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.