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?