Being Effective

Being effective is difficult. If you find yourself in a somewhat bummed out mood and just feel like what you do isn't effective, well, you're not alone. There are alienated internetters everywhere hoping to make a difference without a road map of how to do so. Given this news, hopefully this new sense of community will not induce a euphoric sense of complacency. It is important to want to be effective. Of course, I'm speaking politically and socially, but ah, why reduce it to that.
See, I have this nagging thought that keeps growing in my mind and I am not sure how to resolve it.. Here is the riddle: If something you do doesn't produce material effects in the world, then it can easily be relegated as a simple positioning of one's subjectivity. That is, if I hold radical beliefs, but only in so much as I can retain the subjective position of radical without my beliefs translating into any actions, then isn't the point more about my identity than it is about effecting change? If I espouse radical theory (a la Deleuze, Lefebre, Lacan, etc. etc) but only use them as a device for social climbing strange graduate school hierarchies, then isn't most theory a form of identity social climbing? And doesn't this type of description apply to most of what is described as the radical left in the art world? Not to pick on us, but isn't this a tricky situation to deal with?
Here is another riddle: are there actions that can occur that produce positive social change that are unattached to any progressive ideology?
And finally: if such actions do exist, shouldn't these be the models we look toward rather than those positioned in a counterproductive niche of subjectivity?
Ok those are the riddles..
-March 13, 2006