In Defence of Fakeness
Be natural! — to Nietzsche, this is a ‘foolish’ suggestion. ‘What if’, he asks, ‘unnatural is what one is?’
Today, we are not encouraged to act according to our nature (lest we be accused of !!biological determinism!!). Instead, we are encouraged to act according to who we really are. Not ‘be natural!’, but ‘be yourself!’. The question is, of course, which self?
As William James famously put it:
[…] we may practically say that [a man] has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups. Many a youth who is demure enough before his parents and teachers, swears and swaggers like a pirate among his ‘tough’ young friends. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club companions, to our customers as to the labourers we employ, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends
Which one is the self? The one beneath all the masks? Surely you do not become yourself when you ‘turn off’…
Rather than identifying with one particular self, I believe that we are, like Camille Paglia says of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, the sum of our masks. In the preface to Sexual Personae, she traces the words person and personality to the Latin persona:
the Latin word for the clay or wooden mask worn by actors in Greek and Roman theater. Its root is probably personare, “to sound through or resound”: the mask was a kind of megaphone, projecting the voice to the farthest tiers of spectators. Over time, persona broadened in meaning to include the actor’s role and then a social role or public function […] By late Latin, persona became a person as we now understand it, a human being apart from his social status
Each self is a persona. Shakespeare was right when he called the world a stage and us the actors. This is topic of Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which opens with this scene-setting description of an everyday performance:
When an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about him or to bring into play information about him already possessed. They will be interested in his general socio-economic status, his conception of self, his attitude toward them, his competence, his trustworthiness, etc. Although some of this information seems to be sought almost as an end in itself, there are usually quite practical reasons for acquiring it. Information about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what he will expect of them and what they may expect of him. Informed in these ways, the others will know how best to act in order to call forth a desired response from him
In this book, Goffman cites fellow sociologist, Robert Park, who argues that the masks we wear are inextricably tied to who we are:
It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role . . . It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves. In a sense, and in so far as this mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves — the role we are striving to live up to — this mask is our truer self , the self we would like to be. In the end, our conception of our role becomes second nature and an integral part of our personality. We come into the world as individuals, achieve character, and become persons
In this clip, Kanye responds to a heckler asking him to take his mask off. He says, in essence, what if I am me more with a mask on?
