18. Person and Characters
The person, a process, should not be confused with the various characters that we play in our social relationships and that we, ourselves, have created. Last time, we referred to this ability to be, to dialectically escape our animal condition and socially construct the character. That’s the person.
Sometimes, a person and the character he created may merge, and he may thus no longer realize that he created the character. This condition is called conformism. I would like to tackle our topic by some thoughts on this idea.
I would however like to warn you beforehand of an almost imposture that Marcel Gauchet and Jean-Claude Quentel are committing by publishing this week “Histoire du sujet et théorie de la personne, La rencontre Marcel Gauchet-Jean Gagnepain” (History of the subject and theory of the person, the Marcel Gauchet-Jean Gagnepain encounter), at the Presses Universitaires de Rennes, a (seemingly) collective book that they both edited. We all know that ambiguity (double meaning) is one of the oldest and widely used techniques of swindlers. I feel then the urge to warn you that the Master has always refused to “encounter” the aforementioned Mr. Gauchet, despite the latter’s utmost insistence. That ought to be noted. Now, onto our business.
We often say “don’t judge a book by its cover”, and indeed many people think that they are what they seem! It is a widely known fact: the mindset of the conformist leads him for example to increase his memberships in order to become “someone”. In the academic world, which is quite familiar to me, the phenomenon is typical: the more someone is useless, the less he has anything to say, the more learned society he joins, the more conference and convention he attends. Joining the societies or attending the conferences means that one is trendy, hip. That is to say that one is acknowledged, recognized and accepted. Conformism is thus a sign of crave for love. How awful that is! It comes from a deep and serious weakness, a need to be esteemed, to be a member of something. Such attitude isn’t “left” or “right”. Some people are trendy because they are regarded as “upper class” people thanks to them being well-mannered, and others are “hip” by hanging a ring in their nose. Such phenomenon is also the foundation of parisianisme, the “intelligentsia”, a class of intellectuals (yet the very term of class rejects any kind of intelligence: it’s straightaway ruined!). I am not saying that I only believe in recluses: I believe people may separate themselves from what they are, or precisely from what they appear because most of the time all that remains are the feathers, for the peacock is long gone!
That isn’t the most severe effect though. There is a more serious issue: when you are entering the field of knowledge with the utmost honesty, you say: “I’m going in, I’m doing a thesis and want to bring my own part in the development of the body of knowledge in my field of expertise”. Even though there’s no body per se but the one you hold as such. In other words, you are displaying an awful conservatism – even if your political inclinations are to the left – by your allegiance to the accepted knowledge. The point is not to think, “Since I’m rejected, I ought to be the best”. The point is to reflect upon yourself, to become a true “somebody”. The point is to willingly risk quarreling with everyone even if it means holding the truth at the end. “The key is to be right, as Maurras said”. Hell yeah!
This leads us to what La Fontaine told was our specialty according to Spaniards: the emptiness, the hollowness, the conceit. This vanity, this kind of social bullshit that the conformist makes his, is displayed by a specific sensibility of the poor soul to flattery, titles, decorations, etc. The conceited is always seeking the judgment of others to assess himself: that’s why some people are always taking exams, doing a thesis… Do you want to be judged all your life? Poor children, when would you dare to be your own master, to be your own judge, without someone telling you leniently: “that’s good!”. These kinds of things are destined to kids, not to grown-ups! I urge you, don’t fall into such bullshits. It shows a total lack of self-judgment, a lack of person. We traded our person with the characters that the relationships we can establish are precisely allowing us to establish. Never fool yourself. That’s the elegance I told you about the training of the citizen.
Some may say it’s hypocritical. Indeed! All of us, we are hypocrites! From its Greek sense, “hupokritès” means “actor”. The social character is a result of the biological subject that we are: it is masking it, and as a result the person never dies with our biological body. Watch out! If I were to die, I may someday come back, if only to somewhat prevent you from snoozing. How can we then complaint against an alleged flaw that defines us as a person and allows us to contract with the other?
In such circumstances, you’ll understand that all the naturalists a la Rousseau oppose to society as an “unnatural” distortion. “Sir, I am nature”, some would say. Which is the same thing as saying “I am a mere animal, such is my glory, my expectation and my support”, for an “unnatural” distortion is the very definition of society. It’s hopeless: you are human and as such, you will never be natural. Would you mate with the first woman you’ll meet? Is love a mere relationship between fellow creatures? I admit that for some people, life is simple and natural, and they get along between beasts without a status or a role. It’s even in vogue! And that’s the reason why there’s no more society: we no longer produce the other, we are flocking in a herd where every young male is seeking every young female (and vice versa). And everything’s fine. Hurrah!
That does however not make a human being. The human condition implies an acculturation of its constitution sexuality, without a call to libido. There’s no impulse in the relationship toward the other, which defines a person. Sure, it may be impulsive too, but sexual desire isn’t sexuality. For this reason, marriage (whatever form it may have) is not necessarily tied to love in all the civilizations, since love humanly has nothing to do with our whims, our impulses, etc. (Sure, all of us have faced this, otherwise the human species would have vanished a long time ago).
And that’s the reason why sociological sex isn’t biological sex. For all of us, even the one who appears the most normal, sexuality is perverted in a sense. Obviously, such perversion is not pathological. I refer to the psychiatric meaning of “pervert”, a pathological hypocrite if you want. The pervert is thus the crossing of the limit of our social hypocrisy, which defines us as humans. That means that without social hypocrisy there are no clinical perversions. If you are willing to admit that the person is both a self and his own (“the Latin would say “se” and “suum”), as I tried to show you the last time, you’ll understand why there’s no pathological hypocrisy if the relic is the Saint, the handkerchief is the loved one, etc. For such is the main and fortunate hypocrisy (or “perversion”) that makes us human. In other words, reaching the person leads us to reach the human. You understand that this vision leads to sexuality taking its full importance, yet at the same time it’s also devoid of any libido. By being emptied of our libido, we all are essentially hypocrites, in the sense that we are the actors of this great human comedy that is the basis of social life.
In such circumstances, no wonder if social life seems a comedy for us, and you understand how theater is strongly linked to social. I was about to say that it defines the person as the person is taking the character over. The word “person” comes from the Latin “persona”, which was what the actor’s mask was called. Hence, the greatness of the idea of tying the character embodied by the dramatic mask, even though it is fortuitous, for the mask represents the role that we act in the human comedy, and we are the actors of this mask, so to speak. Now you understand the origin of theater. It’s neither Art (as in “Fine Arts”), not literature, as some people state that there’s nowhere to classify the theater in literature. Of course, there isn’t! Theater is ceremony: instead of relying on an idea of a political efficiency (“left” and “right” alike), the group is forming to celebrate itself. Theater is one of the oldest manifestations of the celebration of this being together, as old as we are.
It’s clear that society is staging itself: either directly (comedy), or by depicting its – more or less – mythical ancestors (tragedy). It’s a staging of a different nature, since the human comedy is playing its own comedy to itself. Theater is thus nothing but the simulation that defines us in our daily life. We have to understand the link here before tackling the theater phenomenon with all our perception and prejudices, since we often strip theater to a bare staging. Yet there’s a full religious or secular ceremony to be taken into account when it comes to theater: the march-pasts, the liturgies, the parades, the fetes, the demonstrations etc., they are all part of theater. The march-past is a military theater, the fete is a commercial theater, the liturgy is a religious theater, etc. All these ceremonies should thus be classified as theater without specifically relating them to the religion or magic, unlike Lévi-Strauss et al are doing by always seeking the origin of theater in what they call “the religious”, looking to explain the origin of societies within religions. Yet seeking the origin of what we were a long time ago, a time before our own time (religious or not), is quite a nonsense, since we were already humans at the dawn of humanity! This question of the chronological origin is of the same vein than the chicken-egg paradox. What was first, the egg (before the chicken) or the chicken (before the egg)? Hence an insoluble, even a ridiculous paradox, at least if we approach it that way. One need to structurally (dialectically if you want) think that the chicken is within the egg, and the egg is within the chicken, even though hard-boiled eggs shouldn’t make us forget the egg timer.
With that in mind, one may draw a clear comparison between narrative (epic, fictional or historical) and theater. Both the narrator and the playwright are engaged in the same dramatization of the being together, even when the narrator (Homer for example) is led to write his story while the playwright (Aeschylus for example) is using actors to embody it. Theater characters and novel characters, staging and writing: there is no difference, they are under the same rules of game. And we saw that the games need rules. Any ceremony is a protocol, and as such is never the free-for-all that fair and fetes are. There is always an underlying breaking in a fete: see the carnival, the saturnalias, the medieval jubilation, or nowadays a football match. A football match is always havoc. On the contrary, the ceremony is always formal, under a set of rules. One can thus say that every celebration is an expression of the law. In essence, ceremony is the aesthetics of the law, and is thusly and mostly a “society game”. The snake and ladders of my childhood was already a “game of law”, a ludic training in the rules of the social game. It was indeed already a form of civics, or an education in politeness (from the Greek word “polis”, the city), the Latin urbanity or the British fair play. Well, I’ll conclude by a word about that. In its strict meaning, politeness means the ability to play one’s role, to hold its place. It’s a the mastery of social graces whilst in company of people (the very thing called courtesy, etiquette, convention, indeed all that would make up a 17th Century “honnête homme”). Politeness is hence the height of hypocrisy, in its Greek meaning, yet it’s this hypocrisy that allows for a policed, peaceful state (in the past, people would use “gardiens de la paix” (peacekeepers) instead of policemen).
You can now understand why the ruling class is in quite a state of disarray, in this period of changes where the Order is challenged in all of its official manifestations. The ruling class no longer can keep a social peace, in which nobody believes anymore, except by ruling a herd by police.
And that, my dear friends, makes for a perfect transition onto our next point, the issue of the social peace that I just referred to, under the title “Equity”.