Sunday, January 21, 2007
(10:56 PM) | Amish Lovelock:
Finding a Voice
There is this point at the end of one year and the beginning of another where I suddenly and abruptly re-discover literature. I immediately have a craving for novels, poems, and try to listen and read as many interviews with authors as I can. Part of the thrill is what appears to me as a complete economy with words many of these people have. In what can take three to four academic papers, writers accomplish in a sentence, and get the recognition for it. Reading them becomes like a swift, sharp strike to the head, or like an ice-cold bucket of water has been thrown in my face. They say what I wanted to say.
The question that seems to be presenting itself to me is the following: when does the academic become an artist? While the general reception of writers and artists is a mixed bag of confused reverance led by professional sales culture and tired journalistic idioms, and of academics, a useless intellectual elite simply there to put down naturally intellegent people and stop them from telling the truth, I sometimes really wish that academic writing could capture the economy of literature in this sense. There is a little quote that I read online the other day from a seminar on feminist memoir that tries to tell me why it can't.
"After all, I believe, I don't even think academic is such a dirty word. I mean, I did say once, when I was sitting in the subaltern studies party in Hyderabad, I was sitting and there was a lot of noise going on. I was speaking Bengali again; I hope someone can imagine what kind of word I used for "motherfucker," but anyway [. . .] Everybody else was milling around being very academic in the bad sense - a boys' club, mostly. I said to a woman friend, I entered this profession because I like to read, write and teach; and as a result, I'm thrown in with a bunch of motherfuckers. This is what I said. (laughter) So I know the problems, but nonetheless, I think, one should question oneself, that one sticks at the job, takes in young people in the name of teaching, makes a salary, makes a life, fights for tenure. And then, at the end of the day, says, I don't want to be in the academy, I want to write something, you can give it a nice psychoanalytic name. I don't even know what kind of name I would give it. It just seems too obvious to me. So, I'm not against education. We shouldn't burn the universities. But nonetheless, my desire in this thing has been to write in such a way that they would find the questions something that . . . I want to be haunted. Some people will know what I'm talking about. I want to be haunted by them. So it's a hauntological autobiography."
But then again I wonder if when an academic is regarded as an artist it is because he writes a book on Aristotle, Kant, Montaigne and Heidegger and calls it The Politics of Friendship, rather than calling it: "Friendship and Fraternity in the Western Canon from Aristotle to Heidegger." Why do people in philosophy departments get hooked to one, two or maybe even three individuals and write paper after paper with their names in the titles? For all the reasons cited above no doubt. People outside philosophy, sociologists (not the policy-driven kind) for example, look to philosophy for inspiration in tackling a specific issue or subject, but usually lack the time for proper engagement - social theory and philosophy/thought have never really come to terms with one another. I see people moving towards literary expression on the one side and maths on the other.
How the hell are people who believe it's important to do a huge amount of time-consuming research, read a lot of books, reflect on difficult philosophical, empirical and theoretical issues to produce intellegent knowledge expected to produce anything today? Something tells me that the question of finding a voice in today's academia is completely inseperable from the issue of academia's future.
...and I wish it was not.
