Friendship is the most beautiful emotional attachment because it is freely chosen, freely cultivated; it flourishes in reciprocity, mutual possession, and mutual self-abandon.

Heller 1998: 10

1.

This is a tale of friendship. Or, more accurately, it’s a reflection on how a friendship based on a few meetings can amount to a lot. I am sure many of us have had a version of this experience. The friendships made during a stint living elsewhere. Or those incidental meetings and interactions with someone at infrequent events which, though it never quite blossoms into something more, we can still define as friendship.

Of course, these definitions are tricky to isolate. Each friendship is particular. The term friend is bandied about in English. In other languages, it holds a more exclusive use for only a handful of people throughout the course of a life. There’s also the inevitable problem of sentimental imbalance in friendships – that the association is valued differently by each individual. But that’s something I’ve realised has its own liberating effect: if reciprocity is not expected, then its fortuitous emergence is especially marvellous.

Any hope for a fixed definition of friendship is fraught with complexity. Friendships differ. Offering a definition is not my purpose. Others have written about this far more thoughtfully, including in this journal (Blatterer 2010). My current notion is facile – that friendship can be defined in many different ways. Ultimately, it’s about the shared connection between two people. It’s not simply a matter of time spent together, although that’s important. More often than not, friendship is circumstantial. It is bounded by specific timeframes not chosen by either individual – those school days, that part-time job, a season of sports, your child’s friend’s parent, a fellow commuter.

Personal definitions within a friendship are more valuable than sociological ones. I’ve also come to understand that friendship is something we need to name more explicitly between friends. It’s not enough to rely on the gestures of proximity that are part of conventions that give way to friendship. Instead, we need to actually say something like: hey, you’re valuable to me and I consider you an important person in my life. You are, in other words, my friend.

A friendship is the sum of moments together. Sometimes many, sometimes few. But all valued by both. This essay is about my friendship with Peter Beilharz. Or, more accurately, it’s about his small kindnesses toward me when I, naively, tried to become an academic during the early twenty-first century – a period that saw the simultaneous devaluing of the humanities and social sciences and the increasing precarity of scholarly employment in universities.

2.

Peter welcomed me to his office at La Trobe University in the autumn of 2007. I was teaching a History course there that semester on Fascism and Nazism. It was only one day a week and the bus ride to and from the campus took up a large part of that day. Still, I hadn’t been to La Trobe before and I thought it would be a good chance to make contact with Peter and Thesis Eleven. I’d been in Melbourne for a couple of years after my doctorate and was piecing together a career, of sorts, with various academic and non-scholarly jobs. Most opportunities emerged from hopeful emails. I am grateful to all who responded. When I sent one to Peter explaining my background in History and Social Theory, he was gracious enough to meet me.

The university was quieting in the late afternoon. I found Peter in his neat, book-filled office and he immediately suggested that we go for a walk to chat as he’d been sitting indoors all day. We strolled and talked. My memory of the experience is of Peter as a generous listener and gentle contributor. But it was the walking and talking that struck me because it was, and is, my favourite way to get to know others. I spoke mainly of my studies and current work situation; Peter recalled the overwhelmingness of teaching the Holocaust and mentioned his transition to part-time work as well as the parlous state of the university. It was probably the final days of La Trobe’s late-twentieth-century moment during which Thesis Eleven was born. What I mean, without being uncharitable to those there now, is that retirement was embracing the generation of social scientists on which the university had built its reputation. More could be said about this moment. But not here. A fair few of you reading this will know far more than me.

As we arrived back at his office, he wished me well and sent me off with a couple of books and a bottle of wine. It was a lovely moment for me as a younger man. He didn’t have to meet me. He didn’t have a course for me to teach or any other work for me to do. And I wasn’t so career-minded to assume something concrete would come of it. Afterall, my precarious employment in academia was leading me toward other options, including school teaching. If anything, our meeting was a chance for me to connect with someone who’d long worked in an intellectual space that I’d come to identify with through my postgraduate study. Around 2000, while trying to teach myself Critical Theory, I stumbled across Thesis Eleven in the stacks of the Reid Library at the University of Western Australia. I was astounded that a journal existed that offered a distinct Antipodean viewpoint, often by Australians, on what I’d come to understand as a largely transatlantic phenomenon. Meeting Peter was a way of feeling a part of that lineage.

Then one of those funny things in life happened. Just when you think something ends, it continues. As I waited at the bus stop for the long journey home, Peter turned up for his evening commute. And so our chat recommenced. I’d always used long public-transport journeys as a time to read and reflect. I was working my way through Barry Miles’ biography of Frank Zappa, so we spent some time chatting about his music’s intoxicating bizarreness as well as the limitations of his shtick. Peter recalled how his brother introduced him to Zappa’s music and I shared my own reminiscences of how jazz-musician friends did the same for me. The meandering conversation had a different, more intimate, tenor than that of our walk. Small big talk. Yet again resonances presented themselves.

For the rest of the semester, we irregularly sat with each other on the bus and chatted for half an hour or so. Peter, I learnt, always caught the bus home. I assume he’d had many conversations over the years with others on it – students, colleagues, strangers. His willingness to chat with me meant an awful lot to this fellow public-transport intellectual.

3.

After that, my life re-routed to Sydney for a stint teaching history at Macquarie University. When I returned to Melbourne, Peter and I met up once again after a couple of years. Resonances continued. I mentioned we’d moved to the city’s outer east with our then very young kids, he spoke of growing up nearby. He even knew our street and the children’s park we frequented each day. He recalled taking his kids there too and helping a woman look for a lost engagement ring among the tanbark. And he disclosed that his mother was in a home in the area that was associated with the community of migrants his family was connected to. My family used to visit there each year for its Weihnachtsfest where my kids would ride ponies and chomp salty Brezeln.

Our suburban upbringings, which is admittedly common for many, reminds me of the place of social theory within these settings, especially those far from the centres of intellectual power in Europe or the United States. Around that time I saw a young man reading Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man in the street outside a bakery. This was distinctly out of place in the suburb I now knew. I struck up a conversation with him about it and he said he’d found it in a used bookstore and was intrigued by the title. But thinking about it all now, there’s something in common with the actual nature of the reflective thought inherent to social theory: the sense-making of our place in modernity. All of us come to Social Theory from different places. The work of Peter on Antipodean social theory, and Thesis Eleven in general, exemplified that his experience is shared in different locales and with different interpretations being inevitable and important. Much like Marcuse and co. in the suburban Californian sunshine, thinking critically about modernity from a different place always offers fresh thinking about its nature.

During this time, I was still piecing academic teaching together alongside other jobs. But this work’s false freedom no longer appealed to me. I now had children to nurture. I began teaching in schools. I thought this would be my future when a research opportunity presented itself at Monash University. As part of the process, Peter attended, in an official capacity, a presentation that I had to give on my part of the research project. His intellect left a strong impression on those who later became my colleagues. He was extraordinarily kind in saying that I was the perfect person for the work. And he finished the session by saying it was fun, which I’d never heard anyone say about academia. I was again struck by Peter’s goodwill. Here was someone with whom I’d shared a handful of meaningful conversations, probably more meaningful to me, that was willing to come and support my quixotic attempt to continue working as a scholar.

After that officialness, we grabbed a quick meal together on campus before attending a seminar in the philosophy department. By coincidence, my session occurred on the same day that Agnes Heller was giving a paper on Hegel. Upon reflection it’s kind of amazing to comprehend the serendipitous timings. As we entered the heaving edifice that is the Menzies building, Peter mentioned that he thought this was the first time he’d come back to Monash for a long time, perhaps even since he’d studied there. We sidled into a packed seminar room just as Heller began to animatedly present her ideas. I only partially understood them at the time and can’t really recall much, if any, detail now. But it was thrilling. And Critical Theory’s lineage was yet again apparent to me.

4.

I didn’t see Peter in person for some years after that. We were in touch now and then via email, usually about Thesis Eleven related things. But we didn’t see each other. Like many men, I suspect my sense of who my current friends are is skewed by miscalculations about time and contact – some of those who I list as my closest friends I haven’t seen for years. Still, within those relationships, real and imagined, there remains a commitment on my part to a belief in their potential. I am usually right about this too, thankfully. And this remains true of Peter and me.

Our paths crossed again, by chance, in late 2018. Again, it was serendipitous since some colleagues at Monash were working on a schools and food symposium and Peter happened to be there supporting his wife, Sian Supski, who’d also be involved in the project. It was lovely to see him – to share a hug, another long chat, to remember coming here to see Agnes years before. And also for him to see me at work within the university. This work allows me to keep a hand in research and teaching that is connected broadly to Thesis Eleven’s focus. 

The chance meeting eventually led to me being more involved in Thesis Eleven. The editorial board began to change and I was asked to come on board. Agreeing to do so means, I suppose, that something concrete came from that email sent all those years ago. But really it’s a chance for me to help usher in a new era for the journal – continuing its legacy and restyling its future. That’s the latest way that the resonance of our personalities has become apparent. This role in the journal has also led to burgeoning friendships with co-editors who share common interests and outlooks. I have Peter to thank for that as well. And through the process, I’ve also found out we share the same birthday, a generation apart. Kismet? Providence? Probably just a nice thing.

5.

In putting together my memories of knowing Peter you will, no doubt, reflect on your own version of knowing him, especially those of you around the world who are part of his remarkable network. Or perhaps you simply read his work. That’s important too. Afterall, this piece hasn’t engaged with his scholarship, as text, but instead points to the crucial interrelational work that a scholar undertakes to sustain a discipline. I am sure there are many others, students especially, who have a version of the assistance Peter has provided.

So maybe it’s not friendship that I’ve described. Maybe it’s mentorship. Or professional kindness. I suppose it is up to Peter to decide. Reading his work on his great friendship with Zygmunt Bauman, Intimacy in Postmodern Times (Beilharz 2020), I am in awe of their relationship’s depth. That book also outlines so many other scholarly friendships as well, including those within Thesis Eleven, during the decades of Peter’s remarkable work with them.

By contrast, my work as a scholar today, like many of my peers, does not afford much time or space for this type of connection. The coronavirus pandemic extended a social disconnect already underway within universities. Work in academia today, in Australia at least, is increasingly isolated. The same is true of studying there. Reduced staff, disembodied Zooms, and empty campuses are the norm. To the extent that there are academic jobs, few offer continuity and thus the certainty that might lead to building something like the wonderful network Peter has created around the globe. This sad reality is well documented. The university system here, as elsewhere, appears devoted to dehumanising its value in novel ways despite lucid calls for alternatives (Hil et al 2022).

Small graces to the contrary can be found. John Berger (2002) called these ‘pockets of resistance’, places where friends can come together to share ideas together in ways that challenge the brutal calculus that orders our lives. Thesis Eleven is one such pocket. I am heartened by the connections that it offers me both intellectually and personally. It’s a journal built on friendships and therefore something more than a journal. A lot of this rests with Peter’s amiability. I am sure he would be quick to add that there are others who’ve been involved with the journal over the years that deserve credit as well. Yet, for me, as one of the journal’s new stewards, it’s this story of Peter’s commitment to our friendship over the years that serves as evidence of his crucial role in cultivating ways of thinking that are worth considering – mine, yours, and others.

Hey, Peter, you’re valuable to me and I consider you an important person in my life. You are my friend.

References

Beilharz, P (2020) Intimacy in Postmodern Times: A Friendship with Zygmunt Bauman. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Berger J (2002) The Shape of a Pocket. London: Bloomsbury.

Blatterer H (2010) Friendship’s Indecencies: Reflections On Maria Markus’s ‘Lovers and Friends’ and ‘Decent and/or Civil Society’. Thesis Eleven 101(1): 36-43.

Heller A (1998) The Beauty of Friendship. South Atlantic Quarterly 97(1): 5–22.

Hil R Lyons K and Thompsett F (2022) Transforming Universities in the Midst of Global Crisis: A University for the Common Good. London: Routledge.

Biographic Information

Howard Prosser works in the School of Education, Culture and Society at Monash University.