“Everyday thinking” — if such a thing really exists — operates in a middle zone of the abstract and concrete.

Hometown: Gainesville, Fla.

Education: Bachelor’s of arts and master’s of arts from the University of Florida; doctorate from New York University

What is your area of expertise?

My doctoral degree was in the field of performance studies, and my research and teaching focus on modern and postmodern forms of theater and performance, performance theory, new media, and civil disobedience.

Not to turn you into a solicitor of thought, but what do students get out of your area of studies that they wouldn’t get out of any other?

Performance studies is a relatively new field, so most students have not studied performance, even in the area of drama and theater. Cultural performance includes theater, but also performance art, ritual, practices of everyday life (e.g., performances of identity), sports and other forms of expressive behavior.

It seems the longer someone is educated, the more they’re drawn to the abstract in art and thought. Do you agree? Is a type of deprogramming necessary for us before we can engage in critical thinking?

Yes and no. More and more education usually means increasing specialization. This can lead to greater abstraction, but it could mean getting more and more concrete (e.g., civil engineers actually study the behavior of polymer modified concrete). For me, critical thinking requires both the abstract and the concrete, but more importantly, it requires a certain commitment to questioning and creating. "Everyday thinking" — if such a thing really exists — operates in a middle zone of the abstract and concrete, far removed from say, philosophy and physics, but nonetheless using concepts and practices closely connected with these fields (e.g., identity and gravity). Critical thinking, for me, requires one to explore the presuppositions, biases, and blind spots of one's ideas and everyday life experience, to ask "what program(s) am I operating and which ones are operating me?"

What’s a concept, theory or idea you’ve come across in your studies that you feel others should know?

One idea is "desiring-machines," developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. "Desiring-machines" operate across different systems — social, psychological and biological; political, economic, technological and cultural; and organic, geological and cosmic — which means that desire is not limited to individual bodies but pervades the universe. Nature and history are themselves machinic, which means they can be understood in terms of flows and breaks. Closer to home: desiring-machines allow us to ask: What systems do I operate across (and/or operate across me)? For example: school machine, family machine, work machine, nation-state machine, gender-machine, race-machine, weather-machine. When and why do they come into conflict, harmonize, produce strange effects?

With technology expanding venues for communication with one another, are Americans getting closer or are we isolating ourselves more than ever?

Both: I think communication has always involved technology: writing is obviously a technology but we often forget that, and even spoken language can be understood as an external medium which we must train our ears and mouth to tune in and use. William S. Burroughs once wrote: "Language is a virus from outer space." With TV and the Web, Americans have gotten closer to each other and to other nations — and also more distant. The near is farther (e.g., we can project our selves and values around the world) and the far nearer (e.g., that world comes to our living rooms and desktops). What's really changed is the speed of such "hithering and thithering." What we'll do with this development is an open question.

I know a lot students who enroll as art majors and end up abandoning their passions in fear of not getting a job, or not making money, when they graduate. Have you seen this trend at all? What do you think of it?

The figure of the "starving artist" is an old one, I'm afraid. Being an artist is a labor of love, and if you don't love it, you'll labor somewhere else (unless you've got a trust fund supporting you.) Many artists work day jobs to support their nights and weekends of art-making. Kafka worked for an insurance company by day and wrote twisted allegories about bureaucracy at night, the day and night feeding back on one another to produce a twilight zone of texts. I lived in NYC when the Web industry started and lots of artists moved into new media, where they could be creative (to some extent) and make a good living: I myself was a "creative," working as a writer and information architect (designing the structure of web pages). So if there is a trend, it may be that artists are getting more savvy about having their cake and eating it too, figuring out better ways to live off their labor of love.

Being an educator, you get to see future generations in a raw form. Judging from your time with students, what do you think this country’s future might hold?

It's interesting that so many of your questions come back to "this country," because I think the future requires thinking both above and below the nation-state: above in terms of global networks, below in terms of local networks. This is related to the question of near and far discussed above. I teach a course on civil disobedience which explores practices of global civil disobedience that nonetheless entail local sites of resistance. One thing that many American students — and not just students — face is the simultaneous feeling that "there's no problem" and "there're too many problems." Many folks don't feel any pressing local problem yet realize that there are many global or distant problems that need attention. Particularly troubling is the sense that one's local pleasures (e.g., driving an SUV or sports car) may be intimately related to distant pains (e.g., war in Iraq, global terrorism). One very present challenge of the future is how to make such connections and then what to do with them.

Judging from the last election there seems to be growing conservatism in this country. What do you think about that?

Conversativism has been rising since the 1980s, and today I think that conservatives and the progressives have traded places to some extent, not only in terms of who controls the federal government but also at the level of rhetoric and ideas. Since at least 1994, conservatives have become "progressive," laying hold of the claim to new ideas (think "Republican Revolution"), while progressives have had to adopt "conservative" rhetoric as they try to conserve such achievements as the New Deal and the Bill of Rights. Given the current political scandals of House Majority Leader Tom Delay, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and top White House staff in the Plame affair, the Democrats may have a chance to reclaim their own progressive agenda, but to do so, they'll need to either come up with truly new ideas or new ways to argue for the value of their old ones.

What music have you been listening to?

Covers, strange covers. Examples: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by The Bad Plus; "Desperado" by The Langley Schools Music Project; "What Goes On" by The Meat Purveyors; "Smoke on the Water" by Pat Boone; "Johnny B. Goode" by The Sex Pistols; Barber's "Adiago for Strings" by William Orbit; and "The Star Spangled Banner" by Hendrix.

What’s a film everyone should see at least once in their life?

One that just showed at the UWM Union: “After Life” by Hirokazu Kore-eda: the premise is that after you die, you get to select one memory that will be staged and filmed and then become your eternal memory. Which reminds me: “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”

Are there stupid questions? Explain.

Of course: what a stupid question! Seriously, "stupid questions" are contextual: good questions can seem dumb in a given context. Conversely, dumb questions can sometimes be really smart, especially if they expose unquestioned assumptions.

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