who's background as a Polish Jewish emigrate, gives him no real bearing, no real right to write about the English-labor movement. I kind of know from the kind of research I did, the conversations I did. This was something that seriously then Baumann's confidence. So it was almost immediately upon arrival in the University of Leeds at this room you came out. It quite immediately severs any ties that Baumann might have developed with the emerging new left in Britain, I think. And one of the things that Baumann writes, kind of reflecting about this review and his reception by E.P. Thompson, it was as if figures like him who were coming from behind the Iron Curtain. E.P. Thompson also notably wrote a much longer sort of rebuke of Leschik or Kofsky. But it is if they were betraying the western left's expectations of these dissidents from the East. So that's the first vignette. The second picks up on the segment and Nina Baumann outside or at the gates of the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw in the late 1980s. This was a very consequential visit because it was the first time that they were able to return to Poland following their exile in the March events of 1968. The description of this meeting or this ceremony that they were attending in 1988, I think it was, appears in an essay of Baumann's quite an obscure essay that has the title, "The Homecoming of Unwelcome Strangers." It was published in the Jewish Quarterly. Ostensibly, this essay is about the place of East European Jewry or student in narrations of European Jewish history. But I think one can sort of interpret it autobiographically. The Baumann's being the sort of unwelcome strangers to it, in a sense, come home, albeit to a place that was never really home in an ambiguous sense. The reason I think we have a license to interpret it autobiographically is at the time he was writing memoirs, as was Janina, who published books about her teenage years in the Warsaw ghetto and about post-war life in Poland. But Baumann wrote a memoir as well. It was unpublished during his lifetime. It was called "The Polls, the Jews and I." It's recently been published in the fragmentary form in a book called "My Life in Fragments." In these publications are questions of Polish Jewish relations, how Baumann reconciled his Polishness and his Jewishness. And this forms a really interesting part of the background of key works like modernity in the Holocaust, for example. This kind of thorny question of where Baumann is positioned in Poland is something that had very obvious political consequences. Later on in life under a sort of right-wing conservative government in Poland, Baumann was a sort of a targeted figure. Most sort of significantly one of his lectures in Warsaw was interrupted by far-right protesters, part of what they were saying, kind of regurgitated this specifically Polish myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, the "Ziddo" commons. So I guess the sort of vignette here was about understanding Baumann's position in Poland. And thirdly, the third vignette picks up on the Baumann's death and be obituaries that were written at the time and deals with this question of legacy. I think Baumann, like many thinkers who achieved a claim in their own lifetime at this sort of uneasy, or was an uneasy witness to his own historicization. And I was particularly interested in how sociologists were sort of positioning Baumann and his legacy. Someone who kind of, in some senses, was a great representative of sociology to be at the same time, wasn't quite a sociologist in a conventional way. Also, somebody who had become canonized and in the process was being ambivalently placed as one of sociology's dead white men. Each of these vignettes, I think, each of them served the purpose of framing Baumann as a stranger. As somebody who is in the knot of the space in which he is residing. And through this, I developed what I call a framework of the axelic position. Yes, so maybe we can pick up on that question of the axelic position. So you talk about this as being "in" but not "of the West". So what do you mean by this axelic position, this idea of being "in" but not "of the West"? Yeah, it's something, I think, that has consequences both for the form and contents of Baumann's thought, which we'll get to, but it might be easiest to start from a vantage point of sociology of intellectuals, because I guess what I wanted to do in the book is not just write a sort of exegetical study of Baumann's thought, but to understand Baumann within the sort of framework study of intellectuals, to understand Baumann's sociologically, really. So I was sort of picking up here on a particular paradigm within the sociology of intellectuals, which has emerged in recent years. She's been developed principally by Patrick Bart at the University of Cambridge, which is positioning theory, which is essentially all about how intellectuals kind of intervene in the social world via sort of positioning themselves in relation to sort of contemporary events, bodies of literature, other thinkers and so on. And it seemed to me that as important as that positioning is, we also have to consider how the intellectual is positioned themselves kind of exogenously by external forces. And this is particularly pertinent when it comes to exegetical intellectuals, I think, intellectuals in exile, whose reception and the character of their interventions tends to differ quite dramatically across the folds of their exel. And then I guess the starting point really is that Baumann is a very different figure in Britain than he is in Poland. So one of the kind of things that I wanted to complicate, I suppose, in this paradigm of positioning theory is that it tends to assume that intellectuals are unproblematically centered in place. So Patrick Bart's study of Jean-Claude Sartre is a case in point-year Sartre, a very significant, very important figure who's treated incredibly interestingly by Baumann, but there's somebody who never really had a difficulty in kind of locating himself in French intellectual culture, always at the center of French academic life in Paris and so on. Baumann's position is very different because he has very significant experiences of displacement of being uprooted. So Baumann, as a Jew born in Poland, is Jewish and is twice the reason he was forced to leave Poland first as a child, when he and his parents fled eastwards into the Soviet Union. And then again in 1968, when as an adult with this family, he was forced to leave first to Tel Aviv in the 1990 Kingdom. Baumann experiences both Nazi and Soviet forms of totalitarianism. They're overlapping imperialism and kind of incorporates that into his work, into his interpretation. So with the Exilic position, I was trying to kind of understand that. And it allows, I think, to consider the traumatic aspects of exile, the Exilic position entails enormous challenges, challenges of the language acquisition, things like censorship. Baumann was a kind of persona non-brotter in Poland, these works were kind of, you know, they were an attempt to erase them essentially. It entails all sorts of losses, the loss of status, the loss of objects, the loss of manuscripts that one might be working on, severing of professional networks and so on. But fundamentally as well, a kind of narrative destruction. So another kind of key area of sociology of intellectuals that I engaged in was the kind of idea of a self-concept developed in the work of Neil Gross, who in a study of Richard Rorty, talked about the importance of, you know, intellectuals having a story of who they are informing the kind of work they do when the kind of self is so disrupted and displaced, that story becomes, or that narrative that becomes very difficult and problematic. So those were the kind of paradigms I was engaging in and I sort of develop an argument that this social position that Baumann up eyes, the Exilic position, which I should say is not just one Baumann up eyes, I think one can understand, you know, a range of thinkers in this same position. This generates a kind of, you know, what Donna Haraway would all situate of knowledge, or Patricia Hill calling to standpoint, it generates a particular disposition, which has implications for the kinds of things Baumann thought about and how he thought them. And one of the things that I find particularly interesting with intellectuals and exile is how, in some circumstances, intellectuals kind of universalize the experience of their own exile and develop kind of sort of epistemological or methodological approaches based on it. So I think Baumann's whole approach to sociology, which you can kind of boil down to this phrase, de-familiarizing familiar or familiarizing the unfamiliar, this kind of has to do with his position as a stranger in classical sociological sense. And then, sort of, I sort of develop the argument that this has consequences for the accusation of Eurocentrism in Baumann, because if we understand Eurocentrism as a tendency to sort of, you know, generalize from a European center, the fact that the Exilic position problem arises to the very idea of a European center for which to extend and universalize means that it cannot sort of apply straightforwardly to Baumann. 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But you talk about not just his style of writing, but the format that he writes, and then, particularly the essay, and you talk about the significance of the essay to him as sort of a key mode of intervention, especially in his sociology of modernity. So, what was so significant about the essay to Baumann's sociology? Yeah, well, as you say, it's very well known that Baumann was a very self-conscious stylist. The way he writes is, it's very much connected to what he's writing about. There's a kind of synergy between composition and criticism, if you will. And it sort of struck me that there's a lot of reflection on Baumann's use of literary devices, metaphor, and so on. But not so much on the kind of more encompassing, as you say, the kind of format of Baumann's writing. And I guess that the sort of first wave of approach in this maybe is quite a straightforward sense, understanding writing as a sort of condition practice. So, one of the things that you find in the archive, the Baumann archive, to engaging with his sort of typescripts, digital files, all sorts of things really is that he tended to write out of compulsion, I think, rather than for specific purposes, rather than for, you know, journal article in X publication. He tended to sort of, you know, reflect on events or theoretical controversies of the day in a way that wasn't tied to sort of instrumental purposes and I think that that's part of the kind of, you know, what I meant by essays and sort of condition practice. But I think the other thing to say is that Baumann developed or sort of worked within within a tradition, a tradition of essays and, again, you just not sort of stand alone in this sense, kind of tracing sort of in a, in a development of a particular way of writing, which of course has a long pedigree so you go back to sort of the writings of Montaigne and Hume, where the essay is sort of figured as a way of writing that sort of not quite literature but also not quite science somewhere in the middle. And Baumann was also his literaryness is very influenced by literary writers. So kind of often when he was asked about his biggest influences he would sort of excuse sociologists or philosophers and he named people like, or his or, or Robert Moosill, both of those examples, particularly Moosill being, you know, very, very important figures in the tradition of artistic novel writing, who still being kind of a representative of a particularly essential European tradition so I think Baumann also kind of picks up on ways of writing the prevalent in, you know, in Polish writing. And there's a version of this in sociology as well, so you can go back to someone like York Simmel through your new cash. Theodore Adorno who wrote a very influential essay on the essay will be essay is form. The key figure somebody who I think has a normal commonalities with Baumann is Karl Manheim, who was, you know, would would often preface his work even his book length studies with the, with the sort of argument that they were essayist explorations so ideology and utopia for example begins with with such a preface and for Manheim asked about and I think the essay is a kind of formalization of uncertainty. It is a way of writing that sort of reflects how through writing one comes to a kind of judgment about something and therefore the essay is always sort of provisional open ended. I think it's been wholly appropriate to times of uncertainty so uncertainty is a really important theme in balance sociology and modernity. And the essay kind of corresponds to that is an appropriate form for, for, for kind of intervening in, in, in a social world is very uncertain. The features of essays and the almonds, almonds were kind of demonstrates the fact that he's always present as an author it isn't hidden somewhere pulling the strings behind the scenes. And the kind of dramatization of thought and thinkers and the idea that ideas themselves and people who create in the part of the social world that they're intervening in. Further essays I think are distinct from say journal articles because they have a kind of untimeliness about them. They sort of transcends the immediate context in which they are, they are sort of being written. And for that reason it has, I think essayism has a very ambivalent relationship to disability and narrative. And I think that a woman, you know, is often kind of, well, you, you one can kind of find disparaging marks about them and not being a sociologist, but a kind of writer or, or, or, God forbid, a sort of journalist. And a door knowing his reflections on the essay sort of talked about how the writer in this sense is, is he called it a pejorative garland that's put on things that you cannot categorize and that's part of what I mean by almonds essayism. And finally, when we move on, the composition of bounding sociology as a whole is essayist it. And by this again I am referred to a door now who is critical of a sort of totalizing approach to sociology or totalizing approach to theorizing, whereby kind of all individual parts of a thinkers out that have to kind of be unified and sort of, as he says, kind of on the main road towards, towards some sort of final direction, the essay sort of embarks on multiple parts. The end result in a door knows words of the aspects of the argument into weavers in a carpet, I like that metaphor for bow and sort of interweaving kind of carpet of his obvious thought. It all sounds quite abstract, but if I can kind of illustrate it here if you want to understand balance of reflections on colonialism, for example, or on Eurocentrism, racism genocide. These do not come in neatly balanced standalone works, you sort of have to read across his work. They are paths, you know, I was actually speaking that kind of meander and intertwine across a great range of formats, not just books and articles but also interviews, standalone lectures that he delivered correspondence in our kind form. So that was a sort of challenge and task that I set myself there was to try and untangle some of these paths in his sociology. And you definitely succeeded in one of the ways I think you succeeded in that was returning to a question that we spoke about earlier in terms of the context in which Baum was being received and particularly after his death because a significant criticism of him in recent years and including both before and after he passed away, did come from a declonial perspective and sort of positioned Baum and as as you said earlier there's white European writer. And what you do is you say is through reading those different texts, creating a path, creating a different type of Baum and and you offer a story of what you call a declonial Baum and it's a phrase you use at one point. So, can you tell us more about this declonial Baum because he's certainly a new figure you're presenting in the work. Yes. I think that the first thing to say maybe is what I'm not doing. So I don't claim that this declonial Baum is the same thing as calling Baum and a declonial theorist or post colonial critique, for example. I think one of the things that is true about about Baum and is that he sort of remained oddly distant I think from the sort of tradition to decolonial and post colonial thought. Sometimes in ways that were kind of hard to understand so if you think about a figure like Enrico Dussell for example, a large in time philosopher who was very significant in the development of declonial thought in Latin America. Enrico Dussell is sort of an inheritor of Emmanuel Lydinas' philosophy exactly the same point that Baum and is kind of engaging with it. I think they're a great parallels between the kind of both the life and work of Baum and someone like Edward Said, even a figure like Stuart Hall who's powerful with Baum and I'm sure in the sort of circles in which they moved in British sociology. And another essay stick writer as well. Another essay stick writer again, that's exactly what I mean. So, one has to kind of work beyond that I think it would have been sort of easy to sort of assume because those figures and maybe those debates and traditions are there that he, you know, he's a kind of Eurocentric thinker or somebody who has very to say to the point of debates and discussions that these traditions and thinkers represent. But my position is that he's a kind of interpreter. He presents overlapping and productive arguments that maybe put into conversation with such traditions. And in some sense was treading the same ground, be it perhaps coming at that ground from a different direction. As I've noted it, I think to make this argument requires a certain approach to reading Baum and I've said, I think it's, it comes back to this question of essays and he never kind of directly treats colonialism and sort of long length work that takes a kind of meandering approach that you sort of have to read across texts. But I think once once you're on the path, it's very, it's very clear that he was quite centrally concerned with with both histories of European colonialism and events and processes of decolonization. So if you go back and read his work in the sociology of culture from the late 1960s onwards, particularly the book that was recently published once it was lost in exile sketches and the theory of culture. But into the 1970s works like culture is practice, Baum is kind of acutely concerned with how, you know, the kind of concepts of culture that had accompanied European colonialism, which had placed non European societies in a kind of space behind European societies. Right. So one of the things he talks about is a temporalization of cultural difference, the idea that cultural difference is interpreted, not this, you know, emblematic of the plurality of culture, but as some defect or deficit, some sort of, you know, something that will eventually in time be overcome and therefore these societies will become more like Europe. You find a critique of that idea. But you also find Baum confronting the meaning of decolonization and it's very important, you know, obviously what's going on in the background in the 1960s, particularly as is a sort of ongoing process as formal independence and decolonization European empires. And I think sociologists have sort of forgotten that, because decolonizing sociality often entails going back to the sort of 19th century writings of, say, a Durkheim. So, you know, you've written about Weber and Marx and so on, but neglect it, you know, sociologists were responding, you know, in varied ways to, to the process of decolonization as it unfolded in the middle of the 20th century. Again, Stuart Hall, very kind of paradigmatic figure in that case, and Baum was doing this as well, and Baum was, was sort of interpreting the meaning of decolonization for how we conceive of things like culture. One of the things he writes about is the sort of shock of, you know, that idea of cultural corrality coming to the floor. The idea that, hey, maybe Europe isn't kind of at the forefront of world history, maybe they are, and alternative forms of social isolation, but they're emerging within these spaces. So, so there's a kind of the gem of it there, this carries on through into his work on hermeneutic, so in the late 70s he writes about hermeneutics and social sciences where I think what he's really concerned with is how cross cultural understanding is possible in these circumstances of cultural plurality in a context of decolonization in a context where the West has sort of been relativized and provincialised how is a kind of trans culture and trans historical understanding possible. That carries forward into the works of the sort of postmodern period. So, but like legislators and interpreters, I think is very clearly formed by that background. The sort of crisis of what he called legislative reason, that idea of, you know, the kind of modern era delegitimising all local grounds of knowledge. This, by the way, I think is eminently translatable to the contemporary concern with decolonising knowledge production, the idea of retrieving those epistemologies, those grounds of knowledge, kind of steam rolled over during the period of colonialism. And Balmain should say writes about colonialism kind of way into the 21st century as well so if he read his works on globalisation, you read a bit like wasted lives, for instance, there are long reflections on the sort of histories of European settler colonialism. So he talks about globalisation, meaning living on a full planet, whereas at one point, during the period of European colonial imperialism, for example, social problems could be exported to the empty lands or so-called empty lands. He's very critical about what that empty lands mean. Those sort of spaces no longer exists. These are just a few examples, but I hope that they're kind of realistic because this thread can be traced through Balmain's work. Very much so. I think very much so. And you've mentioned a lot of different texts there. And I want to turn to, and part of what you said earlier, is this reading across and the way that Balmain has been reduced to larger collections post 89 texts. And then there's probably a greatest tips within that. And so the first one is, in the context of what you've just been talking about in questions of drawing this question of decontality and so on, you talk about Balmain's 1982 text and memories of class, and you talk about it as a huge text in this social gene. I found this really interesting because you mentioned earlier that you were lucky enough to take a course on Balmain while you're doing your masters. I teach a course on Balmain here at Glasgow, and I also present that text as a huge text, but in a very different way to present it because, for me, I've always seen it as like a hinge in Harry talks about inequality. It's a way for him to talk about what we would generally call class formations, but to use different terms. The 40 concerns. Yeah, but reflecting what I said earlier about the value of your text, your reading your book made me rethink how I'd read the memories of class because you talk about it as a shift in his theorization and redundancy and particularly imperialism and the third world. Yeah, cool bad point. So why do you think this text is important? Yeah, it's great. I'm really glad of this question because I think it's a really fascinating work and it's a hinge for all sorts of reasons as well. I think it actually professionally it's quite intriguing because it's sort of published in a relative wilderness by Balmain standards, at least somebody who, you know, particularly in retirement would publish sugar, more than one book in a year. It's, it's kind of stands on its own, you know, in relation to the record of its publications and it's, we sort of know as well now because of the, I guess, the biographical work on Balmain that it sort of was published at a time when he was quite disillusioned with academic sociology. There's a recent books published on Balmain's photography where he sort of threw himself into this, into this kind of amateur hobby. And, and that kind of coincides with the publication of this book as well he's not really writing very so it kind of comes, you know, it comes out of nowhere I suppose. So it's also a time when he was, I guess, deeply dissatisfied with, with the kind of professional conditions of working in the British University system, and have under assault from Thatcher's Conservative government. What's odd about it as well is it is that it's sort of, for a book about clouds in Britain, it's very removed from, from, I guess, contemporary news debates that were very high profile at the time so for example there's no real overlap with the kind of concerns of the sort of Birmingham School, Centre for Cultural Studies. I think not long before it was published, you had an arbitration in very cold forms, forward march of labour halted, Andre Goetz is farewell to the working class. There's a kind of, you know, a general sort of background to the text that is not really reflected in it. But Bauman says, I think this is, this is where you pick up on it, and you know, whether he's sort of thinking around class changes that the memories of class was his farewell to reading history as class history. It's where I think he begins to sort of turn to modernity as a plane of analysis, a plane of analysis that's a kind of common point of reference between kind of communist East and capitalist West. It's also where you begin to see, I think in Mason's form is theorisation of my core political modernity. So where he starts through readings of people like Michelle Foucault and Norbert Elias to sort of really grapple with the problems of modern state discipline. Though he doesn't use the expression, you can clearly see him on the road to the development of the gardening metaphor which comes to the foreign legislators and interpreters and, you know, the state seeing its kind of population as a problem to be managed as a guard overgrown garden to be weeded and ordered according to a kind of blueprint model. So Bauman sort of discusses this sort of case study through the book, the kind of early modern management of these itinerant populations and European cities, these sort of, you know, dark zones, full of vagrants and vagabonds and how, you know, disciplinary institutions like the workhouse and, you know, the school, the hospital, how all of these sort of developed within this context so far, very through Cody and to clear influence on Bauman at this point. The first point of which this intersects with colonial imperialism I should say is I take perhaps a slight license. And in that I think Bauman's argument as it's developing here is a very sort of a contagious with, actually very contemporary work in the sociology of sort of, you know, or history of imperial Britain and the kind of connections that are made between sort of Victorian style or the building at home and all the building overseas so in particular in the book I distress aid and for excellent recent study of British concentration camps in southern Africa and in South Asia. And these are places too that were kind of developed out of this need to territorial lives of order these kind of itinerant disorderly populations, and these sort of anxieties around the order and disorder, the sort of manifesting those as well for virtually draws on Bauman quite a lot. And Bauman actually does sort of, besides this so at one point in memories of class he talks about how you can see Caribbean Plantation Society as a sort of prototype of formation factory patterns in Britain, you know, where you get the development of these models of surveillance and population control And some people may have sort of thought, this is a, you know, perhaps a brief illusion that Bauman's making some develops, and therefore been critical of that kind of thing. I decided to run with them right to see what could be done with these kinds of, you know, illusions of Bauman's work. Decolonization is very blissfully raised in memories of class and there's an extraordinary passage in the final chapter where he's talking about this. The sort of consequences of the emergence of perhaps a novel social condition which he would later name post modernity, where he talks about how, you know, one of the kind of, you know, very pressing kind of issues in the West is this what he calls a self assertion of the third world And I think Bauman meant by third world not the kind of majority of meaning that it subsequently attained but the original understanding the world as a kind of, you know, a block between the blocks of Eastern West, an alternative to this sort of bifurcates and global space. So he says it's impossible to exaggerate the impact exerted by this and the effectively means colonization here. On the intellectual level he says it results in the feverish search of sources of Western uniqueness and quoting here by the way. And that's all he says the mood vacillates between new paroxisms of national insularity in xenophobia and outbursts of remorse the imperial past and fits of inferiority complex. On the political level cries and whispers to close ranks in defense of civilization as we know it. I'm describing in temporary. Yeah 1982 1982 we survived that was written. Yeah. Yeah so I think in there's something very sort of prescient about about that particular statement and something that is, you know, red alert of what I'm arguing here which is that he is fundamentally concerned with with decolonization and what it means for sociology, as well as for kind of, you know, broader social formation. Yes, absolutely fascinating as I said provided me a new way of looking at that book so moving on to an up book 1991's modernity ambivalence which is, it comes in that period as you say where bound is more well known but of the text of that period is one of the the less well read I think partly something gets one of the most boundless ever difficult bids it's certainly a more more challenging read in some ways and one of the things he does in that text is he talks about the experience of Jewish figures most notably Zimmel and Fred, both of whom in very different ways are huge influences upon him, but he talks about them as effectively harbingers of what he would like to call postmodernity that sort of Jewish experience as a harbinger who would become postmodernity but what you do in your book that's so original I think in many ways is you look at that discussion in modernity ambivalence as part of a broader discussion apart from Jewish terms some have called it which includes these writings, writings you mentioned earlier, the writings in Jewish quarterly and obviously Modernity and the Holocaust, but you look here as part of a broader engagement with the figure of the Jew in the history of sociology and the sociology of modernity and in particular something that no one will have known it to the rich of book unless I'm lucky enough to go to the archives, the really significant engagement he had with Julian Rose during this period by letters so can you tell us a bit about the significance of the Rose Bauman exchange as we might call it and how this figure is in his theorization of the Jewish experience and Modernity? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, I guess the kind of broader context for this and there's a self-contained chapter in the book on Bauman's writing of Jewish modernity is, I think, the sort of, yeah, turn into the kind of synergies that may exist between I guess engagements with Jewish modernity and Jewish social thought in general and decoloniality and I think of work like Santiago, Slovakia's decolonial Judaism here or a book by Chad Allen Goldberg which I know you were sort of influenced by as well, the name Modernity and the Jews in Western social thought. And turning around and we're asked to put it on the shelf but I can't quite, I can't quite locate it on the shelf at the moment. Yeah, it's a great book, it's a wonderful book but I mean his uptick is more the sort of the classical figures, again that's sort of 19th, early 20th century sociology which kind of is the Jewish populations within Europe and the Jews, what Alma calls the conceptual geo, I suppose, as a kind of internal other as Western modernity. And if I, you know, one of the kind of very invitational things about Goldberg's book is that it kind of leaves the kind of maybe the return to those teams in the sort of sociology of post modernity. To somebody else and I guess I tried to pick that up and bowman is key here. So, you kind of articulated, you know, why that kind of argument is so important and influential this for Jewish experience as the kind of internal other of the Western modernity and modernity and ambivalence is key text here is modernity and Holocaust, of course. But I'll say a little bit about correspondence, that's a specific aspect of the question. I became very, very interested not just in the correspondence with Rose but in bowman's correspondence in general, particularly at this stage so late 80s early 90s you have a huge, a huge volume of letters with influential figures, people at Agnes Heller, Anthony Giddin, who at the time was was editing quality press and small eyes and staff, various sort of publishers and editors. With the correspondence with Gillian Rose is fascinating for multiple reasons. Firstly, there's the whole kind of context of the 80s and 90s, a sort of period of what I forget who the apologies but somebody turned the Holocaust boom right so so across various sort of arenas of culture and society and politics and so on you, you have this kind of renewed engagement with the Holocaust, films like Schindler's list, for example, Claude Lanzmann-Shower. In literature, figures like W. Zebalt institutionally, you've got the things like opening of archives across Eastern Europe, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the development of memorial institutions and Rose is, you know, is a key figure here. She was part of a commission established by the Polish state to sort of to think about the future of Auschwitz, the future of the camp and how sort of best to memorialize it. So, her correspondence with Human Baumann unfolds at this time, when both are kind of involved in some way in a kind of delayed registering of the trauma of the Holocaust. Baumann experiences it as a teenager in a very particular way, you need a Baumann so he's very close to you need a Baumann obviously and she's right and her memoirs but I think that the thing that's very interesting to consider is, is that even the Baumann sort of immediate family members talk about their parents silence, right, about how they never kind of really addressed up until the 80s. What had happened never sort of sort to document it or kind of engage with it in any sense. There are other like characters actually in W.C. Zebalds novels, so he's right like the immigrants or austellists figures who get to a certain age they get to around 60 they sort of start to see this kind of, you know, beyond a time beyond their professional life and suddenly distinct they've managed to kind of hold down over constant and they find they have to kind of have to have to really try and understand what happened and document what they went through. And all of this is kind of apparent in their letters, Jillian Rose is, I guess, part of a different generation you might say, what Marian Hirschpool's post memory so the kind of generation who sort of come up the Holocaust through the memories of their immediate family members. But one of the things I found particularly interesting is that this time Jillian Rose was, you know, she was forced to leave or kind of forced to leave Sussex, where she had long been based as somebody leading on the social and political thought program and she was forced to leave and ended up taking on a position at the University of Warwick in the early 90s and her position was listening to develop what she called Holocaust sociology. So her title I think that she, she wrote communicated it to Bam on was, was a chair in Holocaust sociology and modern Jewish thought, she's an extraordinary chair. And of course the fact that that that that Jillian Rose so sadly died very young aged 45 I think when she was just a few years into this post mean that that that kind of project, I think, is is unfinished really I think there's a lot to be gained and I sort of, you know, taking this discussion that they were having this correspondence they were having and working with its, with its themes and revisiting it. And yeah, Rose is an extraordinary, very difficult, serious that somebody who perhaps is not as well kind of established and well known as she, as she perhaps ought to be in in sociology today, possibly because of her ambivalent relationships and indeed I agree with everything you're saying there. So to continue on the path, we've been traveling on and questions of imperialism and de-conality. One area where de-conality has faced some criticism is the question of imperialism within Europe. And, but this is really central to your discussion of what Baum had said, communism, estate, socialism and their links to imperialism. So, can you speak a bit about the links you think Baum had made between communism, state, socialism and imperialism within Europe? Yeah, so I, again, this is sort of situated within a larger discussion. So this is the sort of idea of all this sort of discussion, which is ultimately about translating and perhaps reconfiguring certain ideas around post-coloniality and de-coloniality in kind of East European context, or gemrism. And then what kind of an equinistic language is sort of Eastern context. So, to my mind, some of the most interesting discussions and debates around de-coloniality in the social sciences and humanities, at the moment, are unfolding in this kind of Soviet space. As a particular resonance and significance, I think, when you consider what's happening in Ukraine, for example, at the moment. This is the idea that I guess the Soviet Union was an empire, in some sense, kind of an empire that built on the Russian Empire. But that kind of effectuated a particular form of colonialism, both within the kind of, I guess, directed administrations, but also in the satellite states, which Poland is part. So, there's an argument about this institute calls memoir, actually, which I was reading very recently. He talks about the significance of the year 1956 in his own intellectual formation when you had the Suez Crisis on the one hand, sort of exemplar of the ongoingness of British or Western colonialism, I'd say. But also the crushing of Hungarian uprising in the streets of Budapest, as a sort of exemplary of the Soviet polymerization. And I guess that Bauman, you can see, is operating in a similar space. A lot of these debates in the kind of East European context who have unfolded in the pages of the journal, called Abimperio. And Bauman was interviewed in this journal in 2008, and was sort of positioned in his interview as somebody who both kind of intellectually is formed by a kind of an ambivalent relationship to Soviet Empire, but also works through it and intellectualizes it. So, again, you know, building this thread of Bauman's carpet or his tapestry or whatever you want to call it that represent his work. There's a very, very long running engagement with communist societies, communist modernity, we might say, and post-communism in his work. In fact, I would suggest it's possibly the longest running one. So Bauman's earliest writings on things like the bureaucracy in communist societies, his critique of perfect planning models, his sociology of the party. All of this kind of amounts to his idea that Soviet communism is not a default version of Western modernity, but is a kind of form of modernity in and of itself. So one of the other kind of bodies of works I drew some similarities to here is the idea of multiple modernities, which was another attempt to try and think about modernity in non-Urocentric ways I think Bauman overlaps with that as well in very, very interesting dimensions. As it sort of goes on his position that Soviet modernity is a kind of imperial form of modernity becomes quite clear. So there are some very interesting, albeit quite obscure writings on Stalinism, for example, which which are very interesting to read in these terms. But I think it's when you get to the late 80s and 90s, again in Bauman's sort of occasional essays, so things that he's not necessarily writing about in his books, which are more kind of generalizing and universalizing. But particularly in a journal T loss, the sort of journal of the new left, as it kind of was in New York, edited by called Tony, but he writes specifically, this is very interesting vis-a-vis the position I was talking about earlier, he writes about ongoing events in Poland from the vantage point of Britain. So he writes about solidarity movement, he writes about 1989. But what's interesting is that solid on us, it's almost framed as a kind of independence movement, 1989 as an event of decolonization. And the kind of, you know, what he comes to talk about, as a sort of post-communist experience in those early, early 1990s, which by the way, I make the argument in the specific chapter is, is the sort of context of liquid modernity, I think liquid modernity which often figures as a sort of placeless theoretical frame or metaphorical frame, it has its origins in an attempt, a really concrete attempt to interpret what's going on, you know, in these sort of capitalizing parts of the ex-Soviet Union, when all that had seen solid had somehow kind of melted into various, as the Marxist phrase go. So yeah, there are evident crossovers, I think, between Balm and sort of diagnoses of post-communism and sort of experiences of decolonality and post-coloniality, but also between Soviet communism and European colonialism. They are all part of this kind of broader frame of reference, which is modernity. So coming to the conclusion of your book, you spent a conclusion of your book talking about Balm and as a sort of political figure and a left-wing figure, and Balm has often been breadly, and I would say, broadly, I've written this, but he's often been framed as this overly pessimistic thing. So it's like this despair, you lose all hope, the vaginal hope or who enter readings in my Balm about it. I don't find that convenient, and clearly you don't either, because in your conclusion, you speak about them as a figure of as a form of left-wing, melancholic hope, I call it. So what led you to say that? What was it about Balm and legend? Yes, this question of pessimism is very interesting, because I think it comes maybe as a sort of legacy of the boosterism of the kind of end of history narrative, the idea of the events of 1989 and for the Berlin Wall and all that. It sort of created a sort of triumphalist narrative around liberal democracy, and Balm was one of many figures, I think, who were dealing with that quite a nuanced way, and in quite a kind of a way that was sort of attentive, maybe to some of the dangers of those narratives and what was being left out of them. So actually I think what I would say, given where we are now, and the kind of radical uncertainty, the kind of return of authoritarian politics around the world, various sort of overlapping crises that we face, I don't think Balm and seems sort of overtly pessimistic. You know, even it is sort of most, even it is most despairing, I think. So it's interesting actually how the events that have unfolded since Balm and died in 2017 have maybe rendered some of what he had to say that perhaps at the time of its reception was deemed to be sort of, you know, yeah, sort of overly sort of pessimistic, doom laden, you know that that kind of stuff has a has a has a has a resonance I think we speak with the present but but I guess that the kind of concept of melancholy comes from an engagement with the great book by historian enter traverse left wing melancholy and the term itself left wing melancholy it sort of originates in a review that was written by Walter Benjamin, which is a very kind of just quite disparaging review, and he was he was somebody who was quite dismissive of what he could left wing melancholy or as a sort of commercialized form of despair a form of left this diagnosis that writes about kind of misery in the world but but kind of trades off it proposes no kind of alternative no sense of possibility. There's a lot of discussion about this discussion as well in an essay she published in the 90s left wing melancholy it sort of she argued was it was about kind of, you know, kind of an older generation of left is to reflect on history, ultimately as a series of losses and the failed revolutions. People argue it tended towards quite actually reactionary positions on the rise of so called identity politics and so on but but enter traversal looks to try and kind of rescue some aspect of of melancholy left melancholy left wing melancholy for traversal is a is a is a form of thinking which does not abandon the idea of socialism or the hope for a better future but it speaks to rethink socialism at a time which the kind of memory is at risk of being lost hidden and forgotten. It's a kind of redemptive approach and I guess what what what links that to bowman I think is a bowman was somebody who remained socialist, you know his entire life was never bashful about calling himself a socialist, but who was in, you know, in a very kind of direct sense of being elected from state socialism so left wing melancholy is an attempt to try and or as I used it as an attempt to try and understand, you know how bowman sort of maintains a commitment to socialism and the sort of principle of utopia. You sort of see this developing in his writings on utopia, particularly the book socialism the active utopia published in 1976, where he defines utopia is, you know, not as a kind of defined social form, a kind of blueprint to be realized as a sort of something that really never be achieved, right, something that you know utopia is a is a sort of a cognitive frame that won the shoes but which one can never institutionalize any attempt to kind of to build it here on earth ultimately failed. That's a kind of good example I think I mean by melancholic hope. There's also a way of kind of reading bowman's sort of approach across other traditions of thought so I was quite influenced by a book by Joseph Winters which is all about black American writers like WV Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Tony Morrison, wearing melancholic hope is sort of characterized by this belief in the possibility of a better world at the same time as a heightened capacity to remember and register the damages and losses and the rages of the past. And I think that's very much work in bowman as well this sort of very acute exceptional of the sort of the ways in which possibilities for things of the better are intertwined with catastrophe. So that was kind of what I was getting at with that idea of melancholic hope. Yeah, yeah, that's so fascinating and obviously we've covered the material of the book now and we could talk for hours about this Jack and obviously I feel like we've only scratched the surface of the valuable insights in your book and one thing we haven't even spoke about was the significance of the archive. You mentioned that there's a unique, unique and similar bowman papers which held at the University of Leeds, which is having been lucky enough to visit. I would recommend to anyone as a wonderful archive and you talk about it and there is a sociological archive that has real significance not just for the life of bowman but for tracing the history of Sir Shulja I think you do so quite massively. But to move on now to thinking more generally about. So I've been read a bowman for over 20 years more than half my life at this point. And as I said reading your book made me think of you connection made me think of bowman slightly differently and obviously three of the things we discussed day most likely questions so in politicalism, de-conality, the West, exile and so on. But I was wondering what do you think we should change in how we read down with what what common assumptions about him do you think should be overturned as a result of the discussion you provide in your book. I think that it's about the necessity for a more encompassing reading than one often finds. I think there have been sort of a number of occasions I think where I've had conversations or read signals which assume that bowman didn't write about something, i.e. colonialism and then one finds that he did so I think there's maybe an necessity about how we kind of approach the sort of entirety of this work. And I think that more generally this is a point about reading social theory in general that because we're conditioned by the conditions in which we read, there's always something new to be found or kind of way of reading something that perhaps may not been intended in its writing but which we can take from it. So I'd say it's a more encompassing reading of bowman that sort of looks beyond the kind of the famous works, the identity in the Holocaust liquidity and particularly looks before 1989. So there's that. And I'd also say I think an appreciation of what bowman was doing I think it comes back maybe to the point essayism and another way that bowman sort of stood himself I think was as a kind of chronicler. All right, what he was doing was trying to chronicle the times in which he'd sort of lived through and give the readers and basically in later life when he was retired the readers were really easy out of mind were public. You know they weren't academic sociologists or academics at all necessarily these were these were kind of uninitiated and interested members of the public like, you know, like ourselves I guess going back to the first question that you asked. And I think at a time when when that idea of, you know, those ideas around points of orientation the idea of providing narratives that give me allow us to make some sense of what we're living through. It would be very significantly under threat in the era of fake news and, you know, what poverty or called the information bomb, you know, just this this sheer amount of data that we've bombarded with everywhere. I think what bowman was trying to do as a sociologist. I'd like to think that that's as we sort of move further away from his death and away from maybe the kind of politics of bowman is something that will become more and more appreciated. And again, I don't think he's alone here I think there's a generation particularly your prominent in the 80s and 90s, and thinking to people like orish bet, even someone around any giddens, less alone figures hella, Gillian rose we might say. These figures you kind of often come in for a particular kind of critique because they are sort of, let's face it sometimes I'm thinking the sort of talk in textbook form on, you know, undergraduate degree programs or in textbooks and so on. And their projects have great value and I'd like to think that that's something that that readers might take away from my book as well. So it's a question read in many ways is one of the things you take for me but you know and reread you know this one of the things you talk about is the virtue of rereading different contexts etc. So to come to our father question Jack can you tell a listeners what you're working on now. Yeah, well, this is tricky I mean one of those interstitial positions again where I've kind of come to the end of one projects and the next one isn't quite materialised yet but I'm kind of working on several lines of inquiry I guess each of which kind of follow on from the audience in some ways so, so this idea of the excellent position which I developed through bombers a kind of case study I'd like to work up, you know sort of comparative frame so I'm interested in developing a comparative sociology and into that tools in exile across a range of contexts and develop the idea of the position to a greater degree. And I'm also very interested in what I was talking about earlier that dialogue between Bauman and Rose and the idea of Holocaust sociology so I'm undertaking a project at the moment which is about, I guess, understanding Holocaust and sort of neglected lost tradition of sociology, but no matter what Bauman might have said about sociologists not from from the Holocaust kind of extends way back to the kind of immediate, you know, post war years in the works of figures in the Appalachia for example, those are the two main things at the moment, but one of the rings I guess I have maybe developed since this project on Bauman and his essayistic approach is a kind of an openness right to all sorts of things so they're all sorts of bits and pieces and what I'm writing and having discussions with people about the moment. Yeah, there we go. Yeah and the excellent works house fascinating it just makes me think of you know how central exiles have been to British sociology absolutely you can also make the same case of American sociology and American anthropology as well as largely an excellent discipline as well so there's lots of really interesting things to come there so we'll have to have you on later to talk about I don't want to come so as a reminder we've been talking to Jack Palmer who is all for a segment Bauman on the West, a sociology of intellectual exile published by McGill McGill Queens University Press and as his discussion has made clear this is an incredibly rich book as I mentioned a minute ago with there's tons we could have spoken about that we haven't touched upon, it's an incredibly interesting retailing of Bauman's life and the circus that they live through but also encouraged us to look again at a scholar who as you've noted like most of these scholars are open to a variety of different readings and this is in my view among the very best books on Bauman of which there is currently a large number and this is among the very best so thank you very much. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thanks very much for having me. It's been wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. That was it. Thank you. [Music]
