Losing in the Funhouse? Winning in the Playhouse?

Losing in the Funhouse?

You can lose yourself in an academic funhouse. I went missing as an especially bad student in my first one. I was more interested in playing and fooling about rather than studying. I had some amusing romps and scrapes while being lost in the funhouse and I thought of myself as a funster. I was comically, like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, just a rude, provincial, mechanical, translated into an ass, and then transformed back again into a simple weaver of life stories (Badley, 2013). ¹

At times, the academic funhouse was fun, especially for insiders, cavorting and prancing about in their own games, and entering into the sparky dialogues of the argumentative university (Myerson, 1997). They were serious funsters engaged in a dialogue of ideas. But I wasn’t enthused by the official texts, preferring instead my own subversive choices. I now think that being subversive in a university, or in society generally, is similar to Foucault’s description of critique—the art of voluntary insubordination (see Butler, 2002). I suppose that my seditious selections, mainly novels and plays, would be regarded as useless reading in the academy.

Such reading was useless in terms of my feeble attempts to meet the purposes of the university course. But my reading was purposive in that it generated other ideas and understandings. It helped broaden and educate me. My useless reading, as well as being more interesting than the useful texts, was also a form of playful resistance to the authority of the university. Useless reading was, and is, a continuing experiment with learning about the world and oneself, a form of learning which has its own unauthorized value (see Van Cleave, 2018). Reading useless stories allows us to explore another archipelago within which we can see and learn about ourselves as well as about others (see Rankin, 2017).

As a result of my useless reading and other playful activities, I was almost rusticated—banished from the funhouse—and was virtually defenestrated—kicked through the shiny window of the honors school. So that first foray ended up with the funhouse becoming a flophouse. I was the flop and only just scraped a lucky if lousy degree (see Badley, 2013). Thereafter, I became a college teacher more by accident than intention. I was still more devoted to useless learning than to teaching. Development was more important to me than didactics, personal growth to pedagogy. However, after a little teacher education, I embraced Dewey’s democratic pragmatism, began to encourage learning through reflective doing and dialogue, and did my bit to promote social justice through a “socialism of the intelligence and of the spirit” (see Benson, Harkavy, & Puckett, 2007, pp. 39-40). Dewey even provided me with a justification for the role of funster as he argued that being serious and playful at the same time is the ideal mental condition (see Dewey, 1910/1991). As a funster, I had been actively playful though I had failed to be serious enough.

I wanted, and want, the academic funhouse to be a place where we all learn and speak and teach freely (see Badley, 2009). But soon I realized that universities were becoming more like corporate enterprises. They were abandoning the collegial, turning more managerial, and were importing and embedding the pernicious ideologies of business competition, entrepreneurialism, and surveillance. In the United Kingdom, especially, universities were compelled to accept external research and teaching assessment exercises. Knowledge was becoming another commodity with the funhouse resembling a battlefield where liberal education was losing its struggle against the market and the increasingly neoliberal state (see Shumar, 1997; Badley, 2013).

Managerialism in the university derives from neoliberal convictions about the virtues of capitalism that rewards achievement and punishes failure, especially underperformance. Academics are compensated for research outputs and grants achieved where the rewards (carrots) include pay increases, relief from teaching, and symbolic awards for excellence. One consequence for senior academics is less time and diminished attention for teaching. Punishments (sticks) include absence of rewards, increased teaching loads, and aggressive performance management plus threats of dismissal (the big stick). The collegial university, where academics shared governance, has been replaced by the managerial university with its hierarchy of managers in a pervasive culture of audit, control, intimidation, and surveillance. Upward appraisal, or even critique in Foucault’s sense of voluntary insubordination, is not tolerated. Traces of democracy are hard to discern. Only loyalists are favored with dissenters chastised as malcontents, troublemakers, and subversives. Humanist values of academic freedom, liberal learning, and critical scholarship are continuously threatened in an atmosphere of bullying and staff unhappiness. The managerialists strive for greater efficiency and productivity as well as for their (often dishonest?) quest for better branding, image building, and enhanced reputation (see, for example, West, 2016).

Besides, neoliberalism is flawed in its dominant belief that basic economic principles readily provide models for practical policies which fit every case, even that of the individual university or higher education system. Neoliberals ignore or neglect the particulars of local contexts. The neoliberal mantra of more markets and less government is “a perversion of mainstream economics” as no single blueprint or map or model or recipe fits all. Neoliberals just do not get the economics of good governance for countries, or universities, right and as a result erode cherished values such as democratic deliberation, equality, justice, and social inclusion (see, for example, Rodrik, 2017).

Being a subversive funster becomes less plausible in such an environment. And yet a form of positive subversion is still needed. Academics are, though, occasionally urged to challenge the ascendancy of cynical and antidemocratic tendencies in higher education by defending universities as democratic spheres in which critical and engaged citizenship should be nurtured. Otherwise, we could be accused of retreating from general debate into our own reclusive arcane discourses with their inaccessible concepts and narrow theoretical concerns. There is a real danger that academics could degenerate into a coterie of disengaged professionals. The further risk is that humanistic knowledge and values will be cut out of the academy as it becomes increasingly corporatized and stripped of its democratic functions, a mere training facility for powerful corporations (see Giroux, 2006). Instead, academics and students, in their grave funhouses, should be encouraged to exercise the freedom to question and to speak, to become critical and self-critical but not self-righteous or dogmatic (see Giroux, 2006; Badley, 2009). ²

As subversive skeptics, perhaps, academics should question everything, and challenge the dominant ethics of private property, the market economy, and an elite hierarchy which together promote miseducation rather than education as a medium of liberation. Managerial universities should be exposed as agents of class oppression. Sadly, higher education often treats the powerless working class in a market economy merely as labor costs to be lowered. Contrast this approach with Paulo Freire’s attempt to create a beachhead of liberation to help people take back control of their communities and their own lives (see Francisconi, 2008). What humanist–liberal–pragmatists now need is a reformation of mainstream economics which will rid us of this neocon dominance (see Macfarlane, 2017). ³

Falling Out With the Academic Funhouse

Under neoliberalism, the funhouse was rapidly becoming diminished. Indeed, the funhouse is now more of a managerial and neoliberal doomhouse or gloomhouse. In one public lecture I argued, probably ineffectively, that liberal academics should help the university challenge the worst aspects of managerialism. We should continuously remind ourselves and others that the university is an institution whose core purpose should not be business but education. Of course, universities should be business-like and efficient organizations, but they should not treat students simply as consumers of well-packaged products. We should subvert the excesses of managerialism and neoliberalism by reasserting our free commitment to teaching and learning and by becoming coresearchers with our students (see Badley, 1996). ⁴

Academic subversives, serious funsters, are needed to point out that we have drifted away from merely being market economies into being market societies where knowledge, people, and universities have become more and more marketized (see Sandel, 2012). Buying and selling seems to have become our raison d’être. Democracy’s colleges and universities—the higher education enterprise—might even be characterized as catallaxies as they now comprise agencies, individuals, and organizations in constant competition to set goals and acquire state resources to achieve those aims (see Fox & Johnston, 2017). Academics have been forced to become tellers of impact stories to show and boast their exchange value to the neoliberal state. ⁵

But before I totally fell out with the academic funhouse, I had created or imagined several identities and roles for myself so, in answer to the question, “Who are you?” I could answer, among other personae: Bricoleur, concept-monger, curmudgeon, fabricator, funster, humanist, inquirer, insider, maker, nomad, outsider, pragmatist, reader, reviewer, rewriter, scrabbler, scribbler, scriptor, scrubber, scholar, teacher, textor, weaver (see Badley, 2013). I might now, as a post-academic, present myself mainly as a pragmatic, humanist, bricoleur, a cobbler, and weaver of essays and life stories who nevertheless retains features of the rude, provincial, mechanical I always was. And part of that rudeness is an outsider’s tendency to taunt and an insider’s desire to subvert.

Winning in the Playhouse? ⁶

I am a theatre and nothing more than a theatre (Philip Roth)

Having fallen out with the academic funhouse, I was afraid that I was about to fall out of it. “Falling out with” was a painful enough experience—a continuous quarrel between my serious and playful humanism and its gloomy corporatism. It was as if my form of playful subversion was sinful that led me to be glum about the prospect of falling out of the ruined funhouse. The problem I faced was whether I should jump or wait to be pushed. Was it time to go or should I just stay put? (the dilemma discussed in Pelias, 2016). Should I cling on or should I jump and risk the consequences of the fall?

Despite my disillusion with the managerial university—the funhouse in ruins—I could make a case for clinging on. There were still possibilities of serious playfulness—with keen students, interesting colleagues, stimulating ideas, occasional seminars, or conferences at home and abroad. I opted for a parachute jump, a softened fall before I was actually pushed. I took the offer of early retirement that provided not only a pension but also paid work for 2 days per week. This was fine for a couple of years while I was a dialysis patient but eventually I couldn’t even cope with this. Then came a renal transplant (see Badley, 2013). However, I still wanted to cling on to the wreckage of my academic career. To go along with my renal graft, I needed another transplant, a career extension of sorts, which I could fashion for myself. Soon I found myself in an imagined global playhouse where I could choose, like Roth’s alter ego, a post-academic counterlife (see Roth, 1988).

The global playhouse is first and foremost a theater where I could be my own actor, director, manager, and scriptwriter. Most of all, I could settle down to enjoying what Roth calls an impostor’s life, adopting playacting roles of theatrical self-transformation, using writing as playful hypothesis and imaginative inquiry. In such a playhouse, I could transform life into an act in which I could impersonate what I might best like to be (see Roth, 1988, cited in Badley, 2015). Indeed, Roth sees all human beings as actors, artists, impostors, impersonators, players, and writers, who have no other independent selves. As he claims, “I am a theatre and nothing more than a theatre” (Roth, 1988, p. 325). I, too, want a post-academic counterlife, a post-career extension, especially through writing, an experimental and human adventure in self- and social-criticism (see Badley, 2015). Also, I want my post-academic counterlife in my imagined playhouse to be, at least, a partially winning one.

The Playhouse as (Post-Academic) Freedom

Falling out of and with the academic funhouse means, of course, leaving one (once?) vital place purporting to promote freedom and then needing to find another. When Voltaire exiled himself from France and settled in Switzerland, he claimed he had found a new place from where to speak. He was already a philosophe—a freethinker, a funster—who had tasted the delights of tolerance in visits to Holland and England, his land of liberty. He even proclaimed that “I think and write like a free Englishman” (pp. 97-98) because he valued England’s religious pluralism, its parliamentary government, its trade, its men of letters, and its theater (see Pearson, 2005). I, too, want to use my post-academic space and time, in my imagined playhouse, to think and write like a free Englishman whatever that means in these neoliberal times. Can a free Englishman still hope to be a winner? Can a managerially tainted Englishman still hope to be free?

When he settled outside Geneva in 1755 Voltaire found “a happy place of friendship and freedom far from the Bastille” where he could “speak what I think” and “do as I will” (see Pearson, 2005, pp. 245-246). Calvinist Geneva, however, would not demean itself with an immoral public theater, so Voltaire used his house to “win friends and influence people by the glamour of his theatrical celebrity” with which he eventually produced Candide:

Mirthful and wise, the best of all possible stories, an allegory of life and living that does the work of a hundred bibles and a thousand moral tracts. And does not tell us what to do. For that above all was the objective of Voltaire Almighty: to confer freedom on his readers, the freedom to think and to feel and to speak as we consider fit. By the light of human reason. (see Pearson, 2005, p. 408)

Voltaire used his writing, especially that for the playhouse, to explore and promote his and our freedom to think and feel and speak. While he never did write, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” he did claim “I am a tolerant man, and I consider it a very good thing if people think differently from me” (see Pearson, 2005, p. 409). He would have agreed with Orwell’s view, “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” (quoted in Appignanesi, 2005, p. 1). Voltaire is a major winner in the global playhouse.

Furthermore, he would have fervently supported Nicholas Hytner (former Director of the U.K.’s National Theater) in his view of the theater as a safe place for argument and for extremes of emotion, a secular space demonstrably interested in the fate of man, in this life. For Hytner and Voltaire and many other writers, “nobody has the right not to be offended” and indeed “there is no idea so sacred that it deserves protection from robust artistic attack” (see Hytner, 2005, pp. 40-43). After all, as one British novelist stated, “There is no knowing what we will choose to be offended by next” (Jacobson, 2005, p. 84). Winners are not readily offended. Losers are.

It was not too long ago that Derrida argued for the university to be a place of cerebral fun (an academic funhouse?), a place of free speech and free laughter, a place for the defense of those freedoms. But if the neoliberal university cannot now provide the kind of space for the exercise of free speech, laughter, and satire then there are other spaces for what has been called “lay therapy”: “conversation, or the theatre, or poetry, or dance, the novel, or pop” (Kureshi, 2005, p. 157). One good thing about words and stories and plays is that their effect is incalculable: “talking is a free form, a kind of experiment . . . an act, a kind of performance. It is an actor improvising—which is dangerous and unpredictable—rather than one saying lines which have already been scripted” (Kureshi, 2005, p. 157). And another good thing is that such spaces are both accessible and welcoming even to semi-disillusioned post-academics, especially those gratified by the occasional small victory.

The Playhouse With a Writers’ Room

One important purpose of any playhouse is to produce new plays, new works that represent and reflect the society in which they are performed. As such, theaters represent people reaching out to one another across their own identities, by paying attention to tradition and also by advancing it. But perhaps playhouses, themselves often under threat, need a benevolent state as a “benign enabler” of art, health, and education. And, to enhance its traditions and, especially, to promote new writing, theaters should have their own writers’ rooms. The impact of such national and global theaters would be to cheer everyone up, to restore spirits, to be genuinely collaborative, and to prove that the things we do together have a quality all of their own (see Hare, 2017).

The dream of such playhouses may appear socialistic or utopian to those who take a more market-driven view of society. Why should theaters and writers and actors be subsidized, feather-bedded, and mollycoddled? Surely, if they are good enough and smart enough, they will survive and flourish despite or even because of the rigors of national and international competition. Or will they succumb to the temptation to produce pabulum rather than caviar?

Of course, in my virtual playhouse, I do not have access to a subsidized writers’ room. But I do have a space where I can indulge my own post-academic playfulness, experiment with my own ways of exercising free speech, and pretend, as an impostor, to be actor, director, manager, and scriptwriter. I can imagine myself as a poor man’s post-academic Voltaire: “He was rich, he was free, he was old, and he could do—he must do—exactly what he wanted” (see Pearson, 2005, p. 277). Voltaire, in his own imagined playhouse, could reject drudgery—I had enough of that in my own university days—and embrace the benefits of pleasure in retirement: “Life is too short for reading so many fat tomes one after another. Woe to long dissertations!” (see Pearson, 2005, p. 299). I gave up examining PhD theses a few years ago. My life expectancy is shortening. Fat tomes are not for me.

Furthermore, in Voltaire’s view “books rule the world” so that writing, especially his brilliant satires, was for him the most effective form of action. And through his writing, through his “Ali Baba’s cave of intertextuality” (his bricolage?), he could claim that enlightenment meant getting people to think for themselves, to see through the nonsense that held them in thrall. Readers must reflect and must draw their own conclusions. Ironic then that one of his greatest attempts to communicate with readers, his Dictionnaire philosophique portatif, was shredded and burned by the Swiss public executioner in September 1764 (see Pearson, 2005). I doubt if any of my stuff will ever be important enough to upset the state or its censors. My idea of being a partial winner as a post-academic writer is to produce the odd text which a few other humans around the globe may find interesting or even useful.

The Playhouse as Citizens’ Theater ⁷

The playhouse is a global citizens’ theater. It encourages us fakes and impostors—as managers, directors, writers, actors, spectators—to contribute our own ways of becoming democratically engaged, to speak and write creatively, and to listen attentively to what others are saying. The citizens’ theater becomes successful, becomes a winner, helps us become winners also, when it persuades us to connect hermeneutic listening to, for example, Dewey’s ideas about democracy and freedom, to build understanding through the dialogues created in the playhouse. And “creativity is our greatest need and our greatest hope” leading to the imaginative production of understanding and not just the reproduction of meaning. The playhouse as global citizens’ theater may also be used as a prime example of using emotion and creativity in building understanding in dialogues across difference. We may also see it as a vital and dramatic way of promoting active and even dangerous listening within a working democracy of engaged citizens. Our need for such risky listening, in the playhouse and elsewhere, is important because it is others (e.g., actors and writers) who may have what we require to become more thoughtful, feeling, and active citizens (see Garrison, 1996).

The playhouse can test us out, present us with new arguments, experiences and reasons, and help form the mind and will of a democratic community through a process of thoughtful interaction. This theatrical or Deweyan process should help us inform and transform ourselves as citizens and offer us a vision of shared life. Indeed the playhouse should be recognized as an important way of helping us create a deliberative democracy thereby tying the idea of representative government and the role of experts to deliberation among the citizenry. For Dewey, this is the basis for dynamic democratic self-governance and accountability. The playhouse, especially one which never shies away from the presentation of controversial or even offensive themes, is one vital means of creating that democratic ethos which “extends to matters of the mind, heart, and spirit” (see Rogers, 2014, p. 4).

Dewey’s view of democracy was always one of a “task before us.” That task is greatly helped by our becoming fully engaged with deliberation of important issues including those raised in “useless literature” such as novels, poems, and plays. Such active participation in theater, as concerned listeners and spectators, connects with Dewey’s demand for

an interventionist spirit on the part of citizens, even as it cautions humility regarding the outcomes that follow from acting in the world. Reading Dewey puts us in touch with a political sensibility we must continue to cultivate, and which we can never afford to abandon. (see Rogers, 2014, p. 5)

Of course, it is not only the playhouse and the university that champion this broader notion of education and the task before us. The vital civilizing forces of democracy include universities, playhouses, museums, publishing, and the best of broadcasting, for these are “today’s custodians of open inquiry, participation and debate . . . the outreaching engines of modern culture, most deserving of public support” (see Jenkins, 2017, p. 39). And, as Dewey suggested, participation in public can both educate citizens and improve the quality of collective knowledge and understanding as well as change opinions and ways of thinking (see Calhoun, 2013). There is also an argument that the kind of active citizenship called for by Dewey comes with a bonus—“the cure for populism”—and with a rallying cry—“Citizens of the world, wake up. Unveil your eyes, ask questions, use your power” (see Okri, 2018, pp. 1-2). ⁸

Interval: Lazy, Slow, Timeless, and Useless in the Playhouse?

As a post-academic, I am now also a post-worker. After retirement, I worked part-time and then on a more occasional basis for the following 14 years. Much of that post-work was running seminars and workshops for postgraduate students and academics on research topics as well as on research writing. Like many post-academics, I also did some PhD supervision, examined theses, and chaired vivas. I served on the editorial boards of several journals and did my share of refereeing. Throughout, I continued to write and publish articles and presented numerous papers at national and international conferences. I also served as a trustee of Kidney Research UK and set up and chaired its first Patients’ Group. However, advancing decrepitude has now brought most of these activities, especially the traveling, to an end. Perhaps now I might be accused of becoming lazy, slow, timeless, and useless in my post-work phase in the post-academic playhouse.

“Post-work” is an ambivalent term. There are both laudatory and pejorative interpretations. Being in work is, according to some, how we give our lives meaning and how we express our identities: “I’m a professor therefore I know and therefore I am.” Those in work are praised because work enables them to be socially mobile and to display their self-worth. But “as a source of social mobility and self-worth, work increasingly fails even the most educated people—supposedly the system’s winners.” (Beckett, 2018, pp. 9-11) There is also now an unavoidable “crisis of work” brought about by neoliberalism and globalization: some have too much, others too little, for work is poorly distributed; some get only “bullshit jobs”; and many jobs are threatened by automation. However, for some enthusiasts, “post-work” offers attractive promises: a universal basic income gifting us calmer, more equal, more communal, more pleasurable, more thoughtful, more politically engaged, more fulfilled lives—human experience transformed into utopia. A major criticism of this self-righteous version of utopia is that it is a future envisioned by a coterie of academics, artists, and journalists for whom post-work would be little different from the work they have always done (see Beckett, 2018).

Of course, “post-work” might allow post-academics to become even lazier than they are often portrayed—more vacations in their delightful country or seaside retreats as they enjoy their gold-plated pensions. Typically post-academics look forward to indulging themselves in one or more pleasurable practices: more cycling and rambling (biking and hiking) in the countryside, more traveling to exciting countries, more sampling of exotic cuisines, more reading of useless (i.e., nonacademic) literature, more art and craft classes, more yoga, more writing of fiction and poetry, and even more drama for the citizen’s playhouse. These practices always ran counter to the imperatives of the neoliberal university because they slowed down the production of real academic output: research. Furthermore, “these practices are lazy” (Gildersleeve, 2018, p. 1).

Alternatively, these lazy practices (an oxymoronic phrase?) may be regarded not as a sin but as a virtue if they can be seen to engender creativity and confront the neoliberal imperative. Indeed, laziness has been persuasively defined as a form of virtuous political action—that is, as a principled refusal to work or as a dogma of work or as Duchamp’s readymades or work avoidance. The motivation of those supporting such a definition is one of rejecting the conversion of each researcher into homo economicus and calling instead for academicus otiosus as a lazy yet virtuous academic and methodological artist (see Gildersleeve, 2018).

However, this sounds highfalutin to a post-academic, post-worker like me. The argument presented here is that “lazy” academics should not be criticized or dismissed as lethargic but valued instead as political activists who use the opportunities provided by their principled refusal to work—their laziness—to establish specific rights to work and livelihood generally. Academic work—scholarship—should, accordingly, be used to promote the virtues of positive laziness to confront and subvert the neoliberal academy (see Gildersleeve, 2018).

This argument requires readers to accept a (slippery) persuasive definition of laziness that turns it from a pejorative term into a laudatory one. We, as post-academics, don’t have to reject standard lexical definitions of “laziness” to show that we can use our freedom from the constraints of neoliberal-tainted work into creative and positive activities. Reading literature or watching theater for whatever reasons, academic or nonacademic, are not necessarily lazy practices. They may be regarded as “useless” by our one-time corporate managers but their use-value changes once we become post-workers with our own set of priorities. We do not have to regard our previous academic work, unpleasant and restricting though some it might have been, as a form of serfdom or slavery. We may still use our post-academic freedom as an opportunity “to enjoy becoming human in a dynamic assemblage with nature, the arts, recreation, family, and the ability to do nothing” (see Gildersleeve, 2018, p. 4).

The possibilities of laziness laid out by Gildersleeve—political, practical, artistic, and philosophical laziness—distort ordinary language as they conflate what we more often regard as wasteful (laziness) with what we normally regard as praiseworthy (e.g., human rights activism). What Gildersleeve refers to as aspects of “laziness” are instead important opportunities for thoughtful human intervention and improvement. I doubt if a full-time academic writing and publishing articles against the corporatization of the university could be accused of laziness given that such work would require considerable intellectual effort as well a certain degree of moral courage. And, even if some academics adopt a slow professor approach to their work, slowness should not necessarily be equated with laziness. Certainly, academics are managerially pressured to produce more research outputs but most are capable of resisting unreasonable demands.

Pressures and deadlines are, of course, also present in the post-academic world but deadlines are often negotiable and pressures can be lessened. We can become Bartleby who, when asked to perform a certain task, answered “I prefer not to.” We post-academics in our virtual playhouse may enjoy being slow, timeless, and useless and even, at times, being lazy. We can, if we choose, adopt the theatrical role of vagrant or nomad or wanderer. Rather than refer to the “vagrant advance” of one’s professional career (see Geertz, 2000, p. xiii) we might, instead, call our post-academic phase a vagrant retreat.

The Playhouse as Conversation and Critique

As slow, timeless, useless, vagrants, we post-academics can, relatively, safely indulge in our playfulness, play with our research and writing, care less for theory, and be guilt-free. We can luxuriate in the freedoms and opportunities of the global playhouse—to cavort, dance, hector, juggle, mime, rant, and sing—to act, perform, and speak. We can act as major protagonists in vital conversations about the planet we occupy or perform as one of a variety of bit players who have smaller roles to assume: artisans, comics, fools, rude mechanicals, schemers, or villains. And we can speak our lines as demagogues or poets. In the global playhouse, we can become exposers and subverters of the neocon-men who dominate the corporate, managerial, neoliberal, dystopia they have malignly constructed. Our most human roles in that playhouse demand that we confront oppression and speak out on behalf of greater social justice and realizable hope for all (see, for example, Denzin, 2017).

Our seriously playful stance in the global playhouse is one of conversation and critique. Like modern universities, modern playhouses should not endorse existing power, privilege, and social inequality. Instead, they should critique and expose abusive power and privilege and promote social justice. In our post-work global theater, we can and should reject managerial and neoliberal ideology wherever it is manifested in public policy and public institutions, including universities. The post-academic playhouse and its players and writers should be on the side of democracy and social justice by helping us all become more aware and intelligent citizens through dialogue and conversation about our major social and political problems.

Portraying the playhouse as a useful space for such conversation and critique is not a claim that theatrical events, happenings, and performances can guarantee definite improvement in political and social equality and justice. But the playhouse can help us make suggestions for radical action. Here, the idea of the “caring university” might be adapted to describe the “caring theater” where dialogue and elastic conversation could help us repair the corruptions of neoliberalism and help us create a more socially just civilization (see Oakeshott, 1991). We may use the playhouse at least to keep the conversation of an edifying philosophy going even if the suggestions made for change may only be seen and tried out as experiments (see Badley, 2015).

Of course, the playhouse should also be playful. Full of plays. And plays should, occasionally, be fun. All Shakespeare’s tragedies have their fun moments, their comic relief. They have their fools who are often the bravest and wisest of comedians as they dare speak truth to power. Our conversational stance in the global theater should also therefore be playful as well as serious. The theater envisaged here may thus be viewed as another place for critical inquiry through action and words, through playful performance, and through “the relational engagement of bodies, imagination and foolishness” thereby helping “to resist oppressive dominant discourses” of neoliberalism (see Gray & Kontos, 2018, pp. 11-12).

The Playhouse as End-Stage

As the life–play in which we aspire to co-star nears its end, we can all ask the question: What am I then? And provide a provisional answer knowing that all our answers are provisional: just an aging player on a crumbling stage—another human actor in a disintegrating playhouse. Like Roth’s Everyman, we might end up mumbling that we are also impotently deteriorating, putting up with terminal sadness, waiting and waiting for nothing, and realizing that this is how it works out (see Roth, 2006).

We surviving post-academics must finally fail and fall. When we reach our last exit, the last scene of life’s ups and downs, we can reflect on having played our various roles upon the stage. Not good enough as human beings perhaps, partially failed as parents, as teachers, as researchers, as writers, as funsters, as bricoleurs, and as everything. Perhaps we elderly post-academics have to confront the inevitability of that end-fall and life-failure with courage in the face of fear. Perhaps we can express our final identities by each of us claiming I am what survives me or I am what meaning I can make of my life (see Erikson, 1950). We know that we will soon arrive at that point where life transitions into the curve of death, the cusp of “mere oblivion” (As You Like It). We might be reassured, however, that just as each day we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday dead, then why should we be afraid of death, when death comes all the time? (see Updike, 1989).

At least in the playhouse, we can at some moments pretend to be other than what we are, pretend to play roles we never could earlier in our lives, and, as well, learn to age in a spirit of “realistic defiance.” One solution to the inevitability of dying and death is that we should patch together our fragments of experience to create our own “consoling narratives.” These should be observances of “nowness,” discoveries of wisdom and experience, and, especially, celebrations of human drama in all its variety (see McCrum, 2017). We console ourselves, now, by admitting that our life’s winnings, especially as post-academics and post-workers, were never to be seen as crushing victories: We settle for partial achievements, moderate successes. Finally, the global playhouse experience will show us and others that our post-academic counterlife is not a rehearsal for a better afterlife but is, most probably to this old humanist at least, the end-stage of this life.