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!/?)