My life, overanalyzed

Friday night I came face-to-face with how bizarre one's life sounds when it gets crammed into the frame of structuralism. A simple misunderstanding from the past got framed as an epic struggle of revolutionary v. reformer, conservative v. radical, department v. department... and the whole narrative didn't bear any resemblance to what actually occurred. In fact, I think it warped the actual incident into some bizarrely determined event where we were all propelled to act in the manners that we were, seemingly with no agency of our own.

I know my structuralist brothers and sisters like to make the claim that those of us who dabble in the micro miss the forest for the trees. After hearing my life recounted to me in these grand terms, I think the case can be made that structuralists forget that the forest consists of trees, and that not every facet of human life, even the parts that are heavily politicized (as this particular recounted incident was), is implicated in the grand narrative of World History, barreling along towards its teleological, inevitable conclusion.

More on my humanist marxism - or is that marxist humanism? - later.