Desire and Fate
The Triumph of the Therapeutic could not exist without the parallel Triumph of the Histrionic. For outside the theater and the opera, the histrionic used to be largely the monopoly of politicians and preachers, in particular of the populist and totalitarian kind. In our age, however, the histrionic has become a mass phenomenon. That it is the lifeblood of social media should be obvious, since in cyberspace hyperbole rules, be it of the political or of the pop cultural sort, that is, whether focused on Gaza or on Taylor Swift. But to blame social media for this is nothing more than the proverbial shooting of the messenger. For the contemporary desire of so many in Western society (and increasingly in non-Western societies as well) to recast themselves virtually at will can only be credible in the context of the performative. This is why Judith Butler’s work has been so influential and why, despite its sticky sentimentalities, it is so important: it has popularized the idea that there are no fixed identities but instead various performances, some repressive, others emancipatory. It is Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage”, but without Shakespeare’s realism about inevitable decline and final oblivion, or his cold realism about people being merely players awaiting their exits. In the sunny uplands of Butler’s vision, each individual is not a ‘mere’ anything, but rather always the star of the show, but with no producer or casting director needed. To the contrary, each individual is the “actor-manager,” as my father put it in his The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “of his own infinitely changeable identities.” By comparison, Andy Warhol’s line that we would all be famous for fifteen minutes seems the height of sober caution. He did not see that people wanted more than to be famous, more than to able to communicate directly with their gods; instead, they wanted to be able to define themselves at will, which, when you think about it, is nothing short of a way of conferring godlike powers to oneself. The move is radical: from ‘truth’ to ‘my truth’, and from the vicissitudes of fate to the supremacy of desire. Fate, though, will have the last word; it always has, and it always will. If on nothing else, on that we can depend.