Defamiliarising Bauman: On Archiving a Displaced Public Sociologist

• In Event: The Unpublished History of Sociology

Abstract

This paper reflects on my role in establishing, cataloguing and interpreting the personal papers of Zygmunt Bauman at the University of Leeds, UK. Working with the collection has raised wider questions about how archives of public intellectuals are assembled and used, including the challenges they pose for interpreting published work. The paper outlines how the variety of documents in the collection - drafts, notes, marginalia and other materials - complicate established accounts of Bauman’s intellectual trajectory and open interpretive possibilities that are not implicit in his published writings. Particular attention is given to correspondence, and to the broader significance of letter writing for understanding how ideas develop in intellectual networks that are often hard to trace in print. Correspondence takes on an especial significance for intellectuals in exile, and to this end the paper introduces the idea of the ‘displaced archive’ as a framework for approaching the Bauman archive, a collection which spans periods of exile and censorship. It will also consider the way in which Bauman’s papers sit uneasily within contemporary debates about his life and career in Poland. Considering the archive as a repository of ‘displaced objects’ draws attention to the political and material conditions that influence what is preserved, what is absent, and how the figure of the displaced public sociologist becomes archived.

Author

• Jack Palmer, University of Leeds