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??