passion projects

 Yesterday, I read some excerpts from Melanie Micir's The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives for an undisciplining book club with The Space Between Society. We had a lovely conversation about critical archive studies, the current destruction of cultural archives in Gaza, and the various difficulties of doing archival work. I wanted to do more archival work for my dissertation project, but it never quite worked out for various reasons (money, travel, time, covid, archival permissions etc.), but I am planning this course for the summer semester that has students look at some different digital archives. Our discussion got me thinking a bit more about how to have students consider both the ethics and institutional aspects of archives as well as some of the more theoretical discussions of how to approach gaps in the archive and our relationships to the past. 

I bring it up here, however, because I was really taken with Micir's explanation of her term "passion project." 

A passion project is work that its practitioner undertakes for a reason other than professional duty or immediate gain...The passion project is work that comes at personal cost without the guarantee of a social reward; it is sacrifice that leads to no certain redemption. To undertake a passion project is often to move outside of one's field of expertise or specialization, to labor in a foreign land and to do so for love. It is to pursue desire over practicality, affect over intellect, amateurism over professionalism. It is work in the service of unreasonable pursuits: memory, legacy, the future world. The passion project is a promise to oneself or another that begins in private but continues in an imagined public. And as it originates at that scale, its ultimate goal is an intimate one. This project will, in essence, matter because it matters to this intimate, maybe even impossible, audience. And it is perhaps the unavoidable tragedy of the passion project that so many of them remain unfinished. Because they exist outside the lines of ordinary genres, because they strive toward an ethereal goal, because they are frequently last on the existential bucket list, they are often left behind unassembled, askew, incomplete, or unpublished. But even as these projects eschew world-historical ambitions, the purity of their conception lends them a power and potentiality absent from other, earlier works. (Micir 14-15)

I know that Micir is describing the archiving and cataloguing projects of the modernist writers she is looking at (people like Radclyffe Hall, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Djuna Barnes), but this felt like a vision of academic work that I needed right now. I tried to explain to my fellow book club attendees--all much further in their much more secure academic careers--the excitement I felt at the idea of the value of a passion project. In the haze of another slog on the academic job market, it's becoming increasingly more difficult to imagine that I will have an academic career and if I do it probably won't be the research focused one I had imagined. Maybe my dissertation will turn out to be only a passion project. Maybe the future will hold many more passion projects. And maybe there's some freedom in that. The freedom for something to be unfinished. The freedom of intimacy. The freedom of experimentation with genre, form, style. All things that a traditional academic career might not allow. And of course, life is not such an easy/or. I will hopefully get a job of some sort. Maybe it will involve research, maybe it won't. But I find power in the mental re-organization of my research interests as passion projects. I love the idea that there's always the passion project there waiting for me when I get tired of waiting on the professional world to find a space for me. Instead, and at least for now, here's to unreasonable pursuits!