Art class: how to creat your own sense, or, thanks forever to my admired professor Mike, dressed up as good as it gets!

Mariana: ...taking the opportunity, if you don't mind...What do you answer to your students when they ask you (if they do) about the practices of non-essentialist thought? I mean, where do we find a sense (meaning objective) to our lives then? How not to fall into the relativism black hole, or should we? My students always talk about "real life", food, poverty, power and so...

Shapiro: there's no one way to answer those who want to resist non-essentialist thought. MY answer is that to recognize that there is no one place from which the life world can be validated is to recognize that the meaning of YOUR life is up to you. I found - once I fully gave up on any idea of transcendent and/or stable meaning that what life means is open to practices of negotiation, both between and within selves. That is of course hard work, but such "work" is what makes life exciting and worth living. Why live a life that someone else has invented, institutionalized, and then covered over with false assurances? And, further, why not invite every one into a life of shared invention rather than shared ritual?

somewhere in 2007