They say home is where the heart is, and maybe that's why such a large quantity of academic writing lacks heart. Home is a private social space that is part of a much broader social network. It is the privatization of home that often separates it from scientific or intellectual "fields"- places and times that have been canonized into academia proper. High clout intellectuals such as Freud and Marx have touched on home in their writing, but always in regard to the learning of broad social behaviors through familial relationships. Without family, home is a place of solitude. It is the one space that allows for unhindered expression because there is no audience, and this is probably the reason that I prefer to do the majority of my writing from home.
The institutionalization of proper intellectual and scientific fields means that it becomes necessary to travel away from the home in order to learn empirically about the field of one's choosing. Research is conducted in accordance with normed academic behavior so that credibility can be attained. I have never felt the need to travel for any intellectual endeavor- I would much rather travel for pleasure. At this point, there has been nothing for me outside of reading and personal expression and it is probably for that reason that my writing has become abstract over time and probably difficult to read. If I could back up everything I say with concrete empirical research, perhaps it would improve my writing but I find it difficult to imagine that it would increase my passion. My heart is at home, and so is my writing.
3 comments:
Amir
Your meditations about home and scholarship reminds me of Samuel Johnson's quip,"Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see." Luckily, many writers do just fine writing at home even if they write about places they have never been. Like you, my own writing have never required anything like real "field research," but I wonder if travel writing can make use of the day-trip excursions or even a trip to the post office. Maybe I'm stretching it a bit.
To take a contrary turn, I do think my own attachments to home betrayed a wanderlust, an penchant for falling in love with other places, especially if I stay long enough to create that feeling I think you touch on.
Amir, I am quite interested in this statement: "High clout intellectuals such as Freud and Marx have touched on home in their writing, but always in regard to the learning of broad social behaviors through familial relationships." I wonder what examples you are thinking of here. Also, this would be an excellent point of inquiry for other writers/thinkers, as well.
I think academic writing is trending toward putting the heart back into it. So much criticism in the last 20 years or so was weighed down with a perceived need to obfuscate-to-compete that yeah, the personal or the heart was written right out of it. But I think newer scholars are trying to put some heart and soul into their work, and I think that the other trend toward interdisciplinary work has a bit of "trying to find a home" in it.
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