The English twin: Reflections on Keith Tester

The first thing that struck me about Keith Tester was his name. I had never heard that particular surname before (finding out later that it was perhaps not all that uncommon) and immediately associated it with a flacon labelled ‘Tester’ intended for customer trial in a perfume boutique. I thought it was a funny name, and also a name difficult to forget. By the time I first read some of Keith Tester’s work in the mid-1990s – perhaps this was his book on animal rights from 1991 or his book on postmodernity from 1993 – little did I did know that he was later to become my friend, confidant and collaborator. When I myself started working in a more focused way on Zygmunt Bauman’s ideas in the early days of the new millennium, I was looking for someone sympathetic to Bauman’s work with whom to discuss ideas and develop international connections. Hence I decided, bold as only such a young scholar can be, to send Keith an email suggesting that we perhaps do something together on Bauman. I was quite sure that he would decline – after all, he had never heard of me, and at the time my list of publications was on the short side. To my surprise, he did not. In fact, he responded very positively, admitting that he himself at the time felt somewhat lonely in his Bauman studies. Since then we stayed connected and wrote quite a few things together, to which I will return below.

At some point in our professional relationship, Keith began calling me his ‘Danish twin’ and wrote the personal dedication ‘To my Danish twin’ in his wonderful book The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman (2004a). To me he was thus my ‘English twin’. Not that we were all that similar – in fact, Keith was more than 10 years my senior and, personality-wise, we were very different and had lived very different lives. We agreed on many things regarding the discipline of sociology, but disagreed on just as many things as soon as we moved outside the realm of sociological research. For example, he called my predilection for the 1980s British progressive rock band Marillion downright ‘wrong’, and we did not even support the same football team. Despite this, his suggestion that we were somehow ‘twins’ was not far off the target, as we both shared a concern with what I would term ‘humanistic sociology’ – the understanding that sociology is about real people (even sociologists themselves) as living, reflexive and self-interpreting creatures, who are desperately trying to make sense of and create meaning with their lives, and not abstractions constructed through the measurement of averages, medians or normal distributions. This joint interest in sociology as a humanistic enterprise had led us both, independent of each other, to the work of Zygmunt Bauman.

Our many personal differences aside, our admiration for and inspiration from the work of Zygmunt Bauman was what united us. However, this interest for Bauman’s work and ideas was often unsynchronised. When I was on a ‘Bauman high’, Keith would normally be on a ‘Bauman low’, not being bothered to read or write any more about Bauman. When I felt that I needed a rest from Bauman, Keith all of a sudden seemed to be very assertive that as soon as possible we needed to do something ‘on Bauman’ together. In this way, we kept each other continuously engaged with the work of Bauman, but also with so many other unrelated topics that every now and then popped up. We had plans on doing many different books together, but most of them never materialised – we wanted to do something on film, something on metaphors, something on irony, something on humanism and so on. The list of intended work was almost as endless as it was at times, unfortunately, also fruitless. We often seemed to talk more about ‘doing things’ together than actually getting them done. We did, however, manage to get some stuff done. Throughout the years, Keith and I wrote and published quite a few pieces together on Bauman’s sociology from the early years in Poland to his postmodern and liquid-modern turn in the new millennium (see, e.g., Bauman et al., 2013; Jacobsen and Tester, 2006a; Jacobsen et al., 2007; Tester and Jacobsen, 2005). We conducted and published several either face-to-face or email-based interviews with Bauman, who was almost always a willing victim of our inquisitiveness (see, e.g., Jacobsen and Tester, 2006b, 2007, 2013). In other pieces of published work, we also ventured into exploring evil (Jacobsen and Tester, 2008) and utopia (Tester and Jacobsen, 2012). Contrary to me, someone believing in the academic right to rehash your own ideas time after time, Keith disliked repeating himself or ‘copying and pasting’. It had to be new stuff to him – the discovery of virgin territory. When we met up somewhere, we always sat down with a drink, or mostly a few, and talked about what we now wanted to do together. As mentioned, most of it remained in our minds, as we were both busy with the more mundane academic assignments of teaching, supervision and external examinership, but just talking about what we could do together for me constituted a tremendous source of energy.

Keith Tester seemed somehow to pop up in my life when I least expected it. For example, some seven or eight years ago I was invited to Zygmunt Bauman’s house in Headingley just outside Leeds to conduct a planned interview. I had been there a few times before and, as I remember it, expected it to be just me and Zygmunt. When I showed up with my usual gift bottle of liqueur, my written questions and a Dictaphone, Keith suddenly – as if out of nowhere – smilingly appeared in the doorway to the living room together with a Polish camera crew. Although I was obviously glad (or perhaps rather surprised) to see him, I also remember feeling a bit annoyed that he was there to ‘steal’ my special moment with Zygmunt. He did not, of course, and we had a very fine interview session, each treated, as always, by Zygmunt with a plate of food, a cup of tea and a glass of cognac. Some footage of this event later appeared in an early unedited version of the film The Trouble with Being Human These Days (2013) by Bartek Dziadosz.

In many ways, Keith Tester was a man of emotions. First of all, he was a funny man – but it was always a kind of serious funniness. He liked to tease and to be teased, but always within certain limits. For example, he detested when someone called him ‘Keefie’ or when students in emails addressed him with a ‘Hi Keith’ or similar – hence I always started my emails to him with ‘Hello Keefie’ or ‘Hi Keith’. He liked to joke, but I sensed that even when in the jesting mode, Keith always kept a bit of himself out of it, in order to secure a sense of seriousness. In my experience, Keith was also a modest man – much too modest when looking at what he had in fact achieved throughout his academic career. Despite his modesty, I do vividly remember some of his rare openly expressed moments of pride. For example, he seemed very proud and felt recognised when visiting our university here in Aalborg in 2003 and giving a series of well-attended lectures to colleagues and students. These lectures were later published in a local working paper titled ‘Fragments of a Human World’ in which he explored topics such as evil and bystanding, terrorism, honour and dignity, moral action as well as humanitarianism (Tester, 2004b). His illuminating and thought-provoking ideas on these topics so much deserved to have been spread well beyond the limited reading audience of a local working paper series. Keith was also immensely proud of being appointed a visiting scholar with what he called the ‘Thesis Eleven crowd’ in Melbourne, and he often told me how glad he was that we had the opportunity to go ‘down under’ and meet up with likeminded people. But besides that, he seemed to be too modest a man when taking into consideration the originality and importance of his work. In many ways, coming to think of it, his humility reminds me of Zygmunt Bauman, who was also a man who just ‘did his thing’ with a sort of self-effacing graciousness about it. In this way, Keith and Zygmunt went well together. And just as Zygmunt had argued that sociology was to be understood as something as unpretentious as ‘an ongoing dialogue with human life experience’, so Keith argued for a ‘principled sociology’ that ‘seeks to engage us in a conversation that inspires free and autonomous action, and it thereby demonstrates that actually the world could become very different from what is currently is’ (Tester, 2008: 167). I always found this Baumanesque understanding of sociology a beautiful statement but also a testimony not only to be preached, but also practiced.

What I perhaps liked most about Keith was the fact that he was and remained a true gentleman, in an academic game that most often seems to benefit those aspiring to steal the limelight. Besides being modest, he was however also an honest man – speaking out whenever something or someone really bothered him, but always in a very gentle and gentleman-like manner. I do recall one exception to this rule of thumb when a colleague and I did a presentation at a conference in Hull some years back, the topic of our presentation being ‘Positive Sociology’. Keith approached us afterwards before the usual trip to the pub to talk about football, music, sociology and life in general, saying that our ideas were ‘preposterous’ and ‘dangerous’. He did not mean this in any disrespectful way, but it was a sincere recording of his sentiments towards the notion of sociology being in any way associated with a positive (as opposed to a critical) outlook. This whole idea seemed to infuriate him.

After Keith had left academia, disappointed, as he said, with the way things were developing within the British university system in general and sociology in particular, we did not have much contact. I missed our frequent email dialogues and face-to-face conversations, but at the same time I was busy with so many other things that our close collaboration and friendship for a few years somehow faded into the background. Then, all of a sudden, once again, Keith popped up unexpectedly in my life, when I suddenly received an email from him only a few months before he passed away, and we were suddenly, once again, engaged in talking about ‘doing something’ together on either film, morality or sports (but not Bauman!) – as long, we agreed, as it was ‘fun’. Here we briefly returned to the aforementioned topic of ‘Positive Sociology’, when I daringly suggested that we could do a volume together for the book series he was editing at Routledge on ‘Positive Sociology’. His response was a ‘typical Keith’ – short, precise and dry: ‘To be honest Danish brother, it is hard to be positive about very much here in the UK – Brexit, rising poverty, decimation of the welfare state and so on’. In our last conversations, I sensed an unmistakable disillusion but also a shimmer of hope that things might, after all, perhaps at some point in time turn out for the better.

Throughout the more than 15 years I had the privilege of knowing Keith Tester, I can in all honestly boil it all down to the fact that he was a thoroughly kind-hearted man, he was a clever and original scholar (in many ways of the old-school, still believing in principles, values and that kind of stuff), and even though he certainly had some edge, he was always polite, interesting, considerate and compassionate company. I miss him as a friend, as a confidant and as a collaborator.