Roy Boyne 1947-2020
Image: Professor Roy Boyne. Source: Nicola Boyne.
Scott Lash
I first met Roy (Boyne) at a British Sociological Association Theory group meeting in Newcastle in I think 1979 or 1980. Roy, young lecturer, had organised the meeting. He had invited Raymond Boudon from Paris, who last minute cancelled and instead sent two early-career scholars called Latour and Callon, whom no one had heard of. Latour opened his talk apologising for ‘taking coals to Newcastle’.
Roy and I met at another BSA group colloquium maybe a year or two later. This time if I’m correct, Mike Featherstone was there, talking about a new journal he was starting – even in these nasty Thatcherite times. The three of us connected. It was all very ‘Northern’, though Roy was born in Birmingham (and a lifelong Villa fan). Roy had been at Leeds, where he had done his PhD with Zygmunt Bauman. He’d just started as lecturer at the old Newcastle Poly, later to become Northumbria University. What I remember is this super intense hyper-theorist. I remember Roy was listening to a tape driving his car of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. He never turned off. 24/7. He already had the air of someone who had been a mature student, from lower-middle class Birmingham, more - though never self-consciously - working class than the others in the theory group at the time. Most of us - John Thompson, David Held, Janet Wolff, Richard Kilminster, William Outhwaite and I were clearly middle class, some of us coddled. But not Roy. Roy had had a sense of adventure, a risk taker though also I think a trainspotter as a teenager, dropping out of secondary school, leaving I think at points his family unannounced and somehow getting down to London. This guy was the real deal.
We reconnected at the Warwick Lyotard colloquium, the great man attending in 1987. Roy had already published his Foucault and Derrida book. This was more the then budding generation of British Continental philosophers – Geoff Bennington, Andrew Benjamin, Howard Caygill - but also I remember, in black leather, Alphonso Lingis. This was Lyotard less of Libidinal Economy or Discourse, Figure, than arguably the most Derridean of Lyotard books, Le Différend. Roy was plugged into this. The Differend and Lyotard’s take on the Third Critique. Roy was there fully engaged. I was a bit lost.
Then little by little Roy and I became closer and closer to Theory, Culture & Society. Roy and I and the others were a Northern thing. Northern. Before Boris’s Red Wall. I was at Lancaster. Bryan Turner from Leeds, Mike from Middlesbrough. Also, Mike Hepworth, Roland Robertson. We were definitely not London, much less, God forbid, Oxbridge. Roy and I both had published in the journal, we became closer friends with Mike F., and slowly joined the editorial board at about the time of the first mega and global Pittsburgh TCS conference in 1992. Weberian and Parsonian sociology had been more or less central to the board with Roland and Bryan. So, who were these two new ‘postmodern’ and French effective upstarts, who may have been as close to cultural theory as to sociology?
I think it was 1993 when TCS hosted Jean Baudrillard at the ICA. The next day Roy and I interviewed him in of course French, with Baudrillard’s wife in his hotel. We came at the interview too much from a Levinas/Derrida direction. Memorable, when we asked him if Henri Lefebvre was an influence, he answered not so much but he admired Lefebvre’s ‘esprit libertin’. Not ‘libertaire’, we noted, but ‘libertin’. Baudrillard, that old roué.
As book reviews editor of TCS, Roy drove over sort of bimonthly from the Northeast to Lancaster on a Friday evening. We’d work on the reviews for a bit at the Uni, then after dinner connect with Lancaster guys, often also Costas Douzinas for a game of poker. Endlessly generous not to mention fearless, Roy would bet substantial sums; you never knew what his cards were. Like me, he lost a bit more than he won. But he never complained. About anything.
Uncomplaining, decisive, in his way tough as nails. We played golf. When I was in London and he was in I think Durham, Roy would book a slot at ever a new and more wonderful course halfway between us in the Midlands and we’d play a round. Indeed, the stroke that finally immobilised him came the day after we played 18 holes after he and Nicola had moved down to London.
Roy was separated or divorced when we first met. Some five years later he met Nicola. They and Celia and I were close, we dined, drank and generally hung out with them. Went to their wedding a few years later and proper party after. We visited them, living in a converted church on a green near Durham, for really a two-day party to celebrate I don’t know what. The locals really appreciated them, no condescension on either side. I remember getting drunk and/or stoned listening with Roy and mates to Mothers of Invention albums. Nicola and Roy had the most genuine and full love up until the end.
Roy loved art. He wrote on Barnet Newman’s Stations of the Cross, his feeling for modern art more instinctive and educated than mine. He and Nicola enjoyed wine and food, were in fact gourmets, and had many wonderful wine and food holidays always a different region in France.
Roy at Northumbria University all of a sudden became involved with regional EU policy and thus university affairs. He became Head of Department at Northumbria, then moved to Teesside University as Dean of Human Sciences. His final move was to Durham University, where he was Vice Provost at Queen’s Campus and finally Principal of St Cuthbert’s Society, all the while being Professor of Social Sciences. Roy went at this with the same energy, enthusiasm and hyper-focus he had on theory as a younger scholar.
Poor health crept upon Roy from his mid-fifties – perforated bowel, and a series of ever more severe strokes. Again, he never complained about anything. He just got on with it. More a Stoic (Foucault) than a Cynic (Sloterdijk). He will be missed. RIP.
Roy Boyne, born December 12, 1947; died October 22, 2020
Charitable donations to the Stroke Association are welcome.
Roy Boyne’s Theory, Culture & Society archive
Heterology or ‘The Science of the Excluded Part’: An Introduction
Marina Galletti, Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 35, 4-5: pp. 3-27. First Published September 10, 2018.
This article is an introduction to the 2018 Bataille & Heterology Special Issue, edited by Roy Boyne and Marina Galletti. (Theory, Culture & Society, Volume 35, Issue 4-5, July-September 2018)
Book Review: The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change by Al Gore
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 31, 6: pp. 151-155. First Published September 23, 2014.
Book Review: Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi by C Mukerji
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 30, 3: pp. 136-140. First Published May 14, 2013.
Introduction: Three Responses to Zygmunt Bauman
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 27, 6: pp. 91-94.First Published December 17, 2010.
A Brief Note on Giacometti
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 25, 5: pp. 20-29. First Published September 1, 2008.
Image and Sound in Cinema: Intervie w with Shiguéhiko Hasumi
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 24, 7-8: pp. 330-333. First Published Dec 1, 2007.
Technics, Media, Teleology: Interview with Bernard Stiegler
Couze Venn, Roy Boyne, John Phillips, Ryan Bishop
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 24, 7-8: pp. 334-341. First Published Dec 1, 2007.
Classification
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 23, 2-3: pp. 21-30. First Published May 1, 2006.
Uterine Self-Understanding and the Indispensable Other: Editorial Reflections on the Work of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 21, 1: pp. 1-3. First Published Feb 1, 2004.
Bourdieu: from Class to Culture: In Memoriam Pierre Bourdieu 1930—2002
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 19, 3: pp. 117-128. First Published Jun 1, 2002.
Cosmopolis and Risk: A Conversation with Ulrich Beck
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 18, 4: pp. 47-63. First Published Aug 1, 2001.
Symbolic Exchange: Taking Theory Seriously. An Interview with Jean Baudrillard
Roy Boyne, Scott Lash
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 12, 4: pp. 79-95. First Published Nov 1, 1995.
Book Review: Fragments of Modernity by David Frisby
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 8, 3: pp. 246-248. First Published Aug 1, 1991.
Culture and the World-System
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 7, 2-3: pp. 57-62. First Published Jun 1, 1990.
Book Reviews: Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writing 1977-1984. Edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. The Final Foucault. Edited by James Bernauer and David Rasmussen.
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 6, 3: pp. 471-474. First Published Aug 1, 1989.
Book Reviews: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image by Gilles Deleuze. Cinema 2: L’Image-temps by Gilles Deleuze. French Cinema: the First Wave, 1915-1929 by Richard Abel.
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 6, 1: pp. 149-153. First Published Feb 1, 1989.
The Art of the Body in the Discourse of Postmodernity
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 5, 2-3: pp. 527-542. First Published Jun 1, 1988.
Interview with Hans-Georg Gadamer
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 5, 1: pp. 25-34. First Published Feb 1, 1988.
The Domain of the Third: French Social Theory into the 1980s
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 3, 3: pp. 7-21. First Published Nov 1, 1986.
Interview With Dan Sperber
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 3, 3: pp. 85-92. First Published Nov 1, 1986.
Interview with François Bourricaud
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 3, 3: pp. 105-111. First Published Nov 1, 1986.
Interview with Michel Wieviorka
Roy Boyne
Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 3, 3: pp. 127-135. First Published Nov 1, 1986.
