Examples of Issue-Themes, to be used in the Prescription of Issue-Exhibitions

The following are two examples of issue-themes, which serve as prompts for the museum's contributors. Issue-themes can either be abstract (consisting of more questions than assertions), or they can be so constructed that they serve as challenges to the contributors, inviting them to support or contest the notions laid out therein. The prescription of an issue-theme is the first step toward the show of an issue-exhibition.

1.) CAREER. AND IDENTITY

This issue-exhibition will focus on the notion of career. What is it? Is it the union of repute and raw income? Is it the whole of a man’s experiences or just the sum of his achievements? When people talk about their careers they’re noting something that really has no other descriptor as a noun. Career is a vector. Your career is everything you’ve worked to achieve, which you’ve achieved through education, professional work, networking, or even by way of charity and social capital. And let’s not leave out that career can be the product chicanery, deception, or simply luck or family legacy. Career seems to be not what you are but what you’ve accomplished. But what you’ve accomplished is the whole of what you’ve done combined with the particularity of how you did those things and your predisposition to do them, therefore your very legitimacy as a person, the whole of your identity. But when you risk your career you don’t risk your identity. What exactly does it mean to risk your career? And why can’t you risk your identity?

Career is everything on your resume, but it’s also a stock of experiences that add up to a communicable repute, like a fluid credential. So it’s not only what you are but how you came to be what you are, but that’s where it gets complicated. Imagine you came to be a U.S. Senator by rigging an election, then a few years later you’re found out, removed from office, prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned. Through all of this you maintain your identity. Though in that short amount of time being arraigned and convicted as a fraud causes your identity to constantly evolve—from a senator to an exposed senator, to an exposed former senator, to a tried exposed former senator, and finally to a tried and convicted exposed former senator—your identity does not ever cease. However, your career (very abruptly) does. This is because you can’t further advance yourself, not even by fraudulent means. At the time you rigged the election you perpetuated your career both by seizing the opportunity to cheat an election and by being stealthy enough to somehow get away with it. Though your identity was always (in objective terms) an election-rigging stealthy politician, it was not until you were exposed that you lost your career of being simply a politician, with none of those descriptors attached. So at any point your career is simply the result of your own self-positioning and ability to do so while taking into account the laws and weaknesses of a system. In this case the system is an easily corrupted electoral process. But had you gotten away with the whole scam, say by serving one term as a senator and then winning the Presidency by honest means, your path to becoming President would’ve been built by one rigged election, one honest election and no doubt your legitimate experience as a senator in office. Then after you’ve served two terms as president, you’re commissioned to write a memoir. What you bring to that book deal is your career as a politician, largely enabled by that first fraudulent vote.

Less cynically, one can also get ahead by simpler, more legal means like making it a point to network among professional circles. The point is that a career is not simply the whole of your abilities but the wider whole of your abilities in relation to a set of standards in which you have to live and work. Your career is what positions you to get ahead or simply to move laterally but favorably. Career exists in a different dimension than identity; it can be started, stopped, restarted , impeded, or interrupted. This is why a prisoner can have an identity but no career. He’s bound; he has no choice but to live in a static routine with no opportunity to do advance his prospects, except to behave in such a prescribed manner as to be paroled.

Through the course of a human life, career is a vector of self promotion. The notion of career legitimizes the assets (but not the discrepancies) of identity.

2.) THE INNOVATOR AND THE CRIMINAL

There is a section in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment in which the main character, Roskolnikov describes a criminal as one who breaks the law, where the law is simply a set of standards—more often than not standards that impede progress. In this context, Roskolnikov’s notions of “standards” and “progress” are not tied to morality, so “standards” is simply a mold to be broken in favor of a new form. And “progress” is the act of such redefinition. Innovators are criminals in this paradigm, because they challenge the premise of “why this can’t be done.” In business, innovation usually means a more efficient way of meeting the bottom line; it’s often hailed as progressive and rewarded accordingly. But of course, literal criminals don’t even need to answer the question of why this can’t be done. The reason “it can’t be done” is simply because “it” is against the law.

Here is the prompt: if the law stands in the way of doing something or doing something in a certain way, it is a cheaper impediment than everything standing in the way of an innovation. In both cases, though, either the innovator or the criminal will not accept the standard. The difference is one is invited to challenge the standard and the other is not. Or, one is rewarded for going against the standard and the other is punished.