notes on the scholarly shelf
With academic life moving onto the screen, I am attuned to lost experiences – the sense of immersion, being surrounded by the familiar vastness of paratextual layers, bridging the disciplines, time and space – the library. The loss takes the shape of a scholarly shelf that morphs into a virtual background reminding me of the privilege of accessing knowledge through physical codex rather than fragmented, infinite yet limiting, pdf/scrolls. 3 Through the lectures, tutorials and seminars conducted online, connecting our intimate and secluded worlds, I encounter the perfect shelf – a type of space that transfixes with its spatial fluidity, its material and conceptual layers, that draws in a fasted mind. It is not the organically amassed assemblage of art and architectural books spanning centuries, contained within subtly worn oak joinery, graciously occupying a Georgian interior, nor is it the carefully composed array of books and design objects climbing modernist modular shelving units. No, I find it in a recorded conversation with Zygmunt Bauman, filmed at his home in Leeds a decade ago. 4 Here, a stratified design, based on small concrete blocks and simple wood shelves, wraps the walls of a modest interior. It fills the niches, carrying the weight of decades of academic work. This dynamic structure, with blocks distributed evenly as well as being shifted for more support or, in some places, responding to oversized piles of material becomes a frame that adapts to an ever-growing library. Other videos document the accumulation. 5
Glimpses reveal a print of Don Quixote on the wall, returning later in the form of a sculpture on a shelf. There is an abstract painting on top of everything, leaning against the wall, and abundance of paper, notes, printed pages, arranged in piles, folders, books and boxes. In all the videos, the camera is fixed on the scholar holding a lighter or a pipe, gesticulating as he describes the dialectics of modern uncertainty. On the door is a poster from 1996, an invitation to an event with Janina Bauman at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Staszic Palace in Warsaw. Above it, is another one, simply titled Moods and Shapes . There is also a card with a poem inside fixed to the door at eye level. At one point the camera looks across a completely filled desk, with a screen, webcam, hard drive and more books – out to the green barrier of the garden. The shelving system, however easy it is to construct, is overgrown by incoming volumes. Books escape the shelves, pile on the floor, taking over, rendering the rest of the space inaccessible. Piled on the shelves the books become structural members in the absence of blocks, disturbing the rhythm of construction. Nothing is fixed, it’s just timber resting on blocks; some shelves are nearing collapse — all from the overwhelming presence of books. I am one of many that acknowledged the cosmic pull of this interior constellation. This precious and fragile space was artistically colonised by Polish artist, Miros ł aw Ba ł ka, who in 2013 brought to Bauman his 1:1 photograph of the studio wall of images, curated with surgical precision. The rationale behind this act was revealed in a limited edition publication, Ba ł ka / Bauman – a record of the conversation between the artist and the philosopher of liquid modernity. 6 5 Bartek Dziadosz, ‘Excerpts from the interview with Zygmunt Bauman/Cutaways B-roll’, filmed June 1-16, 2010 as part of the documentary, ‘The Trouble with Being Human These Days’ acccessed Dec 31, 2021. https//www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zvfLpptUIh4 6 Zygmunt Bauman and Miros ł aw Ba ł ka, edited by Katarzyna Bojarska. Bauman / Ba ł ka. Warszawa: Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 2013. The copy I am working with comes from the library of my supervisor, Ella Chmielewska.
3 Electronic versions of printed works expose the navigational and format challenges of the virtual space that often disregards the paratextual elements understood in Genette’s terms as ‘liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between the book, publisher, and reader’. Johanna Drucker in her essay ‘The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space’ brings to focus the book as a three-dimensional, dynamic and performative structure. See A Companion to Digital Literary Studies , ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. http:// www.digitalhumanities.org/ companionDLS/ 4 Mike Dibb and Charlie Duran, ‘Personally Speaking; Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman - Film 1’ accessed Dec 31, 2021, https://youtube.com/watch?v=19kmqx1-Slw
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