Character mask
Encyclopedia
A character mask in the Marxian sense is a character masked or disguised with a different character. The term was used by Karl Marx
in various published writings from the 1840s to the 1860s, and also by Friedrich Engels
. It is related to the classical Greek concept of mimesis
(imitative representation using analogies) and the Roman concept of persona
, but also differs from them. The notion of character masks has been used by neo-Marxist and non-Marxist sociologists, philosophers and anthropologists to interpret how people relate in societies with a complex division of labour
. As a critical concept, bearing character masks contrasts with the concept of "role-taking" developed by social theorists such as George Herbert Mead
, Ralph Linton
, Talcott Parsons
, Theodore R. Sarbin
and Ralf Dahrendorf
, as well as Robert K. Merton
's idea of a role set
, in the first instance because "social roles" do not necessarily assume the masking of behaviour, and character masks do not necessarily assume agreement with roles, or that the roles are fixed (see role theory
). Peter Sloterdijk
comments:
The concept of character masks refers to the circumstance that, in human societies, people can take on functions in which they “act out” roles, whether voluntarily chosen, by necessity, or forced. In those roles, some or all of their true characteristics and intentions may be partly or wholly masked, so that they appear different from what they truly are - “public face” and “private thoughts, interests and emotions” diverge. Also, their activity may have broader social effects that they would rather not know about, which they wish to be unknown or presented in a certain light, or which they are unaware of, and therefore the effects are mentally disconnected from their real causes. Accordingly persons and their relationships may no longer be quite what they seem to be, and there is a difference between their personal and functional (or formal) relationships. Even if the “masking” is readily observable and known, so that a difference between the person and a functional role is self-evident, what the true character is, may remain unknown.
As a psychological term, "character" is used more in Continental Europe, while in Britain and North America the term "personality" is used in "approximately" the same contexts. Marx however uses the term "character mask" analogously to a theatrical role, where the actor (or the characteristics of a "prop") represents a certain interest or function, and intends by character both "the characteristics of somebody" and "the characteristics of something". He was writing a century before role theory
became an academically recognized subject in sociology. That did not mean that the idea of roles did not exist in Marx's time; rather, it meant that a sophisticated academic language for talking about the sociology of roles did not exist, and therefore Marx borrowed from theatre and literature to express his idea. His concept is both that an identity appears differently from its true identity (it is masked or disguised), and that this difference has very real practical consequences (the mask is not simply a decoration, but performs a real function and has real effects, even independently of the mask bearer).
, social movements and political parties
, social institutions, economic or legal relationships, organizations and functions, social systems
, governments, symbol
ic expressions (including theories, works of art, advertising
and ideologies), historical eras
and epoch
s, and drama
tic, literary or theatrical contexts. In each case, the suggestion is that matters present themselves other than they really are.
There is therefore a link between character masks and the concept of hypocrisy
. Yet character masks need not be hypocritical, insofar as the motive for their use is genuine, sincere, principled or naive - or a product of (self-)delusion. People can also mask their behaviour, or mask a situation, without being aware that they are doing so, i.e. they may mask something to themselves, not just consciously but unconsciously (see false consciousness). Masking need not involve deliberate lying
or fraud
. It may merely involve the projection of an image, shape or sound which the observer chooses to, or is likely to, interpret in a particular way (it could also be interpreted in many other, quite different ways). In fact, Marx suggests that insofar as people work in various roles and functions, a character mask can be a "normal" part of the role - just "part of the job" (see below).
There are numerous novels, thrillers, horror
stories and biographies which explore the human character that exists "behind the mask" from various points of view; often the human character interpreted by the authors is a politician, hero, law enforcement officer or criminal who is found, for one motive or another, to exhibit a truly spectacular discrepancy between his masks, and who or what he (or she) really is - raising important questions about the sheer complexity of possible human behaviours and motives (if not excitement or moral outrage). There are also numerous books by religious authors and psychologists dealing with the way in which people seek to "cover up" the impact of a mistake, a sin
, an injury
or a trauma
by carrying on a pretense which involves the masking of behaviour. However, while this kind of literature does illustrate that character masks of all kinds are a durable feature of the human condition - arising out of the great behavioural flexibility of the human species, acquired through a lengthy process of evolution
- they do not necessarily have anything to do with Marx's critique of bourgeois society as a whole, and the character masks which Marx thought were specific to (or "characteristic" of) that society. The human practice of masking, whether for ritualistic, cultural or practical reasons, predates the origin of class societies by thousands of years, and therefore many kinds of masking cannot be attributed simply to class conflicts, commercial interests or legal imperatives; they reflect long-lasting cultural practices (see below).
Things can get tricky, and life can be riddled with contradictions. To bridge a difficult moment or phase, people have to "act". They take on disguise
s, they hide their true character in some way, and they present themselves differently from what they really are. People can also become aware of a phenomenon before they know what it really is or means, what the implications are, or how to deal with it. They cannot "place" it. This could make them feel embarrassed, helpless or insecure, and they might initially just call it names which mask what is really going on. The masks they adopt as a behavioural response to an unfamiliar experience may provide confidence
or forbearance
where the situation itself gives no reason for confidence. Effectively, the significance is thereby either disregarded, downplayed, or assimilated to something else that is already familiar (see also cognitive dissonance
).
Whether or not this involves deliberate deceit or a ruse, depends on the true motivation. It may not be easily verifiable - the actors may not be very aware of their own motivation. People have depend on others with trust, but that creates plenty scope for deception, insofar as people assume things that they really shouldn't in the situation (human gullibility
). One of Marx's favourite relativizing motto's was "de omnibus dubitandum", i.e. one must retain a healthy sense of doubt
about everything, so that one is not fooled by what seems to be totally obvious or self-evident. There may be more to it, than meets the eye. Indeed, the metaphor of individuals and groups - particularly intellectuals and political actors - who bear "masks", who "abandon their masks", engage in a "masquerade" or who are "unmasked", appears many times in Marx's manuscripts and correspondence.
The "character masks of an era
" refer, according to Marx and Engels, to its main symbolic expressions of self-justification or apologism, the function of which is to disguise, embellish or mystify ideologically the social contradictions in the real character of the era ("the bits that don't fit"), so that life can carry on anyway. A purported "mystical truth" in this context is a meaning (a "naming", a descriptive association or metaphor) which cannot be definitely proved, because it results from an abstractive procedure or cognition which is not logical, and cannot be tested scientifically, only subjectively experienced.
However, in the end Marx also argues that, insofar as capitalist class society is intrinsically a very contradictory system - it contains many conflicting and competing forces - the masking of its true characteristics becomes an integral feature of how it actually operates. Buyers and sellers compete with other buyers and sellers. Businesses compete about costs, sales, profits and much more, and they cannot practically do so without confidentiality
and secrecy
. Workers compete for job opportunities and access to resources. Capitalists and workers compete for their share of the new wealth that is produced, and nations compete with other nations. The masks are therefore not optional, but necessary. And the more one is able to know about others, the more subtle, ingenious and sophisticated the masks become.
One of the centrepieces of Marx's critique of political economy is that the juridical labour contract between the worker and his capitalist employer obscures the true economic relationship, which is (according to Marx) that the workers do not sell their labour, but their labour power, i.e. their capacity to work, making possible a profitable difference between what they are paid and the new value they create for the owners of capital (a form of economic exploitation). Thus, the very foundation of capitalist wealth creation involves a "mask". More generally, Marx argues that transactions in the capitalist economy are often far from transparent - they appear different from what they really are. This is discovered, only when one probes the total context in which they occur. "What the money is for" may seem obvious at first sight, but it may turn out to be something quite different. Hence Marx writes:
This implies another level of masking, because the economic character masks are then straightforwardly ("vulgarly") equated with authentic
behaviour ("there is no more to it, than meets the eye"). The effect in this case is, that the theory of "how the economy works" masks how it actually works, by conflating its surface appearance with its real nature. Its generalities seem to explain it, but in reality, when one gets down to specifics, they don't. The theory works, "except when it doesn't", and it is therefore (ultimately) arbitrary. Either things are studied in isolation from the total context in which they occur, or, generalizations are formed which leave very essential bits out. Such distortion can certainly be ideologically useful to justify an economic system
, position or policy as a good thing, but it can become a hindrance, if we really need to know how the economy works - to know it, we have to be able to see what is behind the masks.
The oldest masks that have been discovered are 9,000 years old, being held by the Musée "Bible et Terre Sainte" (Paris), and the Israel Museum
(Jerusalem). Most probably the practice of masking is much older - circa 30,000-40,000 years - but insofar as it involved the use of war-paint, leather, vegetative material or wooden masks, the masks probably haven't been preserved (they are visible only in paleolithic
cave drawings, of which dozens have been preserved). At the neanderthal
Roche-Cotard site in France
a flintstone likeness of a face was found which is about 35,000 years old, but it is not clear that it was intended as a mask. In the Book of Genesis, one can read how Adam and Eve
used fig
leaves to cover "their nakedness" after eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
. The Carnival of Venice
dates back to 1268 AD. The North American Iroquois
tribes used masks for healing purposes (see False Face Society
). Masks in various forms (sacred or playful) have played a crucial historical role in the development of understandings about "what it means to be human", because they permit the imaginative experience of "what it is like" to be transformed into a different identity.
The face often conveys a person’s intention or character most directly, but the masked persons can gain a certain power or advantage, because they can see through the mask, while remaining unseen themselves in some way. The use of masks therefore facilitates control by the actors over what people are able to see. Inversely, the attraction for the spectators may be that they don't see what they don't want to see, and see something else (that they do want to see).
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
,
The mask as symbolic device expresses exactly this combination of "knowledge and lack of knowledge"; the real intentions or motivations that lurk behind the mask are uncertain to the spectator, precisely because of the disguise, even if it is believed or known that they must be there. A character mask however is not simply “a masking of the character who bears it”. In the technical sense used in theatre
, it is a specific type of mask.
Namely, it contrasts with a neutral mask, which simply aims to remove one sense of character from the body of the actor bearing it - by hiding a part or all of the physical presence (the actors are present, yet absent; absent, yet present. They are there and not there at the same time; remote and close; themselves, yet strangers - evoking a sense of puzzle
, suspense
, intrigue
, distance, anonymity, a mystery or a mystique). It might be thrilling and captivating, or it might be disturbing and offensive, depending on the context (in actor training, a counter-mask is sometimes also used: the actors are invited to imagine themselves in the opposite role to the ones they are supposed to play, to help define the meaning of their intended role with a clear contrast).
The specific function of a character mask in theatre is to transform the bearer into a different personage, or a different role
– a new character is then fixed and defined by the mask, in a simplified and invariant way, and animated by supporting body movements. Various different character masks (or different “hats”) can in principle be worn by the same actor in succession, in which case the same actor acts out various roles.
The history of theatre shows that masks can have a variety of functions, but the five relevant points are that:
In Marx's social theory, the character mask personifies the economic, social, cultural, political or official function which a person or group (or a thing) performs in a particular role, usually in a way which obscures the real relationships involved. When commercial relationships invade every sphere of life in bourgeois society, he argues, people are necessarily forced to act in ways other than they really are, in varying degrees, and therefore are obliged to mask themselves. They may not physically bear any masks or veils, but nevertheless they constantly “act out” roles which the business of making money (or legal requirements) obliges them to do, possibly using various media and props. If they were unwilling to do so, with the appropriate attitude, transactions or functional obligations would fail, and they would not succeed in the marketplace, in public life, or in political service.
Specifically, they must adapt their own behavioural expressions to the behaviour and relationships of things traded in markets, and to abstract legal rules. To reconcile their true personality with their “political personality” or “business personality”, and reconcile personal interests with state or market interests, they have to mask off some or all of their personal motivations. Keeping personal motivations out of the business or official situation indeed becomes regarded as “normal”, “cultured”, “businesslike” and “civilized”. Indeed, people are admired when they can "naturally" fulfill a role, as if they are "made for the role". In that case, it appears that they have made life-choices which placed them in a role in which they can fully express who they are. Incongruence between authentic behaviour and an “act” may then become difficult to detect, and it may be sensed only as a kind of guile.
Abstractly, the masking processes in capitalist society mediate and reconcile social contradictions, which arise from three main sources:
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx & Engels had stated that:
This "naked self-interest" seems to contradict the idea of "masking" in bourgeois society. Supposedly market trade creates transparency and an "open society" of free citizens. In reality, Marx & Engels claim, it does not. The "nakedness" may not reveal very much other than the requirements of trade; it is just that the cultural patterns of what is hidden and what is revealed differ from feudal society and ancient society. Even in "naked commerce", the possible methods of "masking" what one is, what one represents or what one does, are extremely diverse. Human languages and numerical systems, for example, offer very subtle distinctions of meaning that can "cover up" something, or present it as different from what it really is.
of Attica
(6th century BC) and the Greek Aristotelian
philosopher Theophrastus
(circa 371-287 BC) is credited with being the first in the West to define human character in terms of a typology
of personal strengths and weaknesses. Indeed, Marx’s idea of character masks appears to have originated in his doctoral studies of Greek philosophy
in 1837-39, at which time the theatre was one of the few places in Germany where opinions about public affairs could be fairly freely aired, if only in fictionalized form. Independently from Marx, the romantic novelist Jean Paul
also used the concept, in portraying the human problems of individuation
. Perhaps the concept was also inspired by Hegel's discussion of masks in his The Phenomenology of Spirit.
The shift in Marx’s use of the concept, from dramaturgy
and philosophy
to political and economic actors, was in addition probably influenced by his well-known appreciation of drama, including the plays of Goethe and Shakespeare (mentioned in Das Kapital
), the novels of Miguel de Cervantes
and Honoré de Balzac
, Dante
's and Heinrich Heine
's poetry and, possibly, the Italian Commedia dell’arte (troupes of actors, each with a specific role, who travelled through Europe since the mid-16th century and improvised scenarios or skits on stage using masks). Certainly, European writers and thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries (the era of the Enlightenment
) were very preoccupied with human character and characterology, many different typologies being proposed; human character was increasingly being defined in a secular way, independent of virtues and vices defined by religion
(exemplified respectively by saints and sinners). In the middle ages
the Catholic church banned much theatre, in an effort to root out paganism
; theatre (other than liturgical plays) was often regarded as sinful, and actors as deceivers - acting was viewed as a form of lying since the actors portrayed characters which they were not themselves - assuming a false identity. In the renaissance
, however, the court masque
began to flourish. The growth of commerce
and commercial calculation created a new level of human behavioural complexity and motivations, which could not easily be captured in terms of theological categories (or only in a supremely abstract way, rather remote from real life). Criticizing Hegel's philosophy of justice in 1843, Marx concludes:
The first known reference by Marx to character masks in a publication appears in an 1846 circular which Marx drafted as an exile in Brussels. It occurs again in his polemic against Karl Heinzen in 1847, called Moralizing criticism and critical morality and in part 5 of a satirical piece written in 1852 called Heroes of the Exile.
In chapter 4 of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), a story about the sovereign’s dissolution of the French legislative assembly in 1851 in order to reign as imperial dictator, Marx describes how Bonaparte abandoned one character mask for another, after dismissing the Barrot-Falloux Ministry in 1849. In this story, character masks figure very prominently. Contrary to Hegel's belief that states, nations, and individuals are all the time the unconscious tools of the world spirit at work within them, Marx insists that:
The concept is subsequently also mentioned five times in Capital, Volume I
, and once in Capital, Volume II
; here the reference is specifically to economic character masks, not political character masks. However, both the official Moscow translation of Capital, Volume I
into English (essentially the 1887 English edition translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling
), as well as the revised 1976 Penguin translation of Capital, Volume I
into English by Ben Fowkes, deleted all reference to character masks, substituting a non-literal translation which is not accurate. The translation by David Fernbach in the Penguin edition of Capital, Volume II
is accurate.
Marx’s concept of character masks has therefore been little known in the English-speaking world, except through the translated writings of the Frankfurt School
and other (mainly German
or Austria
n) Marxists using the term. Tom Bottomore’s sociological dictionary of Marxist thought has no entry for the important concept of character masks. The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory likewise does not refer to it. David Harvey
, the world-famous New Left
popularizer of Marx's writings, does not mention the concept at all in works such as his The Limits to Capital. There is no entry for the concept in James Russell’s Marx-Engels Dictionary or in Terrell Carver’s A Marx Dictionary.
However, Dieter Claessens
mentions the concept in his 1992 Lexikon, there is another mention in Lexikon zur Soziologie and the more recent German-language Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism has a substantive entry for character masks by Wolfgang Fritz Haug
. Haug suggests that the conjunction of “character” and “mask” is “specifically German”, since in the French, English, Spanish, and Italian editions of Capital, Volume I
, the term “mask”, "bearer" or “role” is used, but not “character mask”. But since “character mask” is a technical term in theatre and costume hire, it is not “specifically German”, and most existing translations are simply inaccurate. However, Haug is correct insofar as "character mask" as a sociological or psychological term is rarely used by non-German speakers. Jochen Hörisch claims that "despite its systematic importance, the concept of character masks was conspicuously taboo in the dogmatic interpretation of Marx". Thus, for example, although the concept was known from Das Kapital
, it is never mentioned in the Marxist-Leninist dictionaries and lexicons of East Germany as a specifically Marxist category. Similarly, the concept does not occur in the Marxist literature of China and Japan.
, with the translation corrected to restore the original literal meaning according to the German edition, are the following (the page references provided in the notes are to the Penguin edition in English):
In Capital, Volume II
, there is also the following passage:
In Capital, Volume III
, Marx does not explicitly refer to character masks. He only notes, that the theories of the political economists invert cause and effect, means and ends, as well as objects and subjects, which has the result that the capitalist system can no longer be understood in a theoretically integrated way, even though people experience it all in one go, as a total experience. Marx aims to show that this misapprehension is the natural effect of the observable form taken by business relations, which mask the real social relations involved. The overall result, he suggests, is a mosaic
of eclectic, fragmented theories which mask the real essence of the matter - they suffice for pragmatic policy purposes perhaps, within the limits of their application, but are scientifically incoherent from the point of view of explaining the capitalist system as a whole.
, Marx noted explicitly:
He goes on to explain why:
Marx's idea is, that in order to survive at all, human beings necessarily depend on co-operative social relations; if they did not enter into these social relations, they would be dead as a doornail. According to Marx, what distinguishes a master-builder from a bee is that the master-builder has a conscious purpose for what he does, whereas the bee just follows a biological program. So, in interacting, human beings somehow have to interpret or assume how their own purpose is related to the purpose of other people. By that very fact, social roles are conferred on them, whatever they might think about that. Another way of putting this is, that individuals can exist as individuals only in relation to other individuals, and, as they interact, they place each other in roles, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Marx’s subsequent argument about character masks in capitalism can be summarized in six steps:
A seventh step could in principle be added, namely a big crisis in society which sparks off a revolution and overturns the existing capitalist system. In that case, it could be argued, the false masks are torn off, and people have to stand up for what they really are, and what they really believe in. But that is a possibility which Marx did not comprehensively theorize in Das Kapital
. His experience as an exile
was only as commentator on the revolutions of 1848
and the Paris Commune
. He does not himself provide any clear picture of a society in which character masks would become unnecessary (unnecessary, because everybody would be able to be naturally themselves all the time). In Capital he comments only that:
In The Age of Extremes, the last sequel in a series of books, the eminent Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm
describes the "tormented history" of the 20th century. It combined enormous economic and population growth with a never-ending succession of wars, plagues, upheavals and disasters. He bemoans the failure of prediction
: how badly people have been able to understand their own future. Arguably, however, this pessimism is itself a "mask", since one can prove that at least some people accurately forecast each of the main historical events that happened; the problem is not primarily with the forecasting, but whether the forecasts are taken seriously. If people think they will lose more than they gain if the forecast is true, or if it becomes known, they are likely to mask the forecast - i.e. a true, honest forecast may not be in their interest, or they just don't want to believe it because it doesn't suit them. They may not be in a position to act on the information or prefer to believe what is good for themselves, even if it masks the truth.
, and his influence on Marx is often underestimated. In 1894, Engels referred to character masks in his Preface to Capital, Volume III
- when rebutting a criticism of Marx's theory by Achille Loria
. This was 11 years after Marx died, and after a lot of effort to get Marx's manuscript to a publishable standard. Rather unkindly and cuttingly, Engels wrote:
Sganarella and Dulcamara were originally characters in the Commedia dell'arte
(Sganarelle is also a mistrustful bourgeois character - in Molière
's 1660 play Sganarelle, ou le Cocu imaginaire - who believes his wife is cheating him, and Dulcamera is the itinerant medicine man - essentially a quack - in Gaetano Donizetti
's opera
L'Elisir d'Amore
). Leaving aside Engels's personal attack, Engels's substantive sociological suggestion seems to be that:
The problem with this kind of argument is just that, in defining the meaning of what is happening in society, it is very difficult to provide definite scientific proof that this meaning is the objective truth. It remains an interpretation, which may make sense of things at a certain level, without providing the whole truth. Engels's comment illustrates that the concept of character masks is not infrequently used in a polemical way.
Engels, like Marx, also used the notion of a “mask” in the more general sense of a political “guise” or “disguise”, for example in several of his historical analyses about religious movements. Engels argues in Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany (1851) that:
In his article On the history of early Christianity (1894–95), Engels suggests that:
Friedrich Nietzsche
's idea of character masks and Alasdair MacIntyre
's idea of "character" in his famous book After Virtue
are similar to the use of the term "character masks" as ideal type
, stereotype
or archetype
by Engels and Mehring in the 1890s - certain people or types personify the culture of an era by giving a particularly clear expression of what it is really about (see also stock character
).
refers to character masks, but more in the sense of Weberian ideal type
s or stereotypical characters. The Marx-Studien published by Rudolf Hilferding
and Max Adler
referred to character masks as a theoretical category. The communist dramatist Bertolt Brecht
made extensive use of neutral and character masks, like Luigi Pirandello
(who, however, joined Benito Mussolini
's National Fascist Party
). In plays such as The Caucasian Chalk Circle
and The Good Person of Szechwan
, the masks support what Brecht called "the alienation effect" (see distancing effect). The imagery of masks was an important inspiration for surrealist art, from James Ensor
to André Breton
. According to Breton's first Surrealist Manifesto
, surrealistic art excels when it "gives to the abstract the mask of the concrete, or the opposite." Karl Renner
and Franz Leopold Neumann
used the concept in the context of a sociological analysis of bourgeois law. In a radical synthesis of Marx and Freud, Wilhelm Reich
created the concept of "character armor". It refers to the total "harness" of physiological defences which mask off the pain of repressing feelings - feelings which the individual is not permitted to express in civil life (involving muscular rigidities, inability to feel much, dammed-up sexual energy, etc.).
György Lukács referred to the “very important category of economic character masks”. However he restricted the application of the idea to capitalists only, claiming that Marx had considered capitalists as “mere character masks” – meaning that capitalists, as the personifications ("agents") of capital, did not do anything "without making a business out of it", given that their activity consisted of the correct management and calculation of the objective effects of economic laws. Marx himself never simply equated capitalists with their character masks; they were human beings entangled in a certain life predicament, like anybody else. If Marx discussed capitalists purely in terms of their function, that was because individual differences were irrelevant to what the function required them to do - either they adapted themselves to the function, or failing that, could not function as capitalists. At most one could say that capitalists had more to hide, and that some had personal qualities enabling them to succeed in their function, while others lacked the personal prerequisites. According to Lukács, the character masks of the bourgeoisie
express a “necessary false consciousness” about the class consciousness
of the proletariat
.
In the post-war tradition of Western Marxism
, the concept of character masks was theorized about especially by scholars of the Frankfurt School
, and other Marxists influenced by this school, though it also appears in Marxist-existentialist thought, such as in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre
. Writing about the Marxist theorist Theodor W. Adorno
, a leader of the Frankfurt School, Rolf Tiedemann comments:
Adorno argues that Marx explained convincingly why the appearance-form and the real nature of human relations often does not directly coincide, not on the strength of a metaphysical philosophy such as transcendental realism
, but by inferring the social meaning of human relations from the way they observably appear in practical life - using systematic critical and logical thought as a tool of discovery. Every step in the analysis can be logically and empirically tested. The assumption is only, that these relations cannot mean "just any old thing", because they require shared meanings in order to be able to function and communicate at all. These shared presuppositions have an intrinsic rationality
, because human behaviour - ultimately driven by the need to survive - is to a large extent purposive (teleological), and not arbitrary or random (though some of it may be). The apparent "irrationality" of emotions and desires is in reality also strongly linked to human purposes, and therefore explicable. Feelings appear "unreasonable" only because it is unclear what role they play in human motivations - if one has never had a feeling, it is difficult to understand that feeling - but if an emotion or desire is considered "inappropriate", that does not of itself mean that it isn't part of the total behavioural strategy an organism
with a nervous system
has in coping with situations.
The human meanings are therefore not indeterminate, but determinate, being controlled by the real things which people have to do in life. To achieve a goal and get something done, people necessarily have to think in a certain way, or at least the possible variability of their thinking is usually limited (see also parametric determinism
). If there is a very great difference between what they think and what they do, causing confusion, this can be solved by getting back to the related practical activities. Philosophy is thereby "sublated", because the focus shifts from abstract generalities to explaining the meaning of specific practical activity.
The Frankfurt School was especially interested in how capitalist market culture affects human subjectivities and personal life, and the ways in which it might distort the “authentic self” and estrange human relations. It asked question such as, "What human factors made Nazism
possible?". In this way, the German Marxist scholars tried to focus problems of the human psyche, by relating them to the capitalist system which gives rise to them - a phenomenological
“science of the human subject” intended to avoid both psychologism
and sociologism. They were also concerned with how people might rebel
against or liberate
themselves from the character-masks of life in bourgeois society, through asserting themselves authentically as social
, political and sexual
beings.
To the extent that the commercial and public roles impose heavy personal burdens, and little space exists anymore “to be oneself”, people can experience personal stress, mental suffering and personal estrangement (alienation
), sometimes to the point where they “lose themselves”, and no longer “know who they are” (identity crisis
). There are then five main possibilities:
Ultimately, there exists no individual solution to such identity problems, because to solve them requires the positive recognition, acceptance and affirmation of an identity
by others – and this can only happen, if the individual can “join in” and receive social acknowledgement of his identity. Marx himself tackled this problem – rather controversially – in his 1843/44 essay On the Jewish Question
.
that, while some West European governments (such as the French) aim to prohibit Islamic women from wearing headscarves, niqāb
and burqa
(hijab
), they are constantly "masking" what they do themselves, even although it may not involve a piece of cloth. The suggestion is that officials "cannot see the wood for the trees", or that there is an exaggerated fear of not being able to see something. Others argue the fears are justified. For example, the Dutch
media personality Theo van Gogh
, always eager to "take the mask off everything" while reaching out to the Other
, was murdered in Amsterdam
in 2004 by Mohammed Bouyeri
sometime after van Gogh screened a short film attacking the attitude of Islam
towards women.
Much of the scientific controversy about the concept of character masks centres on Marx’s unique dialectical approach to analyzing the forms and structure of social relations in the capitalist system: in Das Kapital
, he had dealt with persons (or “economic characters”) only insofar as they personified or symbolized - often in a reified way - economic categories, roles, functions and interests (see above). Evidently Marx felt justified in this approach, because he considered that the capitalist market system really and necessarily required the reification
of human relations in order to operate. That stumped many readers.
According to Marx, the capitalist system functioned as a “system”, precisely because the bourgeois relations of production
and trade, including property rights, were imposed on people whether they liked it or not. They had to act and conform in a specific way to survive and prosper, and could not very well jump out of the ways in which they were related. As the mass of capital produced grew larger, and markets expanded, these bourgeois relations spontaneously reproduced themselves on a larger and larger scale, be it with the assistance of state aid, regulation or repression. However, many authors have argued that this approach leaves many facets of capitalist social relations unexplained.
Marx’s concept of character masks has been interrogated by scholars primarily in the German-language literature (see references). Werner Sombart
stated gruffly in 1896 (two years after Capital, Volume III
was published) that:
The historian Sheila Fitzpatrick
has recorded how, in the Soviet Union
,
Those who supported the revolution and its communist leadership were politically defined as "proletarian" and those who opposed it were defined as "bourgeois". Abandoning bourgeois and primitive norms, and becoming a cultured, socialist citizen, was "akin to learning a role". In the 1920s, the proletarian writers' association RAPP adopted the slogan "tear off each and every mask from reality". This was based on a quotation from Lenin, who had said that the "realism of Tolstoy
was the tearing off of each and every mask"(sryvanie vsekh i vsiacheskikh masok). The communist authorities kept detailed files on the class and political credentials of citizens, leading to what historians call "file-selves".
Much later, in 1973 (16 years before Slavoj Žižek
entered the intellectual scene) the German New Left
critic Michael Schneider claimed that:
According to the German educationist Ute Grabowski,
When in 1975 the German weekly Der Spiegel
asked members of the Red Army Faction
what the murder of the social democrat Günter von Drenkmann (a high court judge in Berlin) by the Movement 2 June
http://labourhistory.net/raf/documents/0019890000.pdf on 10 November 1974 had accomplished, they replied:
Questions subsequently arose about ten issues:
Jean L. Cohen
complained that:
Marx’s "big picture" of capitalism often remained supremely abstract, although he claimed ordinary folks could understand his book
(he had tried to enliven the first volume with many examples and illustrations). Most people - other than academics, artists and bankers etc. - do not usually think that abstractly, because they see no point in it. In particular, it seemed to many scholars that in Marx’s Capital people becomes "passive subjects" trapped in a system which is beyond their control, and which forces them into functions and roles. Thus, it is argued that Marx’s grandiose portrayal of the capitalist system in its totality is too “deterministic”, because it downplays the ability of individuals as “active human subjects” to make free choices, and determine their own fate (see also economic determinism
). The theoretical point is stated by Peter Sloterdijk
as follows:
In response to this kind of problem, many critics have tried to theorize human subjectivity in capitalist society more (the “human face” of capitalism) - sometimes using the concept of “character masks” - to shed light on how people personally experience the social contradictions and hypocrisies in capitalist society. Here, the meanings which people actually have and use are a starting point for understanding the bigger picture. C. Wright Mills
called this approach the sociological imagination
, the idea being that understanding the link between "private troubles" and "public issues" requires creative insight by the researchers, who are personally involved in what they try to study. The analytical question for social scientists then is, how much the concept of “character masks” can really explain, or whether the concept is made to do “too much work” (i.e. that its application is overextended or overworked, as with Althusser).
For example, Jon Elster
argued that:
Jürgen Ritser queries the utility of the concept of character masks:
Faced with the problem of understanding human character masks - which refers to how human beings have to deal with the relationship between the "macro-world" (the big world) and the "micro-world" (the small world) - scholarship has often flip-flopped rather uneasily between structuralism
and subjectivism
, inventing all kinds of dualisms between structure and agency
. The academic popularity of structural-functionalism has declined, "role definitions" have become more and more changeable and vaguer (even in job designations), and more and more, the Althusserian argument has been inverted: human behaviour is explained in terms of sociobiology
. This is certainly closer to Marx's idea of "the economic formation of society as a process of natural history", but often at the cost of "naturalizing" (eternalizing) social phenomena which belong to a specific historical time - by replacing their real, man-made social causes with alleged biological factors. On this view, humans are essentially, and mainly, animals. Elias Canetti
notes in this regard:
Slaves on this view are essentially beings placed outside human society, not social beings proper, i.e. beings considered as not able or not permitted to relate in a human sense, and therefore fitted only for slave work.
That means that “masking” processes begin to play new roles, very different from what Marx could conceive. Computer programmers nowadays refer to "interfacing", "input-masking" and "error-masking", suggesting a whole new world of digital "masks" in cyberspace
. It is not just that employers and officials can bear “character masks”, but that ordinary workers are motivated to mask themselves and their activities against what they perceive as intrusion by businesspeople, officials and others who seek to acquire personal information about citizens, in order to control, police, exploit or manipulate their lives. Thus, paradoxically, many people nowadays believe that the pursuit of liberty
requires masking one’s activities, simply to maintain the personal privacy
necessary to stay in control of one’s own life; the more possibilities that modern technology offers to share information, the more circumspect people become about giving information out. It creates a new stimulus for the autonomist movement. It can also lead to the panic
or paranoia
of conspiracy theory
, where people no longer understand the real meanings and effects of human action, and believe their lives are being manipulated by unseen, hidden forces - without being able to find out who they are.
Scholars noticed that, in the end, Theodor W. Adorno
- who had argued there are "no individuals" in modern society, only "persons" filling, and defined by, specific functions and roles in capitalism - became quite pessimistic about the prospects of human society. In 1963, Adorno wrote:
In The principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch
however remained hopeful. Faced with the same situation, one was pessimistic, the other optimistic.
Economic analysis not only studies the total social effect of human actions, which is usually not directly observable to an individual, other than in the form of statistics
or television
. The “economic actors” are also human beings who create interactions and relationships which have human meanings. Those meanings cannot be observed, they are in people’s heads, and actively created in their social relationships.
People can of course watch television, read a wikipedia article on their laptop, or flick magazines, where meanings are constructed ready-made for them (Adorno’s “culture industry
”). They can get so used to doing this, that they think the meaning is “out there” rather than constructed in their own heads and bodies, and in their interactions with others. The meaning then seems to be a property of things, so they say: “things have meaning” (see also brainwashing). In reality, things have meaning, only because humans, or other sentient organisms, ‘’can and do give meaning to them’’. Because people have brains, they can figure out that meaning. And because they have free will (they can make their own choices), they can also assert their own meaning, even if only negatively (non-acceptance or non-compliance).
To seek to “unmask” the capitalist system, Marx argued, is a work of critical-scientific theory. It means ordering what we can observe, aided by theory and past experience, so that the real meaning of the system is understood as a whole, and the puzzle is solved. The scientific goal is reached, when one can prove with satisfaction, that one’s definition is so good, that it can withstand the test of all relevant scientific criticisms. It is a big task. Marx warned his French readers that:
Yet, since every meaning can always be challenged by another, and new meanings are formed, reaching the whole truth is really a perpetual task. Its result always has to be defended against competing claims. One can, in the end, only lay claim to the truth as one can know it, from one’s own standpoint. Marx said he welcomed serious scientific criticism of his own contribution, he was not afraid of it.
In the end, Marx argues, capitalism cannot be fully unmasked by means of pure scientific thought only. That is because its ever-changing repertoire of masks is part of the very nature of the system itself, and scientific discoveries can also be masked. They are masked, because scientific pursuits are influenced by property rights and financial interests. They can get stolen (or abused), although the theft may be represented as a "trade", where one party just failed to pick up the goods (in an unpublished manuscript, Marx refers specifically to the "theft of alien labour-time"). The idea is, "let other people do what they will to solve a difficult problem, and we will just skim off the result for ourselves". If people depend on its existence, or if it gets in the way of enjoying their lives, there is always another justification for exploitation. Exploitation can occur under the motto of "love" and "peace". In bourgeois theory, the "sanctity of private property" prevails, but in practice, as Marx argued at length, it doesn't - what is sacrosanct is only one's own property, not someone else's. The right of a person to his own creativity and its results has to be continually defended, and this can involve the use of masking.
Capitalism unmasks itself in the course of development, when its internal contradictions become so great, that they cause collapse - impelling the revolutionary transformation of capitalism by human action into a new social order, amidst all the political conflicts and class struggles. Scientific inquiry, Marx felt, should be an aid in the cause of human progress, to ensure that the new social order emerging will be better than the old one, a real open society. Human progress is achieved, to the degree that people really abolish the oppressions of people by other people, and oppressions by the blind forces of nature.
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
in various published writings from the 1840s to the 1860s, and also by Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
. It is related to the classical Greek concept of mimesis
Mimesis
Mimesis , from μιμεῖσθαι , "to imitate," from μῖμος , "imitator, actor") is a critical and philosophical term that carries a wide range of meanings, which include imitation, representation, mimicry, imitatio, receptivity, nonsensuous similarity, the act of resembling, the act of expression, and the...
(imitative representation using analogies) and the Roman concept of persona
Persona
A persona, in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor. The word is derived from Latin, where it originally referred to a theatrical mask. The Latin word probably derived from the Etruscan word "phersu", with the same meaning, and that from the Greek πρόσωπον...
, but also differs from them. The notion of character masks has been used by neo-Marxist and non-Marxist sociologists, philosophers and anthropologists to interpret how people relate in societies with a complex division of labour
Division of labour
Division of labour is the specialisation of cooperative labour in specific, circumscribed tasks and likeroles. Historically an increasingly complex division of labour is closely associated with the growth of total output and trade, the rise of capitalism, and of the complexity of industrialisation...
. As a critical concept, bearing character masks contrasts with the concept of "role-taking" developed by social theorists such as George Herbert Mead
George Herbert Mead
George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded as one of the founders of social psychology and the American sociological tradition in general.-...
, Ralph Linton
Ralph Linton
Ralph Linton was a respected American anthropologist of the mid-twentieth century, particularly remembered for his texts The Study of Man and The Tree of Culture...
, Talcott Parsons
Talcott Parsons
Talcott Parsons was an American sociologist who served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1927 to 1973....
, Theodore R. Sarbin
Theodore R. Sarbin
Theodore Roy Sarbin , known as "Ted Sarbin", was an American psychologist and professor emeritus of psychology and criminology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was known as "Mr. Role Theory" because of his contributions to the social psychology of role-taking.- Biography :Sarbin was...
and Ralf Dahrendorf
Ralf Dahrendorf
Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf, Baron Dahrendorf, KBE, FBA was a German-British sociologist, philosopher, political scientist and liberal politician....
, as well as Robert K. Merton
Robert K. Merton
Robert King Merton was a distinguished American sociologist. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor...
's idea of a role set
Role set
A role set is a situation where a single status may have more than one role attached to it. This multiplicity of roles is what sociologists termed it as such. Consider a student for instance, involves one role as a pupil, another as a user of university library, and another as a member of a...
, in the first instance because "social roles" do not necessarily assume the masking of behaviour, and character masks do not necessarily assume agreement with roles, or that the roles are fixed (see role theory
Role theory
Role theory is a perspective in sociology and in social psychology that considers most of everyday activity to be the acting out of socially defined categories . Each social role is a set of rights, duties, expectations, norms and behaviour a person has to face and to fulfill...
). Peter Sloterdijk
Peter Sloterdijk
Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher, television host, cultural scientist and essayist. He is a professor of philosophy and media theory at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe. He currently co-hosts the German show Im Glashaus: Das Philosophische Quartett.-Biography:Sloterdijk's father...
comments:
The concept of character masks refers to the circumstance that, in human societies, people can take on functions in which they “act out” roles, whether voluntarily chosen, by necessity, or forced. In those roles, some or all of their true characteristics and intentions may be partly or wholly masked, so that they appear different from what they truly are - “public face” and “private thoughts, interests and emotions” diverge. Also, their activity may have broader social effects that they would rather not know about, which they wish to be unknown or presented in a certain light, or which they are unaware of, and therefore the effects are mentally disconnected from their real causes. Accordingly persons and their relationships may no longer be quite what they seem to be, and there is a difference between their personal and functional (or formal) relationships. Even if the “masking” is readily observable and known, so that a difference between the person and a functional role is self-evident, what the true character is, may remain unknown.
As a psychological term, "character" is used more in Continental Europe, while in Britain and North America the term "personality" is used in "approximately" the same contexts. Marx however uses the term "character mask" analogously to a theatrical role, where the actor (or the characteristics of a "prop") represents a certain interest or function, and intends by character both "the characteristics of somebody" and "the characteristics of something". He was writing a century before role theory
Role theory
Role theory is a perspective in sociology and in social psychology that considers most of everyday activity to be the acting out of socially defined categories . Each social role is a set of rights, duties, expectations, norms and behaviour a person has to face and to fulfill...
became an academically recognized subject in sociology. That did not mean that the idea of roles did not exist in Marx's time; rather, it meant that a sophisticated academic language for talking about the sociology of roles did not exist, and therefore Marx borrowed from theatre and literature to express his idea. His concept is both that an identity appears differently from its true identity (it is masked or disguised), and that this difference has very real practical consequences (the mask is not simply a decoration, but performs a real function and has real effects, even independently of the mask bearer).
Use of the concept
The concept of character masks has been applied by Marxists and non-Marxists to persons and politicians, groups and social classes, mass mediaMass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
, social movements and political parties
Political Parties
Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy is a book by sociologist Robert Michels, published in 1911 , and first introducing the concept of iron law of oligarchy...
, social institutions, economic or legal relationships, organizations and functions, social systems
Social systems
Social system is a central term in sociological systems theory. The term draws a line to ecosystem, biological organisms, psychical systems and technical systems. They all form the environment of social systems. Minimum requirements for a social system is interaction of at least two personal...
, governments, symbol
Symbol
A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
ic expressions (including theories, works of art, advertising
Advertising
Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...
and ideologies), historical eras
Eras
Eras is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Albert Boton and Albert Hollenstein , and released by the International Typeface Corporation in 1976. Eras is licensed by the Linotype type foundry....
and epoch
Epoch (geology)
An epoch is a subdivision of the geologic timescale based on rock layering. In order, the higher subdivisions are periods, eras and eons. We are currently living in the Holocene epoch...
s, and drama
Drama
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do","to act" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a...
tic, literary or theatrical contexts. In each case, the suggestion is that matters present themselves other than they really are.
There is therefore a link between character masks and the concept of hypocrisy
Hypocrisy
Hypocrisy is the state of pretending to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that one does not actually have. Hypocrisy involves the deception of others and is thus a kind of lie....
. Yet character masks need not be hypocritical, insofar as the motive for their use is genuine, sincere, principled or naive - or a product of (self-)delusion. People can also mask their behaviour, or mask a situation, without being aware that they are doing so, i.e. they may mask something to themselves, not just consciously but unconsciously (see false consciousness). Masking need not involve deliberate lying
Lie
For other uses, see Lie A lie is a type of deception in the form of an untruthful statement, especially with the intention to deceive others....
or fraud
Fraud
In criminal law, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual; the related adjective is fraudulent. The specific legal definition varies by legal jurisdiction. Fraud is a crime, and also a civil law violation...
. It may merely involve the projection of an image, shape or sound which the observer chooses to, or is likely to, interpret in a particular way (it could also be interpreted in many other, quite different ways). In fact, Marx suggests that insofar as people work in various roles and functions, a character mask can be a "normal" part of the role - just "part of the job" (see below).
There are numerous novels, thrillers, horror
Horror fiction
Horror fiction also Horror fantasy is a philosophy of literature, which is intended to, or has the capacity to frighten its readers, inducing feelings of horror and terror. It creates an eerie atmosphere. Horror can be either supernatural or non-supernatural...
stories and biographies which explore the human character that exists "behind the mask" from various points of view; often the human character interpreted by the authors is a politician, hero, law enforcement officer or criminal who is found, for one motive or another, to exhibit a truly spectacular discrepancy between his masks, and who or what he (or she) really is - raising important questions about the sheer complexity of possible human behaviours and motives (if not excitement or moral outrage). There are also numerous books by religious authors and psychologists dealing with the way in which people seek to "cover up" the impact of a mistake, a sin
Sin
In religion, sin is the violation or deviation of an eternal divine law or standard. The term sin may also refer to the state of having committed such a violation. Christians believe the moral code of conduct is decreed by God In religion, sin (also called peccancy) is the violation or deviation...
, an injury
Injury
-By cause:*Traumatic injury, a body wound or shock produced by sudden physical injury, as from violence or accident*Other injuries from external physical causes, such as radiation injury, burn injury or frostbite*Injury from infection...
or a trauma
Psychological trauma
Psychological trauma is a type of damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a traumatic event...
by carrying on a pretense which involves the masking of behaviour. However, while this kind of literature does illustrate that character masks of all kinds are a durable feature of the human condition - arising out of the great behavioural flexibility of the human species, acquired through a lengthy process of evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
- they do not necessarily have anything to do with Marx's critique of bourgeois society as a whole, and the character masks which Marx thought were specific to (or "characteristic" of) that society. The human practice of masking, whether for ritualistic, cultural or practical reasons, predates the origin of class societies by thousands of years, and therefore many kinds of masking cannot be attributed simply to class conflicts, commercial interests or legal imperatives; they reflect long-lasting cultural practices (see below).
Levels of masking
The substance of Marx's idea is, that people, their relationships and their worlds take on character masks, when people:- cannot stay consistent or survive without them.
- are in truth not (yet) equal to the situation, or in a transitional phase.
- have a special interest, incentive or stake in presenting themselves in a different way, at variance with the real situation.
- pretend and act "as though" a characteristic applies, because they don't really know yet what the real motivation is, or hope to bring the characteristic into being.
- in practical life are so used to regarding something in a reified way, that it becomes "normal", self-evident and a habit.
- aim to dramatize, sanctify, justify or dignify something, even if it was only ignorance or innocence.
Things can get tricky, and life can be riddled with contradictions. To bridge a difficult moment or phase, people have to "act". They take on disguise
Disguise
A disguise can be anything which conceals or changes a person's physical appearance, including a wig, glasses, makeup, costume or other ways. Camouflage is one type of disguise for people, animals and objects...
s, they hide their true character in some way, and they present themselves differently from what they really are. People can also become aware of a phenomenon before they know what it really is or means, what the implications are, or how to deal with it. They cannot "place" it. This could make them feel embarrassed, helpless or insecure, and they might initially just call it names which mask what is really going on. The masks they adopt as a behavioural response to an unfamiliar experience may provide confidence
Confidence
Confidence is generally described as a state of being certain either that a hypothesis or prediction is correct or that a chosen course of action is the best or most effective. Self-confidence is having confidence in oneself. Arrogance or hubris in this comparison, is having unmerited...
or forbearance
Forbearance
In the context of a mortgage process, forbearance is a special agreement between the lender and the borrower to delay a foreclosure. The literal meaning of forbearance is “holding back.”...
where the situation itself gives no reason for confidence. Effectively, the significance is thereby either disregarded, downplayed, or assimilated to something else that is already familiar (see also cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying,...
).
Whether or not this involves deliberate deceit or a ruse, depends on the true motivation. It may not be easily verifiable - the actors may not be very aware of their own motivation. People have depend on others with trust, but that creates plenty scope for deception, insofar as people assume things that they really shouldn't in the situation (human gullibility
Gullibility
Gullibility is a failure of social intelligence in which a person is easily tricked or manipulated into an ill-advised course of action. It is closely related to credulity, which is the tendency to believe unlikely propositions that are unsupported by evidence....
). One of Marx's favourite relativizing motto's was "de omnibus dubitandum", i.e. one must retain a healthy sense of doubt
Doubt
Doubt, a status between belief and disbelief, involves uncertainty or distrust or lack of sureness of an alleged fact, an action, a motive, or a decision. Doubt brings into question some notion of a perceived "reality", and may involve delaying or rejecting relevant action out of concerns for...
about everything, so that one is not fooled by what seems to be totally obvious or self-evident. There may be more to it, than meets the eye. Indeed, the metaphor of individuals and groups - particularly intellectuals and political actors - who bear "masks", who "abandon their masks", engage in a "masquerade" or who are "unmasked", appears many times in Marx's manuscripts and correspondence.
The "character masks of an era
Era
An era is a commonly used word for long period of time. When used in science, for example geology, eras denote clearly defined periods of time of arbitrary but well defined length, such as for example the Mesozoic era from 252 Ma–66 Ma, delimited by a start event and an end event. When used in...
" refer, according to Marx and Engels, to its main symbolic expressions of self-justification or apologism, the function of which is to disguise, embellish or mystify ideologically the social contradictions in the real character of the era ("the bits that don't fit"), so that life can carry on anyway. A purported "mystical truth" in this context is a meaning (a "naming", a descriptive association or metaphor) which cannot be definitely proved, because it results from an abstractive procedure or cognition which is not logical, and cannot be tested scientifically, only subjectively experienced.
However, in the end Marx also argues that, insofar as capitalist class society is intrinsically a very contradictory system - it contains many conflicting and competing forces - the masking of its true characteristics becomes an integral feature of how it actually operates. Buyers and sellers compete with other buyers and sellers. Businesses compete about costs, sales, profits and much more, and they cannot practically do so without confidentiality
Confidentiality
Confidentiality is an ethical principle associated with several professions . In ethics, and in law and alternative forms of legal resolution such as mediation, some types of communication between a person and one of these professionals are "privileged" and may not be discussed or divulged to...
and secrecy
Secrecy
Secrecy is the practice of hiding information from certain individuals or groups, perhaps while sharing it with other individuals...
. Workers compete for job opportunities and access to resources. Capitalists and workers compete for their share of the new wealth that is produced, and nations compete with other nations. The masks are therefore not optional, but necessary. And the more one is able to know about others, the more subtle, ingenious and sophisticated the masks become.
One of the centrepieces of Marx's critique of political economy is that the juridical labour contract between the worker and his capitalist employer obscures the true economic relationship, which is (according to Marx) that the workers do not sell their labour, but their labour power, i.e. their capacity to work, making possible a profitable difference between what they are paid and the new value they create for the owners of capital (a form of economic exploitation). Thus, the very foundation of capitalist wealth creation involves a "mask". More generally, Marx argues that transactions in the capitalist economy are often far from transparent - they appear different from what they really are. This is discovered, only when one probes the total context in which they occur. "What the money is for" may seem obvious at first sight, but it may turn out to be something quite different. Hence Marx writes:
This implies another level of masking, because the economic character masks are then straightforwardly ("vulgarly") equated with authentic
Authenticity (philosophy)
Authenticity is a technical term in existentialist philosophy, and is also used in the philosophy of art and psychology. In philosophy, the conscious self is seen as coming to terms with being in a material world and with encountering external forces, pressures and influences which are very...
behaviour ("there is no more to it, than meets the eye"). The effect in this case is, that the theory of "how the economy works" masks how it actually works, by conflating its surface appearance with its real nature. Its generalities seem to explain it, but in reality, when one gets down to specifics, they don't. The theory works, "except when it doesn't", and it is therefore (ultimately) arbitrary. Either things are studied in isolation from the total context in which they occur, or, generalizations are formed which leave very essential bits out. Such distortion can certainly be ideologically useful to justify an economic system
Economic system
An economic system is the combination of the various agencies, entities that provide the economic structure that defines the social community. These agencies are joined by lines of trade and exchange along which goods, money etc. are continuously flowing. An example of such a system for a closed...
, position or policy as a good thing, but it can become a hindrance, if we really need to know how the economy works - to know it, we have to be able to see what is behind the masks.
- For example, on 5 November 2008 (Guy FawkesGuy FawkesGuy Fawkes , also known as Guido Fawkes, the name he adopted while fighting for the Spanish in the Low Countries, belonged to a group of provincial English Catholics who planned the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605.Fawkes was born and educated in York...
day), the British Queen Elizabeth II visited the London School of EconomicsLondon School of EconomicsThe London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...
and was given an academic briefing on the causes and implications of the credit crunchCredit crunchA credit crunch is a reduction in the general availability of loans or a sudden tightening of the conditions required to obtain a loan from the banks. A credit crunch generally involves a reduction in the availability of credit independent of a rise in official interest rates...
. According to Professor Luis Garicano of the LSE Centre for Economic Performance, she then asked: "If these things were so large, how come everyone missed them? Why did nobody notice it'?". Garicano answered her along the lines that "At every stage, someone was relying on somebody else and everyone thought they were doing the right thing." In other words, everybody was "keeping up appearances", until a "financial tsunami" engulfed all of them.
Significance of character masks
The use of masks in rituals or ceremonies is a very ancient human practice across the world, although masks can also be worn for protection, in hunting, in sports, in feasts or in wars. A spirit, if it exists in nature or in people, is itself unobservable, it "works through" something (a medium); it is the awareness of a meaning which can be only evoked, represented or expressed symbolically - with images, sounds, shapes and movements which make people feel that the spirit is there. Masks have often been used for exactly this purpose. Thus, people believed that the bearer of the mask made contact with the spirit it expressed (different cultures or religions have different stories about how exactly that works). That meant that a special power and status was attributed to the mask and its bearer; not just anyone could handle it, it was sacred. The spirit, the belief, the mask and the power were directly connected with each other. Nowadays many people no longer believe this, but nevertheless they will still wear certain clothes, or go to a church, a concert or another place for the same purpose: to come into contact with a certain significance, to have a certain very personal experience. If they cannot reach it, they feel unhappy, uninspired or alienated, or they might just watch television.The oldest masks that have been discovered are 9,000 years old, being held by the Musée "Bible et Terre Sainte" (Paris), and the Israel Museum
Israel Museum
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem was founded in 1965 as Israel's national museum. It is situated on a hill in the Givat Ram neighborhood of Jerusalem, near the Bible Lands Museum, the Knesset, the Israeli Supreme Court, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem....
(Jerusalem). Most probably the practice of masking is much older - circa 30,000-40,000 years - but insofar as it involved the use of war-paint, leather, vegetative material or wooden masks, the masks probably haven't been preserved (they are visible only in paleolithic
Paleolithic
The Paleolithic Age, Era or Period, is a prehistoric period of human history distinguished by the development of the most primitive stone tools discovered , and covers roughly 99% of human technological prehistory...
cave drawings, of which dozens have been preserved). At the neanderthal
Neanderthal
The Neanderthal is an extinct member of the Homo genus known from Pleistocene specimens found in Europe and parts of western and central Asia...
Roche-Cotard site in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
a flintstone likeness of a face was found which is about 35,000 years old, but it is not clear that it was intended as a mask. In the Book of Genesis, one can read how Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve were, according to the Genesis creation narratives, the first human couple to inhabit Earth, created by YHWH, the God of the ancient Hebrews...
used fig
Ficus
Ficus is a genus of about 850 species of woody trees, shrubs, vines, epiphytes, and hemiepiphyte in the family Moraceae. Collectively known as fig trees or figs, they are native throughout the tropics with a few species extending into the semi-warm temperate zone. The Common Fig Ficus is a genus of...
leaves to cover "their nakedness" after eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
In the Book of Genesis, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or the tree of knowledge was a tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden. . God directly forbade Adam to eat the fruit of this tree...
. The Carnival of Venice
Carnival of Venice
The Carnival of Venice is an annual festival, held in Venice, Italy. The Carnival starts 40 days before easter and ends on Shrove Tuesday , the day before Ash Wednesday.-History:...
dates back to 1268 AD. The North American Iroquois
Iroquois
The Iroquois , also known as the Haudenosaunee or the "People of the Longhouse", are an association of several tribes of indigenous people of North America...
tribes used masks for healing purposes (see False Face Society
False Face Society
The False Face Society is probably the best known of the medicinal societies among the Iroquois, especially for its dramatic wooden masks. The masks are used in healing rituals which invoke the spirit of an old hunch-backed man. Those cured by the society become members...
). Masks in various forms (sacred or playful) have played a crucial historical role in the development of understandings about "what it means to be human", because they permit the imaginative experience of "what it is like" to be transformed into a different identity.
The face often conveys a person’s intention or character most directly, but the masked persons can gain a certain power or advantage, because they can see through the mask, while remaining unseen themselves in some way. The use of masks therefore facilitates control by the actors over what people are able to see. Inversely, the attraction for the spectators may be that they don't see what they don't want to see, and see something else (that they do want to see).
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a freely-accessible online encyclopedia of philosophy maintained by Stanford University. Each entry is written and maintained by an expert in the field, including professors from over 65 academic institutions worldwide...
,
The mask as symbolic device expresses exactly this combination of "knowledge and lack of knowledge"; the real intentions or motivations that lurk behind the mask are uncertain to the spectator, precisely because of the disguise, even if it is believed or known that they must be there. A character mask however is not simply “a masking of the character who bears it”. In the technical sense used in theatre
Theatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
, it is a specific type of mask.
Namely, it contrasts with a neutral mask, which simply aims to remove one sense of character from the body of the actor bearing it - by hiding a part or all of the physical presence (the actors are present, yet absent; absent, yet present. They are there and not there at the same time; remote and close; themselves, yet strangers - evoking a sense of puzzle
Puzzle
A puzzle is a problem or enigma that tests the ingenuity of the solver. In a basic puzzle, one is intended to put together pieces in a logical way in order to come up with the desired solution...
, suspense
Suspense
Suspense is a feeling of uncertainty and anxiety about the outcome of certain actions, most often referring to an audience's perceptions in a dramatic work. Suspense is not exclusive to fiction, though. Suspense may operate in any situation where there is a lead-up to a big event or dramatic...
, intrigue
Intrigue
Intrigue is a Sámi band formed in 1989 in Kárášjohka Karasjok, Norway, that sings in North Sami and English.- Intrigue 1994 :# Is This The End# Revolution# Star In The Night# Iešjávre luntat# Angel Heart# Need Your Love# Liar# Voodoo Child# Orbin...
, distance, anonymity, a mystery or a mystique). It might be thrilling and captivating, or it might be disturbing and offensive, depending on the context (in actor training, a counter-mask is sometimes also used: the actors are invited to imagine themselves in the opposite role to the ones they are supposed to play, to help define the meaning of their intended role with a clear contrast).
The specific function of a character mask in theatre is to transform the bearer into a different personage, or a different role
Role
A role or a social role is a set of connected behaviours, rights and obligations as conceptualised by actors in a social situation. It is an expected or free or continuously changing behaviour and may have a given individual social status or social position...
– a new character is then fixed and defined by the mask, in a simplified and invariant way, and animated by supporting body movements. Various different character masks (or different “hats”) can in principle be worn by the same actor in succession, in which case the same actor acts out various roles.
The history of theatre shows that masks can have a variety of functions, but the five relevant points are that:
- Unlike neutral masks, which only remove character expression, or aim at no character expression (an impersonal expression), a character mask not only hides some or all of the true expression of the acting person, but in addition aims to express a completely different character, intention or feeling, in an invariant way. The character mask therefore always has a double significance: negating one characteristic and creating another, i.e. hiding and positively expressing characteristics at the same time.
- There is no real point in bearing the mask if there is no one else around, other than for protection or medical purposes etc. The mask assumes a social relationship of some kind, and it mediates that social relationship. It assumes that somebody is watching.
- The important restriction of a character mask is, that the actor is identified by it as a character, and therefore has to act, and be able to act, according to that character. The character mask therefore provides less flexibility than the neutral mask, because if the actor behaves contrary to his character mask, or if he falls out of his role, the act is simply not convincing.
- The disguise of the mask may also offer a certain freedom or behavioural flexibility to the bearers which they would not have without it; if they can consciously choose their mask, and change masks in a convincing way, this enlarges their behavioural flexibility.
- Masks, which cover one meaning with a new meaning, mediate the co-existence of two opposites - identity and non-identity, being and non-being - or fix a transitional state between one form of being and another. The concept of the "mask" is therefore an eminently dialectical category.
In Marx's social theory, the character mask personifies the economic, social, cultural, political or official function which a person or group (or a thing) performs in a particular role, usually in a way which obscures the real relationships involved. When commercial relationships invade every sphere of life in bourgeois society, he argues, people are necessarily forced to act in ways other than they really are, in varying degrees, and therefore are obliged to mask themselves. They may not physically bear any masks or veils, but nevertheless they constantly “act out” roles which the business of making money (or legal requirements) obliges them to do, possibly using various media and props. If they were unwilling to do so, with the appropriate attitude, transactions or functional obligations would fail, and they would not succeed in the marketplace, in public life, or in political service.
Specifically, they must adapt their own behavioural expressions to the behaviour and relationships of things traded in markets, and to abstract legal rules. To reconcile their true personality with their “political personality” or “business personality”, and reconcile personal interests with state or market interests, they have to mask off some or all of their personal motivations. Keeping personal motivations out of the business or official situation indeed becomes regarded as “normal”, “cultured”, “businesslike” and “civilized”. Indeed, people are admired when they can "naturally" fulfill a role, as if they are "made for the role". In that case, it appears that they have made life-choices which placed them in a role in which they can fully express who they are. Incongruence between authentic behaviour and an “act” may then become difficult to detect, and it may be sensed only as a kind of guile.
Abstractly, the masking processes in capitalist society mediate and reconcile social contradictions, which arise from three main sources:
- relations of productionRelations of productionRelations of production is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism, and in Das Kapital...
(ownership relations governing the factors of productionFactors of productionIn economics, factors of production means inputs and finished goods means output. Input determines the quantity of output i.e. output depends upon input. Input is the starting point and output is the end point of production process and such input-output relationship is called a production function...
, defined by property rights), which create and maintain a class-divided society, in which citizens are formally equal under the law but unequal in reality; class interests are represented as the general interest and vice versa. The state formally serves "the general interest" of society, but in reality it mainly serves the general interest of the ruling classRuling classThe term ruling class refers to the social class of a given society that decides upon and sets that society's political policy - assuming there is one such particular class in the given society....
, and more specifically what the eliteEliteElite refers to an exceptional or privileged group that wields considerable power within its sphere of influence...
considers to be the general interest of society. - relations of exchange in the marketplace, where buyers and sellers bargain with each other, and with other buyers and sellers, to get the "best deal" for themselves, although they have to cooperate to get it (they must give something to receive something). Supposedly this is a "level playing fieldLevel playing fieldA level playing field is a concept about fairness, not that each player has an equal chance to succeed, but that they all play by the same set of rules. A metaphorical playing field is said to be level if no external interference affects the ability of the players to compete fairly...
" but in reality it is not, simply because some command vastly greater resources than others. The attempt is made to "personalize" otherwise impersonal or anonymous market relationships expressed by transactions. - the combination of relations of production and exchange, in the general process of competition, in which competitors have an interest in hiding certain information, while presenting themselves outwardly in the most advantageous way. Specifically, people are placed in the position where they both have to competeCompeteCompete can refer to:*Competition - the rivalry of two or more parties*Compete.com - a web traffic analysis company*Compete America - an industry trade group...
and to cooperate with each other at the same time, at a very advanced (or at least civilized) level, and to reconcile this predicament involves them in masking. This requirement exists in all kinds of types of society, but in bourgeois society it takes specific forms, reflecting the element of financial gain which is involved in the way people are relating or are related.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx & Engels had stated that:
This "naked self-interest" seems to contradict the idea of "masking" in bourgeois society. Supposedly market trade creates transparency and an "open society" of free citizens. In reality, Marx & Engels claim, it does not. The "nakedness" may not reveal very much other than the requirements of trade; it is just that the cultural patterns of what is hidden and what is revealed differ from feudal society and ancient society. Even in "naked commerce", the possible methods of "masking" what one is, what one represents or what one does, are extremely diverse. Human languages and numerical systems, for example, offer very subtle distinctions of meaning that can "cover up" something, or present it as different from what it really is.
Sources of the concept
The theatrical mask, expressing an acting role, was supposedly first invented in the West by the Greek actor ThespisThespis
Thespis of Icaria , according to certain Ancient Greek sources and especially Aristotle, was the first person ever to appear on stage as an actor playing a character in a play...
of Attica
Attica
Attica is a historical region of Greece, containing Athens, the current capital of Greece. The historical region is centered on the Attic peninsula, which projects into the Aegean Sea...
(6th century BC) and the Greek Aristotelian
Aristotelianism
Aristotelianism is a tradition of philosophy that takes its defining inspiration from the work of Aristotle. The works of Aristotle were initially defended by the members of the Peripatetic school, and, later on, by the Neoplatonists, who produced many commentaries on Aristotle's writings...
philosopher Theophrastus
Theophrastus
Theophrastus , a Greek native of Eresos in Lesbos, was the successor to Aristotle in the Peripatetic school. He came to Athens at a young age, and initially studied in Plato's school. After Plato's death he attached himself to Aristotle. Aristotle bequeathed to Theophrastus his writings, and...
(circa 371-287 BC) is credited with being the first in the West to define human character in terms of a typology
Personality type
Personality type refers to the psychological classification of different types of individuals. Personality types are sometimes distinguished from personality traits, with the latter embodying a smaller grouping of behavioral tendencies. Types are sometimes said to involve qualitative differences...
of personal strengths and weaknesses. Indeed, Marx’s idea of character masks appears to have originated in his doctoral studies of Greek philosophy
Greek philosophy
Ancient Greek philosophy arose in the 6th century BCE and continued through the Hellenistic period, at which point Ancient Greece was incorporated in the Roman Empire...
in 1837-39, at which time the theatre was one of the few places in Germany where opinions about public affairs could be fairly freely aired, if only in fictionalized form. Independently from Marx, the romantic novelist Jean Paul
Jean Paul
Jean Paul , born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, was a German Romantic writer, best known for his humorous novels and stories.-Life and work:...
also used the concept, in portraying the human problems of individuation
Individuation
Individuation is a concept which appears in numerous fields and may be encountered in work by Arthur Schopenhauer, Carl Jung, Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, David Bohm, and Manuel De Landa...
. Perhaps the concept was also inspired by Hegel's discussion of masks in his The Phenomenology of Spirit.
The shift in Marx’s use of the concept, from dramaturgy
Dramaturgy
Dramaturgy is the art of dramatic composition and the representation of the main elements of drama on the stage. Dramaturgy is a distinct practice separate from play writing and directing, although a single individual may perform any combination of the three. Some dramatists combine writing and...
and philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
to political and economic actors, was in addition probably influenced by his well-known appreciation of drama, including the plays of Goethe and Shakespeare (mentioned in Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
), the novels of Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written...
and Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
, Dante
DANTE
Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...
's and Heinrich Heine
Heinrich Heine
Christian Johann Heinrich Heine was one of the most significant German poets of the 19th century. He was also a journalist, essayist, and literary critic. He is best known outside Germany for his early lyric poetry, which was set to music in the form of Lieder by composers such as Robert Schumann...
's poetry and, possibly, the Italian Commedia dell’arte (troupes of actors, each with a specific role, who travelled through Europe since the mid-16th century and improvised scenarios or skits on stage using masks). Certainly, European writers and thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries (the era of the Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
) were very preoccupied with human character and characterology, many different typologies being proposed; human character was increasingly being defined in a secular way, independent of virtues and vices defined by religion
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
(exemplified respectively by saints and sinners). In the middle ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
the Catholic church banned much theatre, in an effort to root out paganism
Paganism
Paganism is a blanket term, typically used to refer to non-Abrahamic, indigenous polytheistic religious traditions....
; theatre (other than liturgical plays) was often regarded as sinful, and actors as deceivers - acting was viewed as a form of lying since the actors portrayed characters which they were not themselves - assuming a false identity. In the renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
, however, the court masque
Masque
The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment which flourished in 16th and early 17th century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy, in forms including the intermedio...
began to flourish. The growth of commerce
Commerce
While business refers to the value-creating activities of an organization for profit, commerce means the whole system of an economy that constitutes an environment for business. The system includes legal, economic, political, social, cultural, and technological systems that are in operation in any...
and commercial calculation created a new level of human behavioural complexity and motivations, which could not easily be captured in terms of theological categories (or only in a supremely abstract way, rather remote from real life). Criticizing Hegel's philosophy of justice in 1843, Marx concludes:
The first known reference by Marx to character masks in a publication appears in an 1846 circular which Marx drafted as an exile in Brussels. It occurs again in his polemic against Karl Heinzen in 1847, called Moralizing criticism and critical morality and in part 5 of a satirical piece written in 1852 called Heroes of the Exile.
In chapter 4 of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), a story about the sovereign’s dissolution of the French legislative assembly in 1851 in order to reign as imperial dictator, Marx describes how Bonaparte abandoned one character mask for another, after dismissing the Barrot-Falloux Ministry in 1849. In this story, character masks figure very prominently. Contrary to Hegel's belief that states, nations, and individuals are all the time the unconscious tools of the world spirit at work within them, Marx insists that:
The concept is subsequently also mentioned five times in Capital, Volume I
Capital, Volume I
Capital, Volume I , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production, and of the class struggle rooted in the capitalist social relations of...
, and once in Capital, Volume II
Capital, Volume II
Capital, Volume II, subtitled The Process of Circulation of Capital, was prepared by Friedrich Engels from notes left by Karl Marx and published in 1885...
; here the reference is specifically to economic character masks, not political character masks. However, both the official Moscow translation of Capital, Volume I
Capital, Volume I
Capital, Volume I , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production, and of the class struggle rooted in the capitalist social relations of...
into English (essentially the 1887 English edition translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling
Edward Aveling
Edward Bibbins Aveling was a prominent English biology instructor and popular spokesman for Darwinian evolution and atheism. He later met and moved in with Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx and became a socialist activist...
), as well as the revised 1976 Penguin translation of Capital, Volume I
Capital, Volume I
Capital, Volume I , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production, and of the class struggle rooted in the capitalist social relations of...
into English by Ben Fowkes, deleted all reference to character masks, substituting a non-literal translation which is not accurate. The translation by David Fernbach in the Penguin edition of Capital, Volume II
Capital, Volume II
Capital, Volume II, subtitled The Process of Circulation of Capital, was prepared by Friedrich Engels from notes left by Karl Marx and published in 1885...
is accurate.
Marx’s concept of character masks has therefore been little known in the English-speaking world, except through the translated writings of the Frankfurt School
Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
and other (mainly German
Germans
The Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages....
or Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
n) Marxists using the term. Tom Bottomore’s sociological dictionary of Marxist thought has no entry for the important concept of character masks. The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory likewise does not refer to it. David Harvey
David Harvey (geographer)
David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . A leading social theorist of international standing, he received his PhD in Geography from University of Cambridge in 1961. Widely influential, he is among the top 20 most cited...
, the world-famous New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
popularizer of Marx's writings, does not mention the concept at all in works such as his The Limits to Capital. There is no entry for the concept in James Russell’s Marx-Engels Dictionary or in Terrell Carver’s A Marx Dictionary.
However, Dieter Claessens
Dieter Claessens
Dieter Claessens was a German sociologist and anthropologist.- Life :Returning as POW from the Soviet Union Dieter Claessens studied sociology, anthropology, and psychology in Berlin, where he got his doctorate from the Freie Universität in 1957...
mentions the concept in his 1992 Lexikon, there is another mention in Lexikon zur Soziologie and the more recent German-language Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism has a substantive entry for character masks by Wolfgang Fritz Haug
Wolfgang Fritz Haug
Wolfgang Fritz Haug was from 1979 till his retirement in 2001 professor of philosophy at the Free University Berlin, where he had also studied romance languages and religious studies and taken his PhD .Haug coined the term commodity aestheticism...
. Haug suggests that the conjunction of “character” and “mask” is “specifically German”, since in the French, English, Spanish, and Italian editions of Capital, Volume I
Capital, Volume I
Capital, Volume I , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production, and of the class struggle rooted in the capitalist social relations of...
, the term “mask”, "bearer" or “role” is used, but not “character mask”. But since “character mask” is a technical term in theatre and costume hire, it is not “specifically German”, and most existing translations are simply inaccurate. However, Haug is correct insofar as "character mask" as a sociological or psychological term is rarely used by non-German speakers. Jochen Hörisch claims that "despite its systematic importance, the concept of character masks was conspicuously taboo in the dogmatic interpretation of Marx". Thus, for example, although the concept was known from Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
, it is never mentioned in the Marxist-Leninist dictionaries and lexicons of East Germany as a specifically Marxist category. Similarly, the concept does not occur in the Marxist literature of China and Japan.
Translation issues in Das Kapital
The relevant five passages in Marx's Capital, Volume ICapital, Volume I
Capital, Volume I , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production, and of the class struggle rooted in the capitalist social relations of...
, with the translation corrected to restore the original literal meaning according to the German edition, are the following (the page references provided in the notes are to the Penguin edition in English):
In Capital, Volume II
Capital, Volume II
Capital, Volume II, subtitled The Process of Circulation of Capital, was prepared by Friedrich Engels from notes left by Karl Marx and published in 1885...
, there is also the following passage:
In Capital, Volume III
Capital, Volume III
Capital, Volume III, subtitled The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, was prepared by Friedrich Engels from notes left by Karl Marx and published in 1894...
, Marx does not explicitly refer to character masks. He only notes, that the theories of the political economists invert cause and effect, means and ends, as well as objects and subjects, which has the result that the capitalist system can no longer be understood in a theoretically integrated way, even though people experience it all in one go, as a total experience. Marx aims to show that this misapprehension is the natural effect of the observable form taken by business relations, which mask the real social relations involved. The overall result, he suggests, is a mosaic
Mosaic
Mosaic is the art of creating images with an assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials. It may be a technique of decorative art, an aspect of interior decoration, or of cultural and spiritual significance as in a cathedral...
of eclectic, fragmented theories which mask the real essence of the matter - they suffice for pragmatic policy purposes perhaps, within the limits of their application, but are scientifically incoherent from the point of view of explaining the capitalist system as a whole.
Marx’s argument in Das Kapital
In the Preface to the first edition of Capital, Volume ICapital, Volume I
Capital, Volume I , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production, and of the class struggle rooted in the capitalist social relations of...
, Marx noted explicitly:
He goes on to explain why:
Marx's idea is, that in order to survive at all, human beings necessarily depend on co-operative social relations; if they did not enter into these social relations, they would be dead as a doornail. According to Marx, what distinguishes a master-builder from a bee is that the master-builder has a conscious purpose for what he does, whereas the bee just follows a biological program. So, in interacting, human beings somehow have to interpret or assume how their own purpose is related to the purpose of other people. By that very fact, social roles are conferred on them, whatever they might think about that. Another way of putting this is, that individuals can exist as individuals only in relation to other individuals, and, as they interact, they place each other in roles, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Marx’s subsequent argument about character masks in capitalism can be summarized in six steps:
- Roles: The first step in his argument is that when people engage in trade, run a business or work in a job, they adopt and personify (personally represent) a certain function, role or behaviour pattern which is required of them to serve their obligations; their consent to the applicable rules is assumed to succeed in activities. They have to act this way, because of the co-operative relationships they necessarily have to work with in the division of labourDivision of labourDivision of labour is the specialisation of cooperative labour in specific, circumscribed tasks and likeroles. Historically an increasingly complex division of labour is closely associated with the growth of total output and trade, the rise of capitalism, and of the complexity of industrialisation...
. People have to conform to them, whether they like it or not. To work together, they have to work together. Subjectively they may know very well that this is the case, and they may indeed be required to know it in order to function; nevertheless, these social relationships are a real constraint, which they cannot simply “jump out of”. They are initially born into a world in which these social relationships already exist, and “socialized” into them in the process of becoming “well-adjusted adults” - to the point where they internalize their meaning, and accept them as a natural reality. They are part of a class-divided social order already before they are able to know what it means. Consequently, they can learn to act spontaneously and automatically in a way consistent with these social relations, even if that is not always an unproblematic process (the cultural notions which different social classes regard as normal and appropriate may clash).
- Interests: The second step in his argument is that in acting according to an economic function, employees serve the impersonal (business, legal or political) interests of an abstract authorityAuthorityThe word Authority is derived mainly from the Latin word auctoritas, meaning invention, advice, opinion, influence, or command. In English, the word 'authority' can be used to mean power given by the state or by academic knowledge of an area .-Authority in Philosophy:In...
, which may have little or nothing to do with their own personal interests. They have to keep the two kinds of interests separated, and “manage them” appropriately in a “mature, professional” way – perhaps with a poker faceBlank expressionA blank expression, also known as poker face is a facial expression characterized by the neutral position of facial features and implies a lack of strong emotion...
. In this way, they “personify” or “represent” interests, and who they personally are, may well be completely irrelevant to that – it is relevant only to the extent that their true personality fits with the role (“the right person for the right job”, or “the function creates the organ”). People are slotted into functions insofar as they have characteristics which are at least compatible with the functions. They always have a choice in how they perform their role and how they act it out, but they have no choice about taking it on. If they succeed in their role, they can advance their position or career, but if they fail to live up to it, they are demoted or fired. Capitalism is about making money, and to make money, people have accept and to take on certain roles; if they did not make money, they would become destitute, or be completely dependent on the charity of others or on social insurance. Human individuality is then conceptualized in terms of the relationship between buyer and seller. - Masking: The third step in his argument is, that the practices just described necessarily lead to the “masking” of behaviours and personalities, and to a transformation of personality and consciousness. It is not just that people can rarely be “all of themselves” while performing a specialized function in the division of labourDivision of labourDivision of labour is the specialisation of cooperative labour in specific, circumscribed tasks and likeroles. Historically an increasingly complex division of labour is closely associated with the growth of total output and trade, the rise of capitalism, and of the complexity of industrialisation...
, and must also express something new and different. There are also many competing, conflicting and contradictory interests at stake – and these must somehow be dealt with and reconciled by the living person. Different interests have to be constantly mediated and defended in everyday behaviour, with the aid of character masks; these masks exist to mediate conflict. It means that people are obliged or forced to express certain qualities and repress other qualities in themselves. In doing this, however, their own consciousness and personality is altered. To be part of an organizationOrganizationAn organization is a social group which distributes tasks for a collective goal. The word itself is derived from the Greek word organon, itself derived from the better-known word ergon - as we know `organ` - and it means a compartment for a particular job.There are a variety of legal types of...
, or “rise to the top” of an organization, they have to be able to “act out” everything that it requires in a convincing way, and that can only happen if they either have, or acquire, real characteristics which are at least compatible with it. That requires not just an “acculturation” process, but also sufficient behavioural flexibility, intelligenceIntelligenceIntelligence has been defined in different ways, including the abilities for abstract thought, understanding, communication, reasoning, learning, planning, emotional intelligence and problem solving....
, acumen and creativityCreativityCreativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new that has some kind of value. What counts as "new" may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs...
- so that a person does not inappropriately “fall out of the role” (in the movies, this is called a blooperBlooperA blooper, also known as an outtake or boner is a short sequence of a film or video production, usually a deleted scene, containing a mistake made by a member of the cast or crew. It also refers to an error made during a live radio or TV broadcast or news report, usually in terms of misspoken words...
or an outtakeOuttakeAn outtake is a portion of a work that is removed in the editing process and not included in the work's final, publicly released version. In the digital era, significant outtakes have been appended to CD and DVD reissues of many albums and films as bonus tracks or features, in film often, but not...
). They actually have to “be” (personify) what the function requires, their identity and the function must match sufficiently. Discord between identity and function is tolerated only in contexts where it does not matter. The relations of productionRelations of productionRelations of production is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism, and in Das Kapital...
defining the distinctive mode of productionMode of productionIn the writings of Karl Marx and the Marxist theory of historical materialism, a mode of production is a specific combination of:...
of a society (organization, property rights, technologies) create types of character masks which have an historically specific meaning. The masks which are accepted and credible in one time or place, may not be in another.
- Inversion: The fourth step in his argument concerns an inversion of subjectSubject-Philosophy:*Hypokeimenon or subiectum, in metaphysics, the essential being of a thing**Subject , a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness, or a relationship with another entity...
and objectEntityAn entity is something that has a distinct, separate existence, although it need not be a material existence. In particular, abstractions and legal fictions are usually regarded as entities. In general, there is also no presumption that an entity is animate.An entity could be viewed as a set...
. It is not just that the commercial relationships between things being traded begins to dominate and reshape human behaviour, and remake social relations. In addition, human relations become the property of things. Inanimate things (commodities, services, financial claims, legal entities), and the relationships between them, are endowed with human characteristics (or even a “soul”). They become “actors” relating in their own right to which people much adjust their behaviour, and they are also theorized in that way. A symbolic language and way of communicating emerges, in which inanimate “things” are personified. A market (or a price, or a stock, or a state etc.) is said to “do this, or do that” - it gains an independent power to act. Marx calls this commodity fetishismCommodity fetishismIn Marx's critique of political economy, commodity fetishism denotes the mystification of human relations said to arise out of the growth of market trade, when social relationships between people are expressed as, mediated by and transformed into, objectified relationships between things .The...
(or more generally, "fetishism"), and he regards it as a necessary reificationReification (Marxism)Reification or Versachlichung, literally "objectification" or regarding something as a separate business matter) is the consideration of an abstraction, relation or object as if they had human or living existence and abilities, when in reality they do not...
of the symbolizations required to traverse life’s situations in bourgeois society. It is necessary, because the relationships between people are constantly being mediated by the relationships between things, where any individual has little or no control over that. People have to accept that, and work with it, like it or not. If however persons are treated as if they are things, and things are treated as if they are persons, then the effect of that is, that character masks may acquire greater weight, power and importance than the persons behind them. It means that people are eventually unable to take their mask off, as Marx himself suggests, even if they would like to, because the masks are controlled by the business relationships between things being traded, and by broader legal, class, or political interests. If they are actually unable to take the mask off, they have effectively submitted fully to the power of abstract, impersonal marketMarketA market is one of many varieties of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange. While parties may exchange goods and services by barter, most markets rely on sellers offering their goods or services in exchange for money from buyers...
forces and legal rules, or at least they accept, conform and obey these external requirements fully; it rules their minds.
- Alienation: The fifth step in the argument is that on the world’s stage, the “dance of masked people, and of the things they have endowed with an independent power to act and relate” - in a reified “theatre of life” where the essence of the matter differs from how it appears - leads to pervasive human alienationSocial alienationThe term social alienation has many discipline-specific uses; Roberts notes how even within the social sciences, it “is used to refer both to a personal psychological state and to a type of social relationship”...
(the estrangement of people from themselves, and from others in contacts which have become impersonal and functional). It durably distorts human consciousness at the very least, and at worst it completely deforms human consciousness. It mystifies the real nature, and the real relationships, among people and things - even to the point where they can hardly be conceived anymore as they really are. The masks influence the very way in which realities are categorized. People’s theorizing about the world also becomes detached from the relevant contexts, and the interpretation of reality then involves multiple “layers” of meanings, in which “part of the story” hides the “whole story”. What the whole story is, may itself become an almost impenetrable mystery, about which it may indeed be argued that it cannot be solved. The real truth about a person may be considered unknowable, but as long as the person can function normally, it may not matter; one is judged simply according to the function performed - with the aid of character masks, the pretence is kept up. In what Marx calls “ideological consciousness”, interests and realities are presented other than they really are, in justifying and defining the meaning of what happens. People may believe they can no longer solve problems, simply because they lack the categories to “think” them, and it requires a great deal of critical and self-critical thought, as well as optimismOptimismThe Oxford English Dictionary defines optimism as having "hopefulness and confidence about the future or successful outcome of something; a tendency to take a favourable or hopeful view." The word is originally derived from the Latin optimum, meaning "best." Being optimistic, in the typical sense...
, to get beyond the surface of things to the root of the problems.
- Development: the last step is, that Marx argues that effectively capitalist market society develops human beings in an inverted way. The capitalist economy is not primarily organized for the people, but people are organized for the capitalist economy, to serve other people who already have plenty of wealth. In an increasingly complex division of labourDivision of labourDivision of labour is the specialisation of cooperative labour in specific, circumscribed tasks and likeroles. Historically an increasingly complex division of labour is closely associated with the growth of total output and trade, the rise of capitalism, and of the complexity of industrialisation...
offering little job security, there is more and more external pressure forcing people to act in all kinds of different roles, masking themselves in the process. Yet, by that very fact, they also acquire more and more behavioural and semiotic flexibility, and develop more and more relational skills and connections. They have to “be” many different things, to survive. The necessity to work and relate in order to survive – while producing a growing mass of capital wealth – thus accomplishes the “economic formation of society” at the same time, even if in this society people lack much control over the social relations in which they must participate. It is just that the whole development occurs in an imbalanced, unequal and uncoordinated way, in which the development of some becomes conditional on the lack of development by others. Commercial interests and political class interests ultimately prevail over the expressed interests of individuals. In the periodic economic crises, masses of people are condemned to the unemploymentUnemploymentUnemployment , as defined by the International Labour Organization, occurs when people are without jobs and they have actively sought work within the past four weeks...
scrapheap, no matter what skills they may have; they are incompatible with the functioning of the bourgeois system, “collateral rubbish” that is swept aside. Even highly developed people can find that society regards them as worthless – which quite often tends to radicalize their opinions (see extremismExtremismExtremism is any ideology or political act far outside the perceived political center of a society; or otherwise claimed to violate common moral standards...
and radicalizationRadicalizationRadicalization is the process in which an individual changes from passiveness or activism to become more revolutionary, militant or extremist. Radicalization is often associated with youth, adversity, alienation, social exclusion, poverty, or the perception of injustice to self or others.-...
).
A seventh step could in principle be added, namely a big crisis in society which sparks off a revolution and overturns the existing capitalist system. In that case, it could be argued, the false masks are torn off, and people have to stand up for what they really are, and what they really believe in. But that is a possibility which Marx did not comprehensively theorize in Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
. His experience as an exile
Exile
Exile means to be away from one's home , while either being explicitly refused permission to return and/or being threatened with imprisonment or death upon return...
was only as commentator on the revolutions of 1848
Revolutions of 1848
The European Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Spring of Nations, Springtime of the Peoples or the Year of Revolution, were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe in 1848. It was the first Europe-wide collapse of traditional authority, but within a year reactionary...
and the Paris Commune
Paris Commune
The Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution...
. He does not himself provide any clear picture of a society in which character masks would become unnecessary (unnecessary, because everybody would be able to be naturally themselves all the time). In Capital he comments only that:
In The Age of Extremes, the last sequel in a series of books, the eminent Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm
Eric Hobsbawm
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm , CH, FBA, is a British Marxist historian, public intellectual, and author...
describes the "tormented history" of the 20th century. It combined enormous economic and population growth with a never-ending succession of wars, plagues, upheavals and disasters. He bemoans the failure of prediction
Prediction
A prediction or forecast is a statement about the way things will happen in the future, often but not always based on experience or knowledge...
: how badly people have been able to understand their own future. Arguably, however, this pessimism is itself a "mask", since one can prove that at least some people accurately forecast each of the main historical events that happened; the problem is not primarily with the forecasting, but whether the forecasts are taken seriously. If people think they will lose more than they gain if the forecast is true, or if it becomes known, they are likely to mask the forecast - i.e. a true, honest forecast may not be in their interest, or they just don't want to believe it because it doesn't suit them. They may not be in a position to act on the information or prefer to believe what is good for themselves, even if it masks the truth.
Engels on character masks
The "mask metaphor" also appears already in the early writings of Friedrich EngelsFriedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
, and his influence on Marx is often underestimated. In 1894, Engels referred to character masks in his Preface to Capital, Volume III
Capital, Volume III
Capital, Volume III, subtitled The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, was prepared by Friedrich Engels from notes left by Karl Marx and published in 1894...
- when rebutting a criticism of Marx's theory by Achille Loria
Achille Loria
Achille Loria was an Italian political economist.He was educated at the lyceum of his native city and the universities of Bologna, Pavia, Rome, Berlin, and London and graduated at the University of Bologna...
. This was 11 years after Marx died, and after a lot of effort to get Marx's manuscript to a publishable standard. Rather unkindly and cuttingly, Engels wrote:
Sganarella and Dulcamara were originally characters in the Commedia dell'arte
Commedia dell'arte
Commedia dell'arte is a form of theatre characterized by masked "types" which began in Italy in the 16th century, and was responsible for the advent of the actress and improvised performances based on sketches or scenarios. The closest translation of the name is "comedy of craft"; it is shortened...
(Sganarelle is also a mistrustful bourgeois character - in Molière
Molière
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature...
's 1660 play Sganarelle, ou le Cocu imaginaire - who believes his wife is cheating him, and Dulcamera is the itinerant medicine man - essentially a quack - in Gaetano Donizetti
Gaetano Donizetti
Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti was an Italian composer from Bergamo, Lombardy. His best-known works are the operas L'elisir d'amore , Lucia di Lammermoor , and Don Pasquale , all in Italian, and the French operas La favorite and La fille du régiment...
's opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
L'Elisir d'Amore
L'elisir d'amore
L'elisir d'amore is an opera by the Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti. It is a melodramma giocoso in two acts...
). Leaving aside Engels's personal attack, Engels's substantive sociological suggestion seems to be that:
- in a society's progressive, constructive era, its best characters come to the fore, and no character masks are necessary for them.
- when society degenerates and submits to intolerable conditions, it not only gives rise to all sorts of dubious, talentless characters who cannot lead the way forward, but also society's dignityDignityDignity is a term used in moral, ethical, and political discussions to signify that a being has an innate right to respect and ethical treatment. It is an extension of the Enlightenment-era concepts of inherent, inalienable rights...
can only be sustained by masking off the social contradictions. - based on comprehensive knowledge of a country and its national psychologyNational psychologyNational Psychology refers to the distinctive psychological make-up of particular nations, ethnic groups or people, and to the comparative study of those characteristics in social psychology, sociology, political science and anthropology....
, it is possible to specify the types of personalities who exemplify the nature of the era.
The problem with this kind of argument is just that, in defining the meaning of what is happening in society, it is very difficult to provide definite scientific proof that this meaning is the objective truth. It remains an interpretation, which may make sense of things at a certain level, without providing the whole truth. Engels's comment illustrates that the concept of character masks is not infrequently used in a polemical way.
Engels, like Marx, also used the notion of a “mask” in the more general sense of a political “guise” or “disguise”, for example in several of his historical analyses about religious movements. Engels argues in Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany (1851) that:
In his article On the history of early Christianity (1894–95), Engels suggests that:
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
's idea of character masks and Alasdair MacIntyre
Alasdair MacIntyre
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre is a British philosopher primarily known for his contribution to moral and political philosophy but known also for his work in history of philosophy and theology...
's idea of "character" in his famous book After Virtue
After Virtue
After Virtue is a book on moral philosophy by Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre provides a bleak view of the state of modern moral discourse, regarding it as failing to be rational, and failing to admit to being irrational. He claims that older forms of moral discourse were in better shape,...
are similar to the use of the term "character masks" as ideal type
Ideal type
Ideal type , also known as pure type, is a typological term most closely associated with antipositivist sociologist Max Weber . For Weber, the conduct of social science depends upon the construction of hypothetical concepts in the abstract...
, stereotype
Stereotype
A stereotype is a popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals. The concepts of "stereotype" and "prejudice" are often confused with many other different meanings...
or archetype
Archetype
An archetype is a universally understood symbol or term or pattern of behavior, a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated...
by Engels and Mehring in the 1890s - certain people or types personify the culture of an era by giving a particularly clear expression of what it is really about (see also stock character
Stock character
A Stock character is a fictional character based on a common literary or social stereotype. Stock characters rely heavily on cultural types or names for their personality, manner of speech, and other characteristics. In their most general form, stock characters are related to literary archetypes,...
).
Marxist theories about character masks
In his biography of Marx, Franz MehringFranz Mehring
Franz Erdmann Mehring , was a German publicist, politician and historian.-Early years:Franz Mehring was born 27 February 1846 in Schlawe, Pomerania, the son of a bourgeois family.-Political career:...
refers to character masks, but more in the sense of Weberian ideal type
Ideal type
Ideal type , also known as pure type, is a typological term most closely associated with antipositivist sociologist Max Weber . For Weber, the conduct of social science depends upon the construction of hypothetical concepts in the abstract...
s or stereotypical characters. The Marx-Studien published by Rudolf Hilferding
Rudolf Hilferding
Rudolf Hilferding was an Austrian-born Marxist economist, leading socialist theorist, politician and chief theoretician for the Social Democratic Party of Germany during the Weimar Republic, almost universally recognized as the SPD's foremost theoretician of his century, and a...
and Max Adler
Max Adler
Max Adler may refer to:*Max Adler , American businessman and philanthropist*Max Adler , Austrian social theorist*Max Adler , American actor...
referred to character masks as a theoretical category. The communist dramatist Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...
made extensive use of neutral and character masks, like Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written...
(who, however, joined Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
's National Fascist Party
National Fascist Party
The National Fascist Party was an Italian political party, created by Benito Mussolini as the political expression of fascism...
). In plays such as The Caucasian Chalk Circle
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
The Caucasian Chalk Circle is a play by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. An example of Brecht's epic theatre, the play is a parable about a peasant girl who rescues a baby and becomes a better mother than its natural parents....
and The Good Person of Szechwan
The Good Person of Szechwan
The Good Person of Szechwan is a play written by the German theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht, in collaboration with Margarete Steffin and Ruth Berlau. The play was begun in 1938 but not completed until 1943, while the author was in exile in the United States...
, the masks support what Brecht called "the alienation effect" (see distancing effect). The imagery of masks was an important inspiration for surrealist art, from James Ensor
James Ensor
James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor was a Flemish-Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for almost his entire life...
to André Breton
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
. According to Breton's first Surrealist Manifesto
Surrealist Manifesto
Two Surrealist Manifestos were issued by the Surrealist movement, in 1924 and 1929. The first was written by André Breton, the second was supervised by him. Breton drafted a third Surrealist manifesto which was never issued.-First manifesto:...
, surrealistic art excels when it "gives to the abstract the mask of the concrete, or the opposite." Karl Renner
Karl Renner
Karl Renner was an Austrian politician. He was born in Untertannowitz in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and died in Vienna...
and Franz Leopold Neumann
Franz Leopold Neumann
Franz Leopold Neumann was a German-Jewish left-wing political activist, Marxist theorist and labor lawyer, who became a political scientist in exile and is best known for his theoretical analyses of National Socialism. He studied in Germany and the United Kingdom, and spent the last phase of...
used the concept in the context of a sociological analysis of bourgeois law. In a radical synthesis of Marx and Freud, Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry...
created the concept of "character armor". It refers to the total "harness" of physiological defences which mask off the pain of repressing feelings - feelings which the individual is not permitted to express in civil life (involving muscular rigidities, inability to feel much, dammed-up sexual energy, etc.).
György Lukács referred to the “very important category of economic character masks”. However he restricted the application of the idea to capitalists only, claiming that Marx had considered capitalists as “mere character masks” – meaning that capitalists, as the personifications ("agents") of capital, did not do anything "without making a business out of it", given that their activity consisted of the correct management and calculation of the objective effects of economic laws. Marx himself never simply equated capitalists with their character masks; they were human beings entangled in a certain life predicament, like anybody else. If Marx discussed capitalists purely in terms of their function, that was because individual differences were irrelevant to what the function required them to do - either they adapted themselves to the function, or failing that, could not function as capitalists. At most one could say that capitalists had more to hide, and that some had personal qualities enabling them to succeed in their function, while others lacked the personal prerequisites. According to Lukács, the character masks of the bourgeoisie
Bourgeoisie
In sociology and political science, bourgeoisie describes a range of groups across history. In the Western world, between the late 18th century and the present day, the bourgeoisie is a social class "characterized by their ownership of capital and their related culture." A member of the...
express a “necessary false consciousness” about the class consciousness
Class consciousness
Class consciousness is consciousness of one's social class or economic rank in society. From the perspective of Marxist theory, it refers to the self-awareness, or lack thereof, of a particular class; its capacity to act in its own rational interests; or its awareness of the historical tasks...
of the proletariat
Proletariat
The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...
.
In the post-war tradition of Western Marxism
Western Marxism
Western Marxism is a term used to describe a wide variety of Marxist theoreticians based in Western and Central Europe, in contrast with philosophy in the Soviet Union...
, the concept of character masks was theorized about especially by scholars of the Frankfurt School
Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
, and other Marxists influenced by this school, though it also appears in Marxist-existentialist thought, such as in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
. Writing about the Marxist theorist Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno was a German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist known for his critical theory of society....
, a leader of the Frankfurt School, Rolf Tiedemann comments:
Adorno argues that Marx explained convincingly why the appearance-form and the real nature of human relations often does not directly coincide, not on the strength of a metaphysical philosophy such as transcendental realism
Transcendental Realism
Transcendental realism is a concept stemming from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant that implies individuals have a perfect understanding of the limitations of their own minds.-Kantian roots:...
, but by inferring the social meaning of human relations from the way they observably appear in practical life - using systematic critical and logical thought as a tool of discovery. Every step in the analysis can be logically and empirically tested. The assumption is only, that these relations cannot mean "just any old thing", because they require shared meanings in order to be able to function and communicate at all. These shared presuppositions have an intrinsic rationality
Rationality
In philosophy, rationality is the exercise of reason. It is the manner in which people derive conclusions when considering things deliberately. It also refers to the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons for belief, or with one's actions with one's reasons for action...
, because human behaviour - ultimately driven by the need to survive - is to a large extent purposive (teleological), and not arbitrary or random (though some of it may be). The apparent "irrationality" of emotions and desires is in reality also strongly linked to human purposes, and therefore explicable. Feelings appear "unreasonable" only because it is unclear what role they play in human motivations - if one has never had a feeling, it is difficult to understand that feeling - but if an emotion or desire is considered "inappropriate", that does not of itself mean that it isn't part of the total behavioural strategy an organism
Organism
In biology, an organism is any contiguous living system . In at least some form, all organisms are capable of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development, and maintenance of homoeostasis as a stable whole.An organism may either be unicellular or, as in the case of humans, comprise...
with a nervous system
Nervous system
The nervous system is an organ system containing a network of specialized cells called neurons that coordinate the actions of an animal and transmit signals between different parts of its body. In most animals the nervous system consists of two parts, central and peripheral. The central nervous...
has in coping with situations.
The human meanings are therefore not indeterminate, but determinate, being controlled by the real things which people have to do in life. To achieve a goal and get something done, people necessarily have to think in a certain way, or at least the possible variability of their thinking is usually limited (see also parametric determinism
Parametric determinism
Parametric determinism refers to a Marxist interpretation of the course of history formulated by Prof. Ernest Mandel, and it could be viewed as one variant of Karl Marx's historical materialism or as a philosophy of history....
). If there is a very great difference between what they think and what they do, causing confusion, this can be solved by getting back to the related practical activities. Philosophy is thereby "sublated", because the focus shifts from abstract generalities to explaining the meaning of specific practical activity.
The Frankfurt School was especially interested in how capitalist market culture affects human subjectivities and personal life, and the ways in which it might distort the “authentic self” and estrange human relations. It asked question such as, "What human factors made Nazism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
possible?". In this way, the German Marxist scholars tried to focus problems of the human psyche, by relating them to the capitalist system which gives rise to them - a phenomenological
Phenomenology (science)
The term phenomenology in science is used to describe a body of knowledge that relates empirical observations of phenomena to each other, in a way that is consistent with fundamental theory, but is not directly derived from theory. For example, we find the following definition in the Concise...
“science of the human subject” intended to avoid both psychologism
Psychologism
Psychologism is a generic type of position in philosophy according to which psychology plays a central role in grounding or explaining some other, non-psychological type of fact or law...
and sociologism. They were also concerned with how people might rebel
Rebellion
Rebellion, uprising or insurrection, is a refusal of obedience or order. It may, therefore, be seen as encompassing a range of behaviors aimed at destroying or replacing an established authority such as a government or a head of state...
against or liberate
Liberty
Liberty is a moral and political principle, or Right, that identifies the condition in which human beings are able to govern themselves, to behave according to their own free will, and take responsibility for their actions...
themselves from the character-masks of life in bourgeois society, through asserting themselves authentically as social
Social
The term social refers to a characteristic of living organisms...
, political and sexual
Human sexuality
Human sexuality is the awareness of gender differences, and the capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Human sexuality can also be described as the way someone is sexually attracted to another person whether it is to opposite sexes , to the same sex , to either sexes , or not being...
beings.
- This type of analysis suggests that human alienationSocial alienationThe term social alienation has many discipline-specific uses; Roberts notes how even within the social sciences, it “is used to refer both to a personal psychological state and to a type of social relationship”...
is never complete, because in the end people cannot very well deny their true nature, no matter how cleverly they mask themselves or manipulate their behaviour. If there is too much “masking”, human processes become dysfunctional, and break down; in order to operate, the symbolSymbolA symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
systems ultimately do require shared truths which are the same for all, or are accepted by all. Nevertheless categories and distinctions can be contrived so that some are included, and others are excluded - creating "insiders" and "outsiders". This can make it much more difficult to understand the true significance of observable social phenomena, i.e. to understand the full story behind what one can see. The trick in capitalist society is just to understand the true motivation of others, while masking your own. But while part of reality is masked, the truth is usually bound to “leak out” in one form or another, anyway. The mask can hide the face, but it cannot hide the movements of the whole body – Michel FoucaultMichel FoucaultMichel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
in fact claimed provocatively that in contemporary Western cultureWestern cultureWestern culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
, "the project of the science of the subject has gravitated, in ever-narrowing circles, around the question of sex." Others nowadays argue the issue is not really about sexSexIn biology, sex is a process of combining and mixing genetic traits, often resulting in the specialization of organisms into a male or female variety . Sexual reproduction involves combining specialized cells to form offspring that inherit traits from both parents...
as such, but about gaining a meaningful, unmasked intimacy, or more generally, about gaining access to the other, and to what the other has.
- The “human drama of life” in a world of masks then concerns the issue of whether people can find a place in the world in which they can finally take their masks off, and be truly themselves (a comedyComedyComedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...
), or whether they remain trapped and die in an estranged, inauthentic existence with their masks still on (a tragedyTragedyTragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of...
; the intermediate variant is a tragicomedyTragicomedyTragicomedy is fictional work that blends aspects of the genres of tragedy and comedy. In English literature, from Shakespeare's time to the nineteenth century, tragicomedy referred to a serious play with either a happy ending or enough jokes throughout the play to lighten the mood.-Classical...
). In this sense, "dramatizing" means acting out a human predicament to engender a sympathetic understanding of it, to illuminate "a world" in which people may live, so that a more objective, understanding appraisal of it is possible. In postmodern thinking, overcoming the limitations of individual understandings depends greatly on the willingness to "see it their way", or "stand in their shoes". If the mismatches (dislocations between person and position) result from “wrong” choices by the individual, the moralMoralA moral is a message conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim...
sentiment is to blame the individual, but if the mismatches arise from uncontrollable circumstances, the individual can hardly be blamed; in that case, the community or state of which he is part may be held responsible, or the mismatches may be regarded as accidents (or unsolvable "mysteries"). Consequently, the public cultural controversies of bourgeois society typically converge on the question of how much control people really can have, are allowed to have, or can be expected to have over their circumstances. In liberal-democratic societies, it is primarily a debate about the limits and potentials for human freedom in civil society - and how much can be, or should be, tolerated; and about the entitlement to public funds by different individuals, organizations and groups of citizens ("why they should, or should not get the money"). Which positions seem credible, is influenced by the norms of social classes and distinctive groupings in society; since they can change, ideas of "normNorm (sociology)Social norms are the accepted behaviors within a society or group. This sociological and social psychological term has been defined as "the rules that a group uses for appropriate and inappropriate values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. These rules may be explicit or implicit...
ality" and "human rightsHuman rightsHuman rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...
" can also change. People have no excuse for not enjoying life, if the resources are available for them to enjoy it; if they do not enjoy it nevertheless, this is regarded as unreasonable and a personal failing (or even as "inhuman").
- The “masking” of an alienated life, and the attempts to counteract it, are thought of in these Marxist theories as co-existing but contradictory processes, involving constant conflicts between what people really are, how they present themselves, and what they should be according to some external requirement imposed on them – a conflict which is not simply puberal, but which persists throughout life, and thus involves a perpetual struggle from which people can rarely totally withdraw – because they still depend for their existence on others, and have to face them, masked or unmasked. They have no choice about being affected by the struggle, only about what side they decide to take in it. Essentially it is a contestation of normNorm (sociology)Social norms are the accepted behaviors within a society or group. This sociological and social psychological term has been defined as "the rules that a group uses for appropriate and inappropriate values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. These rules may be explicit or implicit...
s, which could be the norms of social classes, ethnic groups, some influential lobbyLobbyingLobbying is the act of attempting to influence decisions made by officials in the government, most often legislators or members of regulatory agencies. Lobbying is done by various people or groups, from private-sector individuals or corporations, fellow legislators or government officials, or...
, managers etc. Behind these norms, there are material interests (who gets the money, power, status and access to resources). The distinctive pattern of these contradictory processes is very much shaped by the overall cultureCultureCulture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
of the epoch, based on the given trading practices, organizational forms, the stock of ideas inherited from the past, and the technologies used to produce things. It follows that different times call for different character masks.
To the extent that the commercial and public roles impose heavy personal burdens, and little space exists anymore “to be oneself”, people can experience personal stress, mental suffering and personal estrangement (alienation
Social alienation
The term social alienation has many discipline-specific uses; Roberts notes how even within the social sciences, it “is used to refer both to a personal psychological state and to a type of social relationship”...
), sometimes to the point where they “lose themselves”, and no longer “know who they are” (identity crisis
Identity crisis (psychology)
"Identity crisis is the failure to achieve ego identity during adolescence." The term was coined by the psychologist Erik Erikson. The stage of psychosocial development in which identity crisis may occur is called the Identity Cohesion versus Role Confusion stage...
). There are then five main possibilities:
- People may continue to function routinely ("the silent compulsion of economic relations"), sublimatingSublimation (psychology)In psychology, sublimation is a mature type of defence mechanism where socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are consciously transformed into socially acceptable actions or behaviour, possibly converting the initial impulse in the long term...
, suppressing or masking the contradictions, perhaps in a schizoid way, or by becoming withdrawn. - People may learn flexibly to project many different "selves" to different people and in different situations, as in Robert Jay LiftonRobert Jay LiftonRobert Jay Lifton is an American psychiatrist and author, chiefly known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of war and political violence and for his theory of thought reform...
's protean self. - People may mutate, change abruptly or re-invent themselves, letting go altogether of their old identity, and living according to a completely new identity, whether voluntarily or because they are forced to do so.
- People may be unable to function socially anymore at all, because they cannot reconcile their own way of being anymore with what is required of them – and thus cannot “keep up pretenses”. Their self-contradictory situation may distort their consciousness so strongly, that normal (or acceptable) behaviour breaks down (a topic explored by Joseph GabelJoseph GabelJoseph Gabel was a French Hungarian-born sociologist and philosopher. His work was always strongly influenced by Marxism but he was against Stalinism and critical of the work of Louis Althusser....
, Gilles DeleuzeGilles DeleuzeGilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
and Félix GuattariFélix GuattariPierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy...
). This is likely to happen, especially if they are already vulnerable in some relevant way. - People can also take charge of their lives in the theatre of life, rejecting a victim role. If they are no longer afraid, despondent or downhearted, and don't allow themselves to be forced anymore into a role they hate, they can feel more free to discover the life they want themselves. Or, they can engage in an identity politicsIdentity politicsIdentity politics are political arguments that focus upon the self interest and perspectives of self-identified social interest groups and ways in which people's politics may be shaped by aspects of their identity through race, class, religion, sexual orientation or traditional dominance...
to assert who they really are, rejecting requirements which conflict with what they consider to be their real identity. This "struggle for recognition" is analyzed in modern times for example by Axel HonnethAxel HonnethAxel Honneth is a professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, Germany and director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.-Biography:...
, who, however, attributes identity problems to a reified intersubjectivity, rather than to the very structure of capitalist organization, as argued by Karl MarxKarl MarxKarl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
and György Lukács, or to a master-servant relationship, as in Hegel. Honneth implies that people cannot easily change the structure, but they can change themselves and the way they relate. And it does not help, if they believe there is a structure which doesn't really exist.
Ultimately, there exists no individual solution to such identity problems, because to solve them requires the positive recognition, acceptance and affirmation of an identity
Identity (social science)
Identity is a term used to describe a person's conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations . The term is used more specifically in psychology and sociology, and is given a great deal of attention in social psychology...
by others – and this can only happen, if the individual can “join in” and receive social acknowledgement of his identity. Marx himself tackled this problem – rather controversially – in his 1843/44 essay On the Jewish Question
On the Jewish Question
On the Jewish Question is a work by Karl Marx, written in 1843, and first published in Paris in 1844 under the German title Zur Judenfrage in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher. It was one of Marx's first attempts to deal with categories that would later be called the materialist conception of...
.
Criticism
Some Marxists have politically lampooned the spectacleSpectacle
In general, spectacle refers to an event that is memorable for the appearance it creates. Derived in Middle English from c. 1340 as "specially prepared or arranged display" it was borrowed from Old French spectacle, itself a reflection of the Latin spectaculum "a show" from spectare "to view,...
that, while some West European governments (such as the French) aim to prohibit Islamic women from wearing headscarves, niqāb
Niqab
A niqab is a cloth which covers the face, worn by some Muslim women as a part of sartorial hijāb...
and burqa
Burqa
A burqa is an enveloping outer garment worn by women in some Islamic religion to cover their bodies in public places. The burqa is usually understood to be the woman's loose body-covering , plus the head-covering , plus the face-veil .-Etymology:A speculative and unattested etymology...
(hijab
Hijab
The word "hijab" or "'" refers to both the head covering traditionally worn by Muslim women and modest Muslim styles of dress in general....
), they are constantly "masking" what they do themselves, even although it may not involve a piece of cloth. The suggestion is that officials "cannot see the wood for the trees", or that there is an exaggerated fear of not being able to see something. Others argue the fears are justified. For example, the Dutch
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
media personality Theo van Gogh
Theo van Gogh (film director)
Theodoor "Theo" van Gogh was a Dutch film director, film producer, columnist, author and actor.Van Gogh worked with the Somali-born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali to produce the film Submission, which criticized the treatment of women in Islam and aroused controversy among Muslims...
, always eager to "take the mask off everything" while reaching out to the Other
Other
The Other or Constitutive Other is a key concept in continental philosophy; it opposes the Same. The Other refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is Other than the initial concept being considered...
, was murdered in Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
in 2004 by Mohammed Bouyeri
Mohammed Bouyeri
Mohammed Bouyeri is an Islamist Dutch–Moroccan and convicted murderer. He is currently serving a life sentence without parole for the assassination of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh. He holds both Dutch and Moroccan citizenship...
sometime after van Gogh screened a short film attacking the attitude of Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
towards women.
Much of the scientific controversy about the concept of character masks centres on Marx’s unique dialectical approach to analyzing the forms and structure of social relations in the capitalist system: in Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
, he had dealt with persons (or “economic characters”) only insofar as they personified or symbolized - often in a reified way - economic categories, roles, functions and interests (see above). Evidently Marx felt justified in this approach, because he considered that the capitalist market system really and necessarily required the reification
Reification (Marxism)
Reification or Versachlichung, literally "objectification" or regarding something as a separate business matter) is the consideration of an abstraction, relation or object as if they had human or living existence and abilities, when in reality they do not...
of human relations in order to operate. That stumped many readers.
According to Marx, the capitalist system functioned as a “system”, precisely because the bourgeois relations of production
Relations of production
Relations of production is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism, and in Das Kapital...
and trade, including property rights, were imposed on people whether they liked it or not. They had to act and conform in a specific way to survive and prosper, and could not very well jump out of the ways in which they were related. As the mass of capital produced grew larger, and markets expanded, these bourgeois relations spontaneously reproduced themselves on a larger and larger scale, be it with the assistance of state aid, regulation or repression. However, many authors have argued that this approach leaves many facets of capitalist social relations unexplained.
Marx’s concept of character masks has been interrogated by scholars primarily in the German-language literature (see references). Werner Sombart
Werner Sombart
Werner Sombart was a German economist and sociologist, the head of the “Youngest Historical School” and one of the leading Continental European social scientists during the first quarter of the 20th century....
stated gruffly in 1896 (two years after Capital, Volume III
Capital, Volume III
Capital, Volume III, subtitled The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, was prepared by Friedrich Engels from notes left by Karl Marx and published in 1894...
was published) that:
The historian Sheila Fitzpatrick
Sheila Fitzpatrick
Sheila Fitzpatrick is an Australian-American historian. She teaches Soviet History at the University of Chicago.-Biography:Sheila Fitzpatrick attended the University of Melbourne and received her DPhil from St...
has recorded how, in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
,
Those who supported the revolution and its communist leadership were politically defined as "proletarian" and those who opposed it were defined as "bourgeois". Abandoning bourgeois and primitive norms, and becoming a cultured, socialist citizen, was "akin to learning a role". In the 1920s, the proletarian writers' association RAPP adopted the slogan "tear off each and every mask from reality". This was based on a quotation from Lenin, who had said that the "realism of Tolstoy
Tolstoy
Tolstoy, or Tolstoi is a prominent family of Russian nobility, descending from Andrey Kharitonovich Tolstoy who served under Vasily II of Moscow...
was the tearing off of each and every mask"(sryvanie vsekh i vsiacheskikh masok). The communist authorities kept detailed files on the class and political credentials of citizens, leading to what historians call "file-selves".
Much later, in 1973 (16 years before Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, critical theorist working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis....
entered the intellectual scene) the German New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
critic Michael Schneider claimed that:
According to the German educationist Ute Grabowski,
When in 1975 the German weekly Der Spiegel
Der Spiegel
Der Spiegel is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. It is one of Europe's largest publications of its kind, with a weekly circulation of more than one million.-Overview:...
asked members of the Red Army Faction
Red Army Faction
The radicalized were, like many in the New Left, influenced by:* Sociological developments, pressure within the educational system in and outside Europe and the U.S...
what the murder of the social democrat Günter von Drenkmann (a high court judge in Berlin) by the Movement 2 June
Movement 2 June
Movement 2 June was a West German terrorist organization that was based out of West Berlin. Active only from 1971–1980, the anarchist group was one of the few violent groups at the time in West Germany. Although Movement 2 June did not share the same ideology as the Red Army Faction , these...
http://labourhistory.net/raf/documents/0019890000.pdf on 10 November 1974 had accomplished, they replied:
Questions subsequently arose about ten issues:
- whether behaviour is in truth an "act" or whether it is "for real", and how one could know or prove that.
- whether character exists at all, if "masks mask other masks" in an endless series.
- how people make other people believe what their real character is (see also charismaCharismaThe term charisma has two senses: 1) compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others, 2) a divinely conferred power or talent. For some theological usages the term is rendered charism, with a meaning the same as sense 2...
). - the extent to which masks "of some sort" are normal, natural, necessary and inevitable in civilized society (or given a certain population densityPopulation densityPopulation density is a measurement of population per unit area or unit volume. It is frequently applied to living organisms, and particularly to humans...
). - whether there can be objective tests of character masks as a scientific concept, or whether they are a polemical, partisan characterization.
- the extent to which the device of "character masks" is only an abstractionAbstractionAbstraction is a process by which higher concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal concepts, first principles, or other methods....
or a metaphorMetaphorA metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
, or whether it is a valid empirical descriptionDescriptionDescription is one of four rhetorical modes , along with exposition, argumentation, and narration. Each of the rhetorical modes is present in a variety of forms and each has its own purpose and conventions....
of aspects of real human behaviour in capitalist society. - what is specific about the character masks of capitalist society, and how this should be explained.
- whether the "masks" of a social system are in any way the same as the masks of individuals.
- to what extent people are telling a story about the world, or whether they are really telling a story about themselves, given that the mask may not be adequate and other people can "see through it" anyway.
- whether Marx's idea of character masks contains an ethnocentric or genderGenderGender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...
bias.
Jean L. Cohen
Jean L. Cohen
Jean L. Cohen is Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. She specializes in contemporary political and legal theory with particular research interests in democratic theory, critical theory, Civil society, gender and the law. She received her PhD in 1979 from the New School for...
complained that:
Marx’s "big picture" of capitalism often remained supremely abstract, although he claimed ordinary folks could understand his book
(he had tried to enliven the first volume with many examples and illustrations). Most people - other than academics, artists and bankers etc. - do not usually think that abstractly, because they see no point in it. In particular, it seemed to many scholars that in Marx’s Capital people becomes "passive subjects" trapped in a system which is beyond their control, and which forces them into functions and roles. Thus, it is argued that Marx’s grandiose portrayal of the capitalist system in its totality is too “deterministic”, because it downplays the ability of individuals as “active human subjects” to make free choices, and determine their own fate (see also economic determinism
Economic determinism
Economic determinism is the theory which attributes primacy to the economic structure over politics in the development of human history. It is usually associated with the theories of Karl Marx, although many Marxist thinkers have dismissed plain and unilateral economic determinism as a form of...
). The theoretical point is stated by Peter Sloterdijk
Peter Sloterdijk
Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher, television host, cultural scientist and essayist. He is a professor of philosophy and media theory at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe. He currently co-hosts the German show Im Glashaus: Das Philosophische Quartett.-Biography:Sloterdijk's father...
as follows:
-
-
- A humanist theory was in fact pioneered by the non-Marxist psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. In his psychological theory – which is not necessarily linked to a particular theory of social structureSocial structureSocial structure is a term used in the social sciences to refer to patterned social arrangements in society that are both emergent from and determinant of the actions of the individuals. The usage of the term "social structure" has changed over time and may reflect the various levels of analysis...
– the persona appears as a consciously created personality or identity fashioned out of part of the collective psyche through socializationSocializationSocialization is a term used by sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, political scientists and educationalists to refer to the process of inheriting and disseminating norms, customs and ideologies...
, acculturationAcculturationAcculturation explains the process of cultural and psychological change that results following meeting between cultures. The effects of acculturation can be seen at multiple levels in both interacting cultures. At the group level, acculturation often results in changes to culture, customs, and...
and experienceExperienceExperience as a general concept comprises knowledge of or skill in or observation of some thing or some event gained through involvement in or exposure to that thing or event....
. Jung applied the classical term persona, explicitly because, originally, it meant the mask which the actor bears, expressing the role he plays. The persona, he argues, is a mask for the "collective psyche", a mask that ‘pretends’ individuality, so that both self and others believe in that identity, even although it is really no more than a well-played role through which the collective psyche is expressed. Jung regarded the “persona-mask” as a complicated system which mediates between individual consciousness and the social community. But he also makes it quite explicit that it is, in substance, a character mask in the classical sense known to theatre, with its double function: both intended to make a certain impression to others, and to hide (part of) the true nature of the individual. The therapist then aims to assist the individuationIndividuationIndividuation is a concept which appears in numerous fields and may be encountered in work by Arthur Schopenhauer, Carl Jung, Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, David Bohm, and Manuel De Landa...
process through which the client (re-)gains his "own self" - by liberating the self both from the deceptive cover of the persona and from the power of unconscious impulses. Jung's theory has become enormously influential in management theory; not just because managers have to create an appropriate "management persona" (a corporate mask) and a persuasive identity, but also because they have to evaluate what sort of people the workers are, in order to manage them (for example, using personality tests and peer reviews).
- A humanist theory was in fact pioneered by the non-Marxist psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. In his psychological theory – which is not necessarily linked to a particular theory of social structure
-
-
-
- In the antihumanist, structural-functionalist philosophy of the French Marxist Louis AlthusserLouis AlthusserLouis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....
, individuals as active subjects who have needs and make their own choices, and as people who "make their own history", are completely eradicated in the name of "science". In fact, Althusser recommended the psychological theory of Sigmund FreudSigmund FreudSigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
and Jacques LacanJacques LacanJacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
in the French Communist Party journal La Nouvelle Critique specifically as a "science of the (human) unconscious". In the glossary of his famous book Reading CapitalReading CapitalReading Capital is a 1965 work of Marxist philosophy and theory. The book collects essays developed by Louis Althusser and his students in a seminar on Karl Marx's Das Kapital which took place earlier in 1965...
(co-written with Etienne BalibarÉtienne BalibarÉtienne Balibar is a French Marxist philosopher. After the death of his teacher Louis Althusser, Balibar quickly became the leading exponent of French Marxist philosophy.- Life and work :...
), Althusser announces:
- In the antihumanist, structural-functionalist philosophy of the French Marxist Louis Althusser
-
-
-
- In this quasi-religious reification of what Marx says - which dominated Marxist theory for decades - abstract forces like "relations of production", "political struggle" and "ideology" are the active subject in history, and real people are not. The main reason is that people are being viewed "objectively" as a "tool" of Capital, as the personification of capitalist requirements, analogous to army personnel following orders. Althusser seems to have believed that, aided by the superior vantage point of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, he could raise himself subjectively far above the human world, in order to view that world from an extraneous, "objective" and super-human viewpoint. According to Anthony GiddensAnthony GiddensAnthony Giddens, Baron Giddens is a British sociologist who is known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern contributors in the field of sociology, the author of at least 34 books, published in at least 29...
, the effect is that:
- In this quasi-religious reification of what Marx says - which dominated Marxist theory for decades - abstract forces like "relations of production", "political struggle" and "ideology" are the active subject in history, and real people are not. The main reason is that people are being viewed "objectively" as a "tool" of Capital, as the personification of capitalist requirements, analogous to army personnel following orders. Althusser seems to have believed that, aided by the superior vantage point of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, he could raise himself subjectively far above the human world, in order to view that world from an extraneous, "objective" and super-human viewpoint. According to Anthony Giddens
-
-
-
- Such a malformed "totalizing perspective" - which, by destroying the dialectics of experience, cannot reconcile the ways in which people "make history" and are "made by history", and therefore falls from one contradiction into another - doesn't just destroy belief in the power of human action (because "the system" dominates everything); the super-human approach also invites the objection that it leads to totalitarianismTotalitarianismTotalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...
. Specifically, in the bid of Marxist ideologists to grab state power, extract a surplus from the workers and manage the introduction of the grandiose "new order", armed with an ideological tyranny of categories, real human beings become "expendable" and are trampled underfoot. It is alleged to be a kind of "upward mobility" strategy utilizing sympathy for the oppressed and exploited, and social envyEnvyEnvy is best defined as a resentful emotion that "occurs when a person lacks another's superior quality, achievement, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it."...
. This (fairly cynical) interpretation leads logically to the idea that MarxismMarxismMarxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
or Marxism-LeninismMarxism-LeninismMarxism–Leninism is a communist ideology, officially based upon the theories of Marxism and Vladimir Lenin, that promotes the development and creation of a international communist society through the leadership of a vanguard party over a revolutionary socialist state that represents a dictatorship...
is itself a character mask, by which leftists who are desirous of power and influenceSocial influenceSocial influence occurs when an individual's thoughts, feelings or actions are affected by other people. Social influence takes many forms and can be seen in conformity, socialization, peer pressure, obedience, leadership, persuasion, sales, and marketing...
which they do not have, disguise their real motives. This is hotly disputed by many Marxists, who claim Marxism is something that grows out of their lives.
- Such a malformed "totalizing perspective" - which, by destroying the dialectics of experience, cannot reconcile the ways in which people "make history" and are "made by history", and therefore falls from one contradiction into another - doesn't just destroy belief in the power of human action (because "the system" dominates everything); the super-human approach also invites the objection that it leads to totalitarianism
-
In response to this kind of problem, many critics have tried to theorize human subjectivity in capitalist society more (the “human face” of capitalism) - sometimes using the concept of “character masks” - to shed light on how people personally experience the social contradictions and hypocrisies in capitalist society. Here, the meanings which people actually have and use are a starting point for understanding the bigger picture. C. Wright Mills
C. Wright Mills
Charles Wright Mills was an American sociologist. Mills is best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination in which he lays out a view of the proper relationship between biography and history, theory and method in sociological scholarship...
called this approach the sociological imagination
Sociological imagination
The term sociological imagination was coined by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills in 1959, to describe the type of insight offered by the discipline of sociology...
, the idea being that understanding the link between "private troubles" and "public issues" requires creative insight by the researchers, who are personally involved in what they try to study. The analytical question for social scientists then is, how much the concept of “character masks” can really explain, or whether the concept is made to do “too much work” (i.e. that its application is overextended or overworked, as with Althusser).
For example, Jon Elster
Jon Elster
Jon Elster is a Norwegian social and political theorist who has authored works in the philosophy of social science and rational choice theory...
argued that:
Jürgen Ritser queries the utility of the concept of character masks:
Faced with the problem of understanding human character masks - which refers to how human beings have to deal with the relationship between the "macro-world" (the big world) and the "micro-world" (the small world) - scholarship has often flip-flopped rather uneasily between structuralism
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
and subjectivism
Subjectivism
Subjectivism is a philosophical tenet that accords primacy to subjective experience as fundamental of all measure and law. In extreme forms like Solipsism, it may hold that the nature and existence of every object depends solely on someone's subjective awareness of it...
, inventing all kinds of dualisms between structure and agency
Structure and agency
The question over the primacy of either structure or agency in human behavior is a central debate in the social sciences. In this context, "agency" refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. "Structure", by contrast, refers to the recurrent...
. The academic popularity of structural-functionalism has declined, "role definitions" have become more and more changeable and vaguer (even in job designations), and more and more, the Althusserian argument has been inverted: human behaviour is explained in terms of sociobiology
Sociobiology
Sociobiology is a field of scientific study which is based on the assumption that social behavior has resulted from evolution and attempts to explain and examine social behavior within that context. Often considered a branch of biology and sociology, it also draws from ethology, anthropology,...
. This is certainly closer to Marx's idea of "the economic formation of society as a process of natural history", but often at the cost of "naturalizing" (eternalizing) social phenomena which belong to a specific historical time - by replacing their real, man-made social causes with alleged biological factors. On this view, humans are essentially, and mainly, animals. Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti was a Bulgarian-born modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer. He wrote in German and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power".-Life:...
notes in this regard:
Slaves on this view are essentially beings placed outside human society, not social beings proper, i.e. beings considered as not able or not permitted to relate in a human sense, and therefore fitted only for slave work.
- In game theoryGame theoryGame theory is a mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances, such as in games, where a person’s success is based upon the choices of others...
, there are no human beings or animals, only actors, constraints, opportunities and interests which are abstracted, defined and grouped in certain ways according to assumptions; character masks are dealt with mainly in terms of information asymmetryInformation asymmetryIn economics and contract theory, information asymmetry deals with the study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other. This creates an imbalance of power in transactions which can sometimes cause the transactions to go awry, a kind of market failure...
and opportunismOpportunism-General definition:Opportunism is the conscious policy and practice of taking selfish advantage of circumstances, with little regard for principles. Opportunist actions are expedient actions guided primarily by self-interested motives. The term can be applied to individuals, groups,...
. The game theorists' idea of rationality is, that for any human activity, there are costs and benefits, and people will typically act to maximize the benefit that accrues to themselves, and minimize their costs (a type of utilitarianismUtilitarianismUtilitarianism is an ethical theory holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes the overall "happiness", by whatever means necessary. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined only by its resulting outcome, and that one can...
). This assumption may not be completely true at all times, but as a statistical generalizationGeneralizationA generalization of a concept is an extension of the concept to less-specific criteria. It is a foundational element of logic and human reasoning. Generalizations posit the existence of a domain or set of elements, as well as one or more common characteristics shared by those elements. As such, it...
it is regarded as sufficiently valid to enable successful predictionPredictionA prediction or forecast is a statement about the way things will happen in the future, often but not always based on experience or knowledge...
. Sometimes it is more beneficial and less costly to cooperate, at other times it is more beneficial and less costly to competeCompeteCompete can refer to:*Competition - the rivalry of two or more parties*Compete.com - a web traffic analysis company*Compete America - an industry trade group...
, or maintain a neutral, non-involved position. The basic limitation of this viewpoint, often noted by juridical specialists, is just that cultured human beings have a multiplicity of interests at one and the same time, which interact simultaneously in ways which may not be so "rationally" explicable (unless one knows them personally really well). What people think the costs and benefits are, how they weigh that up, and how they respond to situations can be complicated, and involve sub-conscious, spiritualSpiritualitySpirituality can refer to an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being; or the “deepest values and meanings by which people live.” Spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer and contemplation, are intended to develop...
, emotional and socialSocialThe term social refers to a characteristic of living organisms...
influences. Thus, while game theory can usefully shed light on what basic interests are involved, its picture of what the real human motivations are (or were) may be either too simple, or too complex. "Too simple", because vital parts of human character are ignored. "Too complex", because reasons are invented which are not really there. This is acknowledged by many modern managers and politicians, who therefore sometimes hire in specialists in theatre, to explain or model the meaning of human situations. In the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, the actor Ronald ReaganRonald ReaganRonald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
became president, and Arnold SchwarzeneggerArnold SchwarzeneggerArnold Alois Schwarzenegger is an Austrian-American former professional bodybuilder, actor, businessman, investor, and politician. Schwarzenegger served as the 38th Governor of California from 2003 until 2011....
became governor of California; evidently they had the "human skills" to perform the function convincingly. It suggests, that the concept of "character masks" is not at all an "out-dated, 19th century concept". Evidently people do feel a need for dramaDramaDrama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do","to act" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a...
and narrativeNarrativeA narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
to understand the world, and understand themselves better - even if it's only a TV soap. Without this playfulness, life becomes shallow and boring, but more importantly, people then no longer feel part of things, or don't believe anything much, which makes it difficult to get them to co-operate or compete. In turn, that makes it difficult to have control over them because they do not respond to anything much. Identity managementIdentity managementIdentity management is a broad administrative area that deals with identifying individuals in a system and controlling access to the resources in that system by placing restrictions on the established identities of the individuals.Identity management is multidisciplinary and covers many...
is already established as a multi-disciplinary field, but on 17 March 2011, it was reported that Centcom is paying a Californian corporation to develop an "online persona management service" allowing one US serviceman or woman to control "up to 10 separate (fake) identities based all over the world". The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake "online persona" must have a convincing background, history and supporting details; up to 50 US-based controllers will be able to operate false identities from their workstations "without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries".
- The more recent postmodern criticism of Marx’s portrayal of character masks concerns mainly the two issues of personal identityIdentity (social science)Identity is a term used to describe a person's conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations . The term is used more specifically in psychology and sociology, and is given a great deal of attention in social psychology...
and privacyPrivacyPrivacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively...
. It is argued that modern capitalism has moved far beyond the type of capitalism that Marx knew. Capitalist development has changed the nature of people themselves, and how one's life will go is more and more unpredictable. There is no longer any clear and consensual view of how “personal identity” or “human character” should be defined anyway (other than by identity cards) and therefore, it is also no longer clear what it means to “mask” them, or what interests that can serve. Roles are constantly being redefined to manipulate power relationships, and shunt people up or down the hierarchy. This is a postmodernist argument along the lines that "people are what they do", or "who they think they are", and that could change any minute. Human behaviour is then explained either as a biological effect or as a statistical effect, estimated by probability theoryProbability theoryProbability theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with analysis of random phenomena. The central objects of probability theory are random variables, stochastic processes, and events: mathematical abstractions of non-deterministic events or measured quantities that may either be single...
. Some Marxists regard this perspective as a form of dehumanizationDehumanizationDehumanization is to make somebody less human by taking away his or her individuality, the creative and interesting aspects of his or her personality, or his or her compassion and sensitivity towards others. Dehumanization may be directed by an organization or may be the composite of individual...
, which signifies a deepening of human alienation, and leads to a return to religionReligionReligion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
to define humanity. On this view, people cannot manage the forces they have created, and need GodGodGod is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
(see further e.g. claims to be the fastest-growing religion). Modern information technologyInformation technologyInformation technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
and the sexual revolutionSexual revolutionThe sexual revolution was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the Western world from the 1960s into the 1980s...
, it is nowadays argued, have radically altered the whole idea of what is “public” and what is “private”. Electronic devices nowadays enable people to reach into the most intimate details of other people’s lives, with much greater efficiency, and on a much greater scale. Increasingly, information technology becomes a tool for social controlSocial controlSocial control refers generally to societal and political mechanisms or processes that regulate individual and group behavior, leading to conformity and compliance to the rules of a given society, state, or social group. Many mechanisms of social control are cross-cultural, if only in the control...
; the powerful command information about others, while releasing only just enough information to impose their authority, and prove their own superiority. Some Marxists even refer to the spectre of totalitarian capitalism. Human individuals then appear to be caught up in a stressful battle to defend their own definition of themselves against the definitions imposed or attributed by others, in which they can become trapped. It can lead to post-colonial research. People become very concerned about whether things are done in the right order, timing or sequence, or indeed whether their lives are lived in the "right" sequence of activities; after all, if things are done in the wrong order with the wrong timing, too much information may be released, or not enough information is released. For their own story to be convincing in life's theatre, the appropriate information has to be released at the appropriate moment. If the wrong information leaked out at the wrong moment, their lives could be disadvantaged or ruined (see also impression managementImpression managementIn sociology and social psychology, impression management is a goal-directed conscious or unconscious process in which people attempt to influence the perceptions of other people about a person, object or event; they do so by regulating and controlling information in social interaction...
).
That means that “masking” processes begin to play new roles, very different from what Marx could conceive. Computer programmers nowadays refer to "interfacing", "input-masking" and "error-masking", suggesting a whole new world of digital "masks" in cyberspace
Cyberspace
Cyberspace is the electronic medium of computer networks, in which online communication takes place.The term "cyberspace" was first used by the cyberpunk science fiction author William Gibson, though the concept was described somewhat earlier, for example in the Vernor Vinge short story "True...
. It is not just that employers and officials can bear “character masks”, but that ordinary workers are motivated to mask themselves and their activities against what they perceive as intrusion by businesspeople, officials and others who seek to acquire personal information about citizens, in order to control, police, exploit or manipulate their lives. Thus, paradoxically, many people nowadays believe that the pursuit of liberty
Liberty
Liberty is a moral and political principle, or Right, that identifies the condition in which human beings are able to govern themselves, to behave according to their own free will, and take responsibility for their actions...
requires masking one’s activities, simply to maintain the personal privacy
Privacy
Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively...
necessary to stay in control of one’s own life; the more possibilities that modern technology offers to share information, the more circumspect people become about giving information out. It creates a new stimulus for the autonomist movement. It can also lead to the panic
Panic
Panic is a sudden sensation of fear which is so strong as to dominate or prevent reason and logical thinking, replacing it with overwhelming feelings of anxiety and frantic agitation consistent with an animalistic fight-or-flight reaction...
or paranoia
Paranoia
Paranoia [] is a thought process believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself...
of conspiracy theory
Conspiracy theory
A conspiracy theory explains an event as being the result of an alleged plot by a covert group or organization or, more broadly, the idea that important political, social or economic events are the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public.-Usage:The term "conspiracy...
, where people no longer understand the real meanings and effects of human action, and believe their lives are being manipulated by unseen, hidden forces - without being able to find out who they are.
Scholars noticed that, in the end, Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno was a German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist known for his critical theory of society....
- who had argued there are "no individuals" in modern society, only "persons" filling, and defined by, specific functions and roles in capitalism - became quite pessimistic about the prospects of human society. In 1963, Adorno wrote:
In The principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch
Ernst Bloch
Ernst Bloch was a German Marxist philosopher.Bloch was influenced by both Hegel and Marx and, as he always confessed, by novelist Karl May. He was also interested in music and art . He established friendships with Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Theodor W. Adorno...
however remained hopeful. Faced with the same situation, one was pessimistic, the other optimistic.
Unmasking
If one successfully unmasks something, one understands it for what it really is, and can handle it; inversely, if one understands something and can handle it, it is unmasked. Yet, as Marx notes,Economic analysis not only studies the total social effect of human actions, which is usually not directly observable to an individual, other than in the form of statistics
Statistics
Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....
or television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
. The “economic actors” are also human beings who create interactions and relationships which have human meanings. Those meanings cannot be observed, they are in people’s heads, and actively created in their social relationships.
People can of course watch television, read a wikipedia article on their laptop, or flick magazines, where meanings are constructed ready-made for them (Adorno’s “culture industry
Culture industry
Culture industry is a term coined by critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer , who argued in the chapter of their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, 'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception' ; that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods...
”). They can get so used to doing this, that they think the meaning is “out there” rather than constructed in their own heads and bodies, and in their interactions with others. The meaning then seems to be a property of things, so they say: “things have meaning” (see also brainwashing). In reality, things have meaning, only because humans, or other sentient organisms, ‘’can and do give meaning to them’’. Because people have brains, they can figure out that meaning. And because they have free will (they can make their own choices), they can also assert their own meaning, even if only negatively (non-acceptance or non-compliance).
To seek to “unmask” the capitalist system, Marx argued, is a work of critical-scientific theory. It means ordering what we can observe, aided by theory and past experience, so that the real meaning of the system is understood as a whole, and the puzzle is solved. The scientific goal is reached, when one can prove with satisfaction, that one’s definition is so good, that it can withstand the test of all relevant scientific criticisms. It is a big task. Marx warned his French readers that:
Yet, since every meaning can always be challenged by another, and new meanings are formed, reaching the whole truth is really a perpetual task. Its result always has to be defended against competing claims. One can, in the end, only lay claim to the truth as one can know it, from one’s own standpoint. Marx said he welcomed serious scientific criticism of his own contribution, he was not afraid of it.
In the end, Marx argues, capitalism cannot be fully unmasked by means of pure scientific thought only. That is because its ever-changing repertoire of masks is part of the very nature of the system itself, and scientific discoveries can also be masked. They are masked, because scientific pursuits are influenced by property rights and financial interests. They can get stolen (or abused), although the theft may be represented as a "trade", where one party just failed to pick up the goods (in an unpublished manuscript, Marx refers specifically to the "theft of alien labour-time"). The idea is, "let other people do what they will to solve a difficult problem, and we will just skim off the result for ourselves". If people depend on its existence, or if it gets in the way of enjoying their lives, there is always another justification for exploitation. Exploitation can occur under the motto of "love" and "peace". In bourgeois theory, the "sanctity of private property" prevails, but in practice, as Marx argued at length, it doesn't - what is sacrosanct is only one's own property, not someone else's. The right of a person to his own creativity and its results has to be continually defended, and this can involve the use of masking.
Capitalism unmasks itself in the course of development, when its internal contradictions become so great, that they cause collapse - impelling the revolutionary transformation of capitalism by human action into a new social order, amidst all the political conflicts and class struggles. Scientific inquiry, Marx felt, should be an aid in the cause of human progress, to ensure that the new social order emerging will be better than the old one, a real open society. Human progress is achieved, to the degree that people really abolish the oppressions of people by other people, and oppressions by the blind forces of nature.
See also
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Crystallized self The crystallized self is a theory that refers to the idea that individual selves are neither “real” nor “fake,” but rather “crystallized” with multiple facets.-Popular conceptions:... Dacher Keltner Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley as well as the Director for Greater Good Science Center, formerly known as the Center for the Development of Peace and Well-Being. Professor Keltner received his B.A. in Theatre Studies from the University of... Das Kapital Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of... Eyes Wide Shut Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 drama film based upon Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Traumnovelle . The film was directed, produced and co-written by Stanley Kubrick, and was his last film. The story, set in and around New York City, follows the sexually-charged adventures of Dr... |
Félix Guattari Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy... Fringe theatre Fringe theatre is theatre that is not of the mainstream. The term comes from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which name comes from Robert Kemp, who described the unofficial companies performing at the same time as the second Edinburgh International Festival as a ‘fringe’, writing: ‘Round the fringe... Gilles Deleuze Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix... Hypocrisy Hypocrisy is the state of pretending to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that one does not actually have. Hypocrisy involves the deception of others and is thus a kind of lie.... Joseph Gabel Joseph Gabel was a French Hungarian-born sociologist and philosopher. His work was always strongly influenced by Marxism but he was against Stalinism and critical of the work of Louis Althusser.... |
Mask A mask is an article normally worn on the face, typically for protection, disguise, performance or entertainment. Masks have been used since antiquity for both ceremonial and practical purposes... Marx's theory of human nature Marx's theory of human nature occupies an important place in his critique of capitalism, his conception of communism, and his 'materialist conception of history'. Marx, however, does not refer to "human nature" as such, but to Gattungswesen, which is generally translated as 'species-being' or... Marxist Group (Germany) The Marxist Group was the largest communist organization of the "New Left" in West Germany. The program of the MG focused on the abolition of private property and of the state altogether... Mimesis Mimesis , from μιμεῖσθαι , "to imitate," from μῖμος , "imitator, actor") is a critical and philosophical term that carries a wide range of meanings, which include imitation, representation, mimicry, imitatio, receptivity, nonsensuous similarity, the act of resembling, the act of expression, and the... Moral character Moral character or character is an evaluation of a particular individual's durable moral qualities. The concept of character can imply a variety of attributes including the existence or lack of virtues such as integrity, courage, fortitude, honesty, and loyalty, or of good behaviors or habits... |
Narcissism Narcissism is a term with a wide range of meanings, depending on whether it is used to describe a central concept of psychoanalytic theory, a mental illness, a social or cultural problem, or simply a personality trait... Persona A persona, in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor. The word is derived from Latin, where it originally referred to a theatrical mask. The Latin word probably derived from the Etruscan word "phersu", with the same meaning, and that from the Greek πρόσωπον... Persona (psychology) The Persona, for Jung, was the social face the individual presented to the world - 'a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual'.... Private sphere The private sphere is the complement or opposite to the public sphere. The private sphere is a certain sector of societal life in which an individual enjoys a degree of authority, unhampered by interventions from governmental or other institutions. Examples of the private sphere are family and home... Public sphere The public sphere is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action... |
Reification (Marxism) Reification or Versachlichung, literally "objectification" or regarding something as a separate business matter) is the consideration of an abstraction, relation or object as if they had human or living existence and abilities, when in reality they do not... Social character The social character is the central basic concept of the analytic social psychology of Erich Fromm. It describes the formation of the shared character structure of the people of a society or a social class according to their way of life and the socially typical expectations and functional... Theatre of Ancient Greece The theatre of Ancient Greece, or ancient Greek drama, is a theatrical culture that flourished in ancient Greece between c. 550 and c. 220 BC. The city-state of Athens, which became a significant cultural, political and military power during this period, was its centre, where it was... Value-form The value-form or form of value is a concept in Karl Marx’s critique of the political economy. It refers to a socially attributed characteristic of a commodity which contrasts with its tangible use-value or utility .The concept is introduced in the first chapter of Das Kapital where Marx argues... |