On Art and the Self?

Stasis. Static. Image. Icon. Effigy. Form. Structure. The language of aesthetics is stuffed with the utopia of immutability. Something about art makes things frozen, and therefore stable, and therefore both attractive and unreal. I am struck by this.

I am struck by Joe Roach’s concepts of surrogation and effigy, and I wonder if they are relevant not just to cultural studies but to identity theory. Do we only know ourselves as images? Are we attracted to the theater because it dramatizes the process by which the fragmented self (actor) is transformed into a stable essential self (character, form, effigy)? Do we really ever “know” someone, or for that matter ourselves, except as fictionally stable entities?

I think about Derrida (and Foucault, Lacan, et. al.)’s discovery of the slipper signifier and the resulting problem of the unstable, fragmented self. I wonder if, by turning Saussurean semiotics into a dramatic ficture, he has turned life into theater. For, indeed, all meaning, it would seem, is but the occupation of a theatrical role, since every signifier defers its meaning except in which the moment that meaning is cohered for use. Meaning is made. We can only know things, including ourselves, as stable, and therefore as theatrically (or aesthetically?) fictive. That’s the only way we can function (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche: “The best life is lived aesthetically”).

When we ask, “What is the meaning of life?,” we’re looking for the transcendental signifier, to turn theatre into life (hence the anti-theatrical, Platonic prejudice: We don’t like believe that the things we know are mere shadows on a wall). To accept the “truths” of deconstruction is to accept that all being is role-playing, theatre.

Is this part of what’s so hard about being oneself? We are asked, from a young age, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” What is being asked is not what do you want to do, but rather what effigy/essential form one would like to occupy. I like the word “occupy” because it suggests temporaneity—we can’t be there forever. And this is what’s so hard about our lives, that we never “live up” to the role-icons we create for ourselves. The entire project is faulty, of course, but also a part of having a human psyche, and we love celebrities because they seem to have “made it”—to have made successful effigies for themselves. Except, of course, all celebrities feel they don’t “live up” to their own effigies—hence the drugs and the psychic breakdowns and the need for radical privacy, etc.

Musical theatre (and music generally) offers transcendence: A fictive world in which theatre is life and life is theatre? A fictive world in which fragment human beings can rise the level of souls, effigies, stable selves?

Stasis and Esthetics

From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin, 1964), pgs 204–206

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.

…A girl got into a hansom a few days ago, he went on, in London. She was on her way to meet her mother whom she had not seen for many years. At the corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the window of the hansom in the shape of a star. A long fine needle of the shivered glass pierced her heart. She died on the instant. The reporter called it a tragic death. It is not. It is remote from terror and pity according to the terms of my definitions.

…You see I use the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to posses, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

…The desire and loathing excited by improper esthetic means are really unesthetic emotions not only because they are kinetic in character but also because they are not more than physical. Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye.

…Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty.

…Rhythm is the first formal esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part.

…We are right to speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand—that is art.

On What I'm Doing Here

After I presented my paper at ATHE today, on the Illusion of Presence in the Musical Theatre, my dear friend and colleague Joseph Cermatori asked me a lot of really important questions. Given that he’s way smarter than me, a lot of what he was trying to say flew past me, though a few things I remember he mentioned:
• My paper argues that there is something significant about the switch back and forth between speech and song in the musical that is different from a continuous one or the other, but baroque theory suggests otherwise – read Mark Franco and also Matt Wilson-Smith’s chapter on Brecht in his Total Work of Art
• I really need to spell out my argument in terms of form. Bring Pirandello front and center
• Importance of interacting with the neo-Platonists. Alain Badiou, Martha Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, etc

I wonder if perhaps, the larger project here really is an intervention in philosophy, not just in theatre and performance studies. I think I have a broad view of all the fields I’ve been immersed in—queer theory, musicology and reception, performance studies, twentieth-century continental philosophy, theatre history criticism—and find the very idea of essential, stable, self-present form as a problem/unifier among all these differences. Maybe my really big argument. Like, my intervention in the Humanities Field at large, is an investigation into the role of form in shaping our lives, perceptions, epistemologies, identities, experiences, etc. I disagree with Derrida that the human species is capable of, at some indeterminate future, being able to live without metaphysics, and without need to relate to the world in terms of binaries and essentially self-present language, subjects, etc. I disagree—mostly based on experience and intuition, not on empiricism—and I think the implications of this are quite large. I think we need to rethink our relationship to essentialism, as something we have to live with, as the only way we can make sense of the world. Implications for:
•Joe Roach’s theory of surrogation – the very possibility of a “copy” or an “original” necessitates a “form” that must be filled or emptied but can never be erased; we can’t live without it
•Realism: Is realism really so inherently conservative and evil as Barthes and Lyotard make it out to be?
•Musical theatre and stardom and celebrity (and for that matter RELIGION and ETHICS)
•The anti-theatrical prejudice, and (neo)-Platonism
•Activism and politics (how different are my theories from Gayatri Spivak’s?)
•Performance studies: Is not this field an attempt to get around Derrida’s argument that all meaning is deferred meaning, by instead articulating modes of knowing that are embodied and not semiotic/linguistic? But isn’t the very idea of a form to be
“per” fundamental to Performance Studies itself?
•is Derrida the end of philosophy? Is Performance Studies an attempt to replace philosophy by going around but not through it?
•The question: Are there ways to make meaning without sign systems? If so, this is very important to know.

On Reading Louis Menand's "The Metaphysical Club"

What a stroke of fortune that I read this book, which I probably wouldn’t have touched for years if I hadn’t been home sick and in need of something to hold my attention. I am moved by both the accomplishment of Menand’s book and by the philosophy of pragmatism, which is its main subject.

On the book…

Menand’s book is maybe one of the first great models I’ve encountered of how intellectual history can work as scholarship. That he is able to weave a story of intellectual influences and rivalries over nearly a century, and clearly articulate complex philosophical nuances and make sweeping assertions about the way American cultural thought became modern, all without ever being general or glossing over details, is stunning. I’m frankly humbled that I could ever compile and process the amount of research he clearly needed to do to write the book.

I remember Chris Grobe and his (now ex-)girlfriend Michaela discussing Greenblatt-style New Historicism, and complaining about how it led to lazy scholarship in which the existing of a particularly engineered map or cultural object on one side of the continent can be seen to justify and explain an otherwise unrelated cultural object on the other side of the continent. Anyway, while Menand’s work is historicist in a general sense (it’s not a work of literary criticism), he shows how the influence of biographical, cultural, and historical context can be traced precisely and without generalizations. He literally shows how the terms of an argument John Dewey, say, had with Jane Addams about “antagonisms” reappeared twenty years later in a philosophical treatise he wrote, showing without room for skepticism that that arguing actually made a substantive difference in his thinking and his ultimate philosophy. That’s amazing.

What’s more, content meets form, as Menand essentially bases his work on pragmatist principles. His implicit argument is that pragmatist philosophy is no more exempt than any other belief system from the principle that all ideologies are derived from cultural need, rather the other way around (as Menand summarizes: “First we decide, then we deduce”). By showing why pragmatism was born in its particular social, historical, and biographical context, Menand gives credence to the philosophy itself, arguing that all ideologies are contingent, and that that’s okay.

A downside is that in being exhaustive, the book is at times exhausting. Menand complex web demands his primary mode to be that of discursiveness: Three pages on one thinker leads to three pages on another, five pages on another, two pages on another, all without a clear sense of where he’s going. Menand usually ties his various strands loosely together by the end of each chapter, but it’s not until the last couple chapters of the entire book — starting around page 350 or so — that he actually ties all of his work together and explains just what exactly pragmatism is. It’s a hugely rewarding pay-off, inspirational in its accomplishment, but it takes a long time to get there. And, as a corollary, since the book is designed for a general audience, to be read straight through, it doesn’t have the advantage of being easily skimmable, like most academic books (read the Intro, visit the chapters that are relevant to your interest, done). So, you really have to stick with Menand. But, if you’re willing, the results are rewarding. I can’t imagine a better introduction to American pragmatist philosophy than this.

On Pragmatism…

I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this philosophical movement before. How fascinating. On the one hand, I can see how it can be especially exciting and invigorating, in that it reconciles the individual, psychological, and cultural need for belief with the maxim that external reality is inaccessible at best.

I will never forget the letter I wrote, or tried to write, to the bishop of the catholic diocese to which I was about to be confirmed. My opening sentence read something like: “I don’t know if there is in fact a God out there watching over us, but I do know that the belief in such a God, that the faith in Christ’s love, has benefits that justify that faith in themselves. Believing in Chris helps me to get through the day, and so long as religion helps us to get through the day, to live better with each other, to be loving and tolerant and all that, then I am pleased to be confirmed a Catholic.” I’m paraphrasing because I lost the original letter and, more important, my parents forced me to rewrite anyway because they were afraid I would offend the bishop.

Still, I’m seeing in pragmatist principles a justification of the very position I took that day as a youngster contemplating the value of religion, writing to the pope. I see also a response to the questions I’ve been mulling over for the past few months: In the face of modern and postmodern philosophy, and the realities of modern and postmodern life, how do we get through the day? Does philosophy help us or hurt us in that endeavor? In a world in which there is no objective truth, objective value, stable identity, or general teleology—on what basis do any of us act? I called the inability to act, in an earlier blog entry, the experience of the suffering spectator, with which I identify Nietzsche’s angst.

Pragmatism seems to complement Nietzsche’s frustrated assertion that all philosophies are merely the prejudices of individuals. Where that discovery drove Nietzsche’s nuts, it seems to calm and even empower the pragmatists, because it gives license to individual ideologizing. Furthermore, it justifies a pluralist democracy in which many, varied, often opposing ideas are allowed to coexist and, not compete, so much as complement and enrich the possibilities of human prosperity.

At the same time, as Menand acknowledges on page 375, pragmatism still, ultimately, leaves us empty. In asserting that we should feel free to embrace whatever ideologies work for us, it doesn’t give any guidance to determine what “works for us” means. Pragmatism discredits metaphysics, but it still leaves behind a general determining factor for all action and all belief, but it leaves that determining factor ambiguous and shadowed. It leaves us to the Judith Butler question: What does it mean, after all, to thrive?

I of course don’t know how to fill in the blank, or if it’s necessary to do so, but I suspect that pragmatist philosophy does not account for a human individual and cultural need for metaphysics, a need to believe that there are objective truths and values worth dying for. If for nothing else, we need them to turn to when the difficulty of actually making a decision proves too difficult. I suspect it goes even deeper than that: We need to have stable identities, stable truths, stable values, and teleologies, or perhaps at least the potential for all these things, in order to act in the world at all.

The election of Barack Obama, whose inaugural address turned on the words, “These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history,” lends truth to this credence. We elected Barack Obama because we needed to believe again. And, since the pragmatists were generally distasteful of passionate belief, of holding onto our ideologies as though they were lifeboats from the heavens (rather than tools from the workshop), I don’t know how they would feel about Obama Mania, and I don’t know how they would account for the general morass of the 21st century.

Rethinking Postmodernism

This rehashes some of what I said in my last note, and it’s also influenced by Terry Eagleton’s The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction, which I’m halfway through right now. I’m clarifying my position, I think, on postmodernism and post-structuralism. It’s not that I feel these theories and cultural attitudes need somehow to be resurrected. I feel that they have created a problem, not just for philosophy but for our culture, and for the role of the humanities in that culture. The problem is that the deconstructionists and post-structuralists have finally smashed all hope for objective truth, deep meaning, grand narratives and illusions. They’ve cut so deep they’ve even erased the idea of the self as a unitary stable being. They’ve killed metaphysics, and they’ve killed the self. No God. No Earth. No us. Just language and culture, and fiction.

They’ve created this crater of meaning because, I think they believed, it would free us from the constrictions and the injustices inevitably created by all grand narratives, and all institutions (literal and metaphorical) that support them. And there is a great deal to be said for the validity of such a project.

Where they have failed us, I feel, is that they have not offered us any advice on what to do when we’re free, of how to live as free people. Sure, now we’re free of all illusions, but it is illusions (O’Neill: pipe dreams) that permit us to move forward and to act in the world, to believe that our lives are worth living. I fear they’ve, quite without intending to, finally cleared the way for nihilism to sweep the world.

HOWEVER, the problem with the post-structuralists is that they’re right. Or at least, they’ve yet to be seriously disproven. Ammended, sure. Abhorred, sure. But disproven? Not yet. And I think it would be unwise for the intellectual community to ignore or put aside Foucault and Derrida simply because the implications of their work are, as I’ve said, discomforting at best.

I think what we need—or, I should say, I think what I need, and I’m just going to assume everyone else does too—is a revival of the existentialist movements. In general, we need a revival of the concern with how to live that informed Nietzsche’s work, and the American pragmatists’, and the existentialists, and others besides. It seems to me that these questions of how to survive inside the ontological black hole of modernity was of much greater concern to philosophers—and playwrights (not so much other artists of other mediums?)—in the first half of the twentieth century than in the second. Maybe because everyone what post-structuralist crazy. But now it’s time to go back and ask the question of how we can move forward and make our way in a Godless, narrative-less world.

This sounds so pretentious, but I think that the underlying project of my work/career may be, if not to find that solution (I’d love to, but something tells me I may never be equipped), at least to clarify the problem, and to bring the academic community’s attention to it, and to demand solutions from artists and from academics.

ENOUGH with celebrating meaninglessness. ENOUGH with placing all art that troubles meaning on a great pedestal, and all art that reifies and suggests and confirms meaning in the “lowbrow” category. FUCK YOU to Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman and the fucking German postdramatic directors. Their time is done. There are new questions to ask in the wake of what they and their pet philosophers have done to our culture, and that is, what now?

[it could be that Elinor Fuchs’s observation that the postdramatic may be on the wane in Germany is an indication that at least certain Western culture makers are already coming to this conclusion]

As a side note or illustration, I saw Judith Butler give a talk at Yale, called “What Does Gender Want of Me?,” back in April. The speech was a lengthy and obscure argument with a French theorist I’d never heard of whose book, which she was arguing against, hadn’t even been published yet. Anyway, after it was over, she took questions from the audience and was very generous (and, surprisingly, clear and accessible) in her answers. One of the questions involved transsexualism and the value of surgery. Butler was arguing that the question of one’s gender-location is ongoing for every one of us, and that surgery does not solve that problem or that questioning process. She said that the basis for any decision about surgery, or any decision about determining self-identity, is to do what makes one “thrive.”

“Thrive.” What does that mean? Suddenly the deep purpose of Butler’s entire work on gender, its social and personal and psychological value, opened itself up. What does Judith Butler want of me? She wants me to thrive.

But Butler never offered a theoretical explanation of the term. What does it mean, after all, to “thrive”? I wanted to ask her but didn’t get the chance, but it seems to me the most important question to ask of her and all philosophers who employ post-structuralist methods and views. What does it mean to thrive??

Another note from 4/7/2009

I must remember that my own work on the theatre and philosophy must acknowledge and respond to the fact that I learn as much, or more, about philosophy and how to live from, say, Pirandello or Kushner or Chekhov, as I do from reading theory, philosophy, history, etc. One possible question for study could be, then, how do I learn differently in the theatre from nonfiction theory/philosophy books?

4/7/2009: Thoughts While Sitting in Jury Duty and Reading Pirandello's "Henry IV"

How is it possible to live in a world where it is impossible to know? This must be the great question of drama in the 21st century. The theatre today must not simply try to present new knowledges or arguments without acknowledging that all stable meaning is inherently impossible (this is most “social” or “political” drama). Nor must it take as it entire task to deconstruct the possibility of stable meaning, to destroy the comforts we find in knowledge/meaning, without simultaneously acknowledging and accounting for the suffering that being bereft of the chance for meaning causes. This is the flaw of much of the late avant-garde — cf. Richard Foreman’s Astronome. The twenty-first century theatre must inhabit both sides of this dilemma and articulate a way through without denying need or potential.

“There is no theory, but you have to have a theory” is the best articulation of the position of the new theatre that I am yearning for. A theatre that knows the former and also the latter.

For that matter it must be the position of the new journalism, the new art, the new filmmaking, the new music, the new criticism, the new theory, and, certainly, the new philosophy. This should be the project of the 21st century, and maybe beyond—newly enlightened, can we rebuild a new world out of the ashes of the old without simply rehashing the old forms of ignorance?

If Nietzsche’s “God” is finally and irrevocably, or almost irrevocably dead, then, in a way, the project of modernity (from Copernicus forward) is nearing its completion. Hence, perhaps, our instinctive sense of impending apocalypse. Because the question is—what now? And there has never been a more urgent time for our civilization to ask such a question.

The theatre has a special place because it is the place where illusion and truth, flesh and knowledge, and all the contradictions of modern existence are given bodily form. This is why Pirandello was attracted to the theatre. Because there, we have always faced these darkest and most important questions of our time (as we still do in church), and we must return to the theatre to face these questions, to reckon with these dark truths, all over again.

Those who point the way (or, writers who care about this conflict):
Shakespeare
Nietzsche
Chekhov
Pirandello
Kushner
(the Attic Tragedians?)
(O’Neill’s last plays?)

After Reading "Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction" in March 2009

I find Nietzsche riveting, transforming in a way that I have not found in a thinker in a long time. I yearn to read all this books, although this little book has presented, so it seems to be, a great enough summary that I can already begin to feel that I know the man.

What stimulates me about Nietzsche is his awareness and articulation of a particular kind of suffering this is special to the human condition and, particularly, to modernity. That is the suffering of the great philosophical skeptic. The suffering of the one who cannot make meaning, who cannot trust knowledge, who has no metaphysics, who has seen or faced the dark Dionysian truth of existence and its ultimate failure to offer deep or higher meanings. I have always been concerned and interested in this dilemma, but I have never thought of it in terms of suffering before, but it is the suffering that defines Nietzsche’s psyche and informs all his work and ultimately contributed to his insanity (the syphilis surely helped).

There is a necessary corollary that I think would be pertinent to theatre and performance studies, and that is the necessary study of the suffering spectator. It would be useful to reconsider all the studies of audience and spectatorship and consider what kind of spectator is assumed in each of these studies (the Lockean blank-slate spectator? The mass public non-individualistic spectator? Most famously, the feminist spectator?). I wonder if we have considered the role of the theatre for the spectator who is suffering as Nietzsche suffered, the spectator who is undergoing an ontological crisis. For, indeed, isn’t this crisis increasing in magnitude and desperation as 21st century proceeds? That fewer and fewer people are willing to engage the question, to look into the abyss, suggests the growing pandemic of nihilism that threatens, I feel, to engulf us all.

What does the theatre offer the suffering spectator? How does reconsidering the attitude of the audience member force us to rethink our concepts of spectatorship, of performance, of artistic and aesthetic value, of the purpose of the theatre and the responsibilities of the art form?

Book Idea: The Musical Theatre Experience

A super appropriate title that would probably need to be changed in order to be more catchy. But, I was hit with an idea while watching one of Joe Roach’s DeVane Lectures that there are now so many different fields of study that can be brought to bear on the question, what is happening to me when I’m attending a musical theatre performance?, that perhaps rather than try to use one, or force-combine all of them, it might be a really exciting book to spend 3-5 chapters articulating as many ways of understanding the experience of being in the musical theatre.

For example:
1-A study of the musical theatre as a resurgent performance of the myth of presence, bringing to bear presence studies from Derrida through Auslander as well as work by Carolyn Abbate, etc.

2-A study of the musical theatre as intensive ritual, and the role of music in rituals, and how the inactive audience holds the role of the community whose legitimacy is affirmed by the sacrifices made by the actors (the ritual “passengers”) onstage.

3-A study musical theatre as mid-twentieth century cultural form, built upon the cultural and philosophical assumptions of its era in American history.

4-And, I dunno, other angles? Semiotics maybe?

It’s an interesting idea! And a way to deal with the fact that you can’t come up with a Grand Unifying Theory of Musical Theatre even though you desperately want to. Maybe by putting whatever angles you have at your disposal, you’ll find a way to combine them without reducing or dishonoring them. And maybe you’ll begin toward a larger study of how to write scholarship that lacks a thesis but not theory.

Plato lives on, damn him!

On reading A Very Short Introduction to Marx, through p38…

Can we not get away from our own ideals? I am struck, today, by the re-insistence of Platonic idealism in modern philosophy. Peter Singer summarizes Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind in terms of a theory of the “Mind” of which all individual minds are particular manifestations. Then Hegel (via Singer) reads history in terms of the development of the Mind. How is this not Platonic essentialism? The separation of an ideal Mind from the fallen and particularized minds of individuals? Singers describes the Young Hegelians, most notably Feuerbach and Marx, pointing out this problem and trying to bring Hegel “down to earth.” First Feuerbach transforms “Mind” into human consciousness, something less mystical (but still overly universalizing, no?). Marx then gets even further into the dirt by pointing out capitalism as a social force alienating mankind from “itself” – this “itself,” of course, being mankind’s “species-being,” or sense of itself as a unified species. These ideologies, however de-mystified, still separate a universal ideal from a particular manifestation. Is this not problematic? To make things even worse, Singer points out that Marx had very little interest in the proletariat until he realized that the presence of a class of humanity that had nothing else but its “humanity” was the key puzzle piece in his philosophical worldview. He describes—and this quote really gets me—Marx seeing socialist workers in France and writing of them, “The nobility of man shines forth from their toil-worn bodies.” Here again, “the nobility of man”—is this so removed from Hegelian “Mind”—is juxtaposed against, and seeing to heighten in reflection, the individual representation of that man/Mind in the body of the individual worker. He’s not looking at the person, he’s looking at what the person signifies.

And that leads me to semiotics, where the signified pointed to by the signifier “cat” is not a cat is but an idea of cat-ness. Platonic essentialism again.

It would seem that Derridean post-structuralism would be best suited to de-regulating against the Platonism inherent in all this philosophy. Since I don’t know too too much about Derrida I can’t really talk about him yet. But I can talk about Judith Butler, and don’t you think that in her conception of gender performativity she depends upon a kind of radical new idealism? She acknowledges, better than anyone, that essentialism, is a farce, that no individual male is perfectly and unambiguously a “man.” But she says that that individual’s gender identity is performatively constructed by a cultural understand of man-ness. Does this not resituate Platonic idealism within a cultural context? Idealism still exists, but it is a cultural construct, in fact it is the very process of cultural construction itself.

The gap between the ideal and the particular is the fundamental crack in human understanding and, by extension, human philosophy.

Even the Aristotle’s who try to deconstruct Plato (as Feuerbach tried to deconstruct Hegel, and Derrida tried to deconstruct Saussure[?]), wind up simply resituating the place of idealism, not eliminating it completely. Perhaps only those who successfully do eliminate it are the existentialists and nihilists, who leave us with nothing. [but I don’t understand these philosophies yet either, so maybe I’m wrong]

I think that this ideal-particular gap is what I’ve been hitting on in my nascent idea of “lyrical presence” in the musical theatre performer. It’s the idea that we (WHO THE FUCK IS WE?) all want desperately to believe in the possibility of presence—which is, inherently, transcendence—and so we are drawn, as in a spiritual pilgrimage, to processes of representation that that make presence and transcendence feel palpably real, that bridge that gap and bring the ideal into the realm of lived experience.

Perhaps the “ideal” is one of those terms that structures human existence and therefore needs to be problematized (Foucault-style), as Warner does with “public” and Butler with “gender.”

P.S. I think one manifestation of this problem is my ongoing frustration that I CAN’T KNOW EVERYTHING!!! Because it would seem that, if I did know everything, I could distinguish ideals from particulars, I could account for all exceptions to any ideal model. Perhaps if I knew everything, I wouldn’t even need ideals, since the sum of my knowledge would contain all, and therefore only, particulars, and I would enter a new paradigm of knowing by which ideals and models are (somehow, magically) no longer necessary.

Ramblings on the Purpose of My Life

Reading David Richter’s introduction to his "Theorizing Postmodernism" chapter, a cold chill ran through my blood as I read his summary of Jurgen Habermas’s critique of Postmodernism. Mostly because I feel any dismissal of postmodernism is dangerous, but I also register his skepticism of postmodernism’s usefulness as a lens toward the future. Mostly because postmodernism has very little vested interest in futurity. I can’t help but feel like most of the great postmodernist thinkers and artists are working in a negative, not a positive, mode. They’re concerned with proving what is not stable or true—the very position of deconstruction itself is negative. The problem we have now is what to do, and how to operate in the future. I am not sure that anyone has successfully answered this question.

Some thoughts.

I think this is tied into something very deep in myself, which is my anxiety that the most people don’t “get it,” that post-structuralist theories have only built the “ivory tower” higher and higher from the world in which culture operates. No one who has not read the great thinkers can even have a conversation with me about their precepts. This is maybe not entirely true, but it’s a little bit true, and it ties into my anxieties about my family and how to relate to them. I once had great faith in equality and democratic ideals as they applied to writers, that everyone should write what everyone can access. This faith is severely challenged by the idea that any truly invigorating theory is going to be oppositional and, borrowing from Adorno, uncommon.

Michael Warner has successfully deconstructed the idea of the “public intellectual” for me, and his explication of Foucault’s idea of “problematizing” feels very helpful as a mission statement for theory. But, the implicit problem is that, if paradigms and concepts are only problematized for intellectuals, does it really work at all? How do we enact a paradigm shift that is intelligible for a public without dumbing anything down? The goal is to lift the uneducated up, not to push the educated down.

I think I’m looking for a mission statement for my life and work. As a theatre practitioner, I had the tangible goal of putting onstage works of political, cultural, and aesthetic merit. But I realized that as a dramaturg and literary manager my powers were extremely, and perhaps by necessity, limited on this front. And I am not interested in the life of a playwright or a director, and I am not sure that even being an artistic director would so freeing, since the forces of capitalism make the ideal search for the Best Work impossible. And, I couldn’t help ask myself sincerely what “merit” means exactly, and I felt that problem stunting. Still, the forced labor of needing to put something up created a sense of purpose that overpowered my fear of action and my insecurities about the value of any action. I had a goal, however, provisional its telos.

BUT, now I’ve left the theatre world behind, and I’m wondering—what’s the point? If I feel that I’m imbued with a certain set of gifts and interests toward deep thinker, deeper than even the life of the journalist might permit, how do I use those powers to make work of value? Is my work only valuable if it is canonized in David Richter’s fourth, fifth, or sixth editions of The Critical Tradition, for indeed making it onto a syllabus might be the only way for me to be read my future generations? I’ve convinced myself that simply articulated quality aesthetics—what makes a good play versus a bad play, why we should watch certain plays and not others—is a problematic and solipsistic enterprise. I’m much more interested in figuring out how culture works, and using art as a collection of objects to think with, but this does once again call into question the value of art itself, if artworks are nothing more than sociological artifacts, as much as knives and tables, why have a separate sphere of art—or, and I do think this is the other side of the same question, of theory—to begin with?

If art and theory are two means to the same end, which I think is one conclusion of post-structuralist criticism, what is the use of art? And what is that end?

I think that post-structuralists articulate the mechanisms of thought, experience, and epistemology. They articulate a kind of ether from which ideas and norms are formed. Just as Judith Butler’s critique of gender does not render gender immaterial in daily life, and just as the realization that race is a “fiction” does not mean race is unreal or have material consequences, so the understand that all “truth” is “fiction” does not render “truth” unnecessary. I think the point is that we always have truth, and we always have norms, because without them we cannot function as people/society. But, the post-structuralists force us to realize that we cannot validify these truths based on “higher” ideals or a priori values, that the only way we can justify our actions is by their consequences.

I don’t know how we measure the value of such consequences, though, without appealing to such ideals. This is perhaps the trap of post-structuralism, but it is also how we need to situate its principles. Post-structuralism tells us how we think. It does not give us a mandate to stop thinking.

I keep going back to Tony Kushner, “You have to have a theory.” I think he’s right. I’m just not sure what my role in this whole process is, and I’m not sure whether I should care about art or sociology or philosophy or what. I need a theory for my theoretical thought and work. If I can no longer rely on the theory that the show must go on, what’s my theory?

Maybe it would be fun to collect for myself all the critiques of postmodernism and post-structuralism as a way to begin to understand for myself the question what do we do now?(Incidentally, this is the Hamlet Problem, isn't it?) Maybe this would be an interesting dissertation project.

To put the project/question another way, has anyone theorized the relationship between theory and action? It's an important distinction to deconstruct (and RECONSTRUCT!/?)