This time it's personal...

I have little time for much blog writing at the moment, but the response on Glen's page about writing in a personal style and the business of blogging has prompted me into making a few brief comments here of my own. First of all, I was extremely surprised that Glen received attack for referring to the concept of the "personal is political" as if it was a defunct concept, no longer relevant or worthy of attention in contemporary culture or in academic writing. It is even more important precisely because this characterises a lot of what is being written in academia in the moment. This informative article by Anne Brewster in the most recent edition of Australian Humanities Review provides a sound definition for the undeniable growth of what has been named the "personal turn":

"The personal turn can be seen as part of a trajectory, from the 1980s onwards, of the humanities and social sciences's growing interest in experience and memory, especially that of minoritarian constituencies—such as working class subcultures, women, youth, and racial and ethnic minorities. During the 1980s and 1990s there was also an expansion of writing investigating renovated ethnographical methodologies, which sought to develop new ethical practices of embodied knowledge production. Some of the work in this broad field drew on personal narratives in an effort to deconstruct the binaries between public and private memory, between 'objective' and subjective modes of discourse and between specialized knowledges and everyday life."

It's a trajectory that comes straight from post-structuralism, and perhaps especially (at least, with regard to Australian feminist fictocritical experiments) from the psych et po movement in Paris in the 1970s, writers such as Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva. A lot of what I'm reading for my thesis at the moment fits into this "personal turn" Brewster specifies, and at the moment this means the interdisciplinary work that has been published on travel and cinema taken from such fields as feminism psychoanalysis cinema geography architecture tourism history anthropology, books that include Giuliana Bruno's wonderfully-written Atlas of Emotion and Sam Rohdie's work on geography, modernism and cinema, Promised Lands, that I have blogged about before. Such works are quick to establish connections between the tour and the personal - in both texts mentioned, the "tour" becomes the central organising structure. Perhaps the popularity of the personal in these texts is partly because form and content align and so it is a narratological strategy that allows an alternative, non-linear "tour" against the usual paradigms of cinema studies and tourism studies that are most often inappropriate on their own for thinking through and developing any new, rupturing concepts.

For me, one of the most interesting aspects about the rise of blog culture is that it fits neatly into this trajectory of the personal turn in academic writing. If academic blogs start to become more and more common as they certainly seem to be becoming so, and if they continue to inspire more "personal" (I keep wanting to use quotation marks here) styles of writing, then of course this prevalence in turn will begin to raise a whole new set of questions about the political or ethical value of utilising and sustaining such personal discourses. If one can currently posit that the personal voice in intellectual writing still provokes speculation upon the current epistemological practices of culture and society because of its ability to textually defamiliarise (a concept that Brewster touches upon and one that remains a concept of eternal return for almost all of my thoughts on politics and writing), what happens when the shock of this style wears off? If the personal voice is thoroughly absorbed or integrated into academic writing, will the personal simply become part of the latest form of self-promotion? Then again, whatever meaning is currently attached to this idea of the "personal" is unstable and is likely to reformulate, and so there is a further question that needs to be asked: if blog writing and the personal voice become commonplace, what indeed will the personal become?

Anyway, enough unanswerable questions for now - I meant it about not having much time to write at the moment! But to finish, anyone who hasn't read it already should read this article by Ian Cook that I'm very grateful to my lovely housemate for discovering and passing on to me on the weekend. Cook began to write his doctorate in Geography at Bristol University that was "supposed to trace connections between the retailing of one kind of fresh tropical fruit which was being sold by the major British supermarket chains in the early 1990s," which ended up turning into an autobiographical account of the process of writing his dissertation and the pitfalls of the British academic establishment. This article (the director's cut!) shows us how very brave and political the process of combining the personal with academic writing can still be.