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!/?)