The Mask (and Hypocrisy)

[constant escape]

Well, there are maybe 20 active dissensus users

Padraig, Barty, Sufi, and possibly Craner are just Luka sockpuppets

That only leaves 15 of us

I guess my point is mostly I don't feel like my pseudonym changes my behavior. I could be wrong! But I'm not sure how I'd know otherwise. It's hard to get a read on that kinda thing other than by feel.

Well honestly I'm impressed by the sheer dexterity required to switch that rapidly between 5 fully-developed and established personas. Color me confounded.

 

[sus]

I picture John Eden as such a tank. The silent type at dinner who when someone's out of line, and everyone's nervously looking at one another like "what do we do," just steps up and slugs the perp in the jaw, puts an end to it, sits down. People look around at each other like "did you see that." He takes a sip of his ale.

 

[sus]

you are wrong. But only because because of the ego imperative to maintain this illusion of consistency for its smooth functioning

ok so how's it that everyone else gets the feel and I don't

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I picture John Eden as such a tank. The silent type at dinner who when someone's out of line, and everyone's nervously looking at one another like "what do we do," just steps up and slugs the perp in the jaw, puts an end to it, sits down. People look around at each other like "did you see that." He takes a sip of his ale.

he's kind of like that, except extremely nice and pretty voluble rather than silent and taciturn

would definitely pull someone up on out of line behavior but using words, not violence, unless it was an extreme circumstance

so actually, not really like your description besides the living one's beliefs rectitude, now that I think on it

 

[sufi]

Well honestly I'm impressed by the sheer dexterity required to switch that rapidly between 5 fully-developed and established personas. Color me confounded.

me too

 

[sus]

I'm gonna experiment like I said, it could be lack of opportunities, or I'm so mentally fucked up I can't even do the personality split, I can't inhabit a role, it's impossible, I just start dissociating

 

[sus]

I get a feeling of being able to ride the flow of a role or "bit" and then I'm immediately like, nope, I can't do this. I'm at the crest of the wave looking down like "no fucking way"

 

[shiels]

sure I agree with that

the multiple online selves are like a more conscious, curated form of codeswitching

I also thought of the written vs spoken self but I think it's more the public vs private self

or as you're getting, the various levels of public and private self

Yeah codeswitching captures it. I suppose i was trying to get past the binaries... public/private, online/offline, authentic, fake etc

 

[constant escape]

What if you considered this alternative persona as a sort of probe, a thesis that you explore by inhabiting it. Assume a distinct ideology that you want to study the social reception of.

 

[luka]

I get a feeling of being able to ride the flow of a role or "bit" and then I'm immediately like, nope, I can't do this. I'm at the crest of the wave looking down like "no fucking way"

sounds like you just need practice. adopt personnas while drinking and talking to strangers. invent histories. jobs. even accents. barty said he got so good at pulling he would give himself challenges like only pick up girls while pretending to be a Russian while on shore leave from the navy.

 

[sus]

that said I'll post some of my favorite mask quotes, b/c I'm quite interested in this stuff, despite being stunted at it

As Cocteau writes: "Decorative style has never existed. Style is the soul, and unfortunately with us the soul assumes the form of the body." Even if one were to define style as the manner of our appearing, this by no means necessarily entails an opposition between a style that one assumes and one’s "true" being. In fact, such a disjunction is extremely rare. In almost every case, our manner of appearing is our manner of being. The mask is the face.

Persona is 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 broaded in meaning to include the actor's role and then a social role or public function. Finally, it defined an individual under Roman law, as a citizen with rights and duties. We retain this sense in reverse in our "nonperson" a political victim. By late Latin, persona became a person as we now understand it, a human being apart from his social status. Vico economically fuses the early theatrical and later legal meanings of persona when he says of the Roman paterfamilias, "Under the person or mask of the father of the family were concealed all his children and servants." Western personality thus originates in the idea of a mask. Society is the place of masks, a ritual theater.

Western personality thus originates in the idea of mask. Society is the place of masks, a ritual theater. Persona's artistic origins were recovered by modernism and the New Criticism, which stripped the text of biographical baggage. For the New Critics, a writer never speaks for himself but only through an assumed persona, a mask. Following World War Two, the classroom set piece was Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, where a self-absorbed voice, airily proposing the cannibalistic farming of Irish infants, is the butt of the author's satire. Irony and game-playing are central to this view of literature and life. The New Critical persona was indebted to Jung, who sees a split between our inner and ouer selves, an authentic psychic reality versus the mask conforming to social expectation. Popularized Jungianism, especially in its American feminist form, has become increasingly Rousseauist; that is, it tends to view society as automatically restrictve or oppresive instead of educative or civilizing.

 

[sus]

In their native contexts these objects [i.e. primitive masks] were invested with feelings of awe and dread, not of esthetic ennoblement. They were seen usually in motion, at night, in closed dark spaces, by flickering torchlight. Their viewers were under the influence of ritual, communal identification feelings, and often alcohol or drugs; above all, they were activated by the presence within or among the objects themselves of the shaman, acting out the usually terrifying power represented by the mask or icon. What was at stake for the viewer was not esthetic appreciation but loss of self in identification with and support of the shamanic performance."

 

[sus]

Because style is an abiding and defining facet of our perceptual and cognitive lives, pop music’s concern with style should not be construed as superficial or trite. Indeed, we can bring this distinction out by noticing that there is, to my way of thinking, a tight connection between the very concept of a person and the concept of style. In its original, etymological meaning, a person is a mask; from there this word (“person”) acquired the meaning of a role, as in, the role played in a drama by an actor who wears a mask (as in “dramatis personae”). The face of a person is a mask, and the person, in truth, is a role, not the one who plays the role.

Personhood is performed, I said above. This brings me to the second linked idea: that of performance. In one sense, “to perform” is simply the most general verb of action. We perform actions in the course of our lives. But it is also possible to distinguish between things we simply do and the actions that, in doing, we perform. It is a difficult exercise to figure out just what principle marks that line, but it has something to do with the fact that when we perform, as distinct merely from acting, we act in view of the evaluation or standards or rules and norms of others. We speak of sexual performance, performance on the job, athletic performance, performance at school, and, of course, performance on the stage. Whether you are actually subject to the evaluation of another—maybe you are practicing handstands in your room or making drawings for your eyes only—you are still performing, for what you do is open to the possible, if not the actual, assessment of others. And crucially, that’s how we experience it, too. The fact that you are alone rarely ever means you are truly alone, for almost everything we do is framed by the roles we are playing and the standards to which we are subject. Can you think of exceptions?

 

[sus]

I guess the reason we have masks is because there are Watchers

The Watchers

"Out at the horizon, out near the burnished edge of the world, who are these visitors standing... these robed figures — perhaps, at this distance, hundreds of miles tall — their faces, serene, unattached, like the Buddha's, bending over the sea, impassive, indeed, as the Angel that stood over...

www.dissensus.com

Suppose an eight-year-old writes a story about being chased down a mouse-hole by a monstrous spider. It’ll be perceived as “childish” and no one will worry. If he writes the same story when he’s fourteen it may be taken as a sign of mental abnormality. Creating a story, or painting a picture, or making up a poem lay an adolescent wide open to criticism. He therefore has to fake everything so that he appears “sensitive” or “witty” or “tough” or “intelligent” according to the image he’s trying to establish in the eyes of other people. If he believed he was a transmitter, rather than a creator, then we’d be able to see what his talents really were.

We have an idea that art is self-expression—which historically is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated. He was a servant of the God. Maybe a mask-maker would have fasted and prayed for a week before he had a vision of the Mask he was to carve, because no one wanted to see his Mask, they wanted to see the God’s. When Eskimos believed that each piece of bone only had one shape inside it, then the artist didn’t have to “think up” an idea. He had to wait until he knew what was in there—and this is crucial. When he’d finished carving his friends couldn’t say ‘I’m a bit worried about that Nanook at the third igloo’, but only, ‘He made a mess getting that out!’ or ‘There are some very odd bits of bone about these days.’ These days of course the Eskimos get booklets giving illustrations of what will sell, but before we infected them, they were in contact with a source of inspiration that we are not. It’s no wonder that our artists are aberrant characters. It’s not surprising that great African sculptors end up carving coffee tables, or that the talent of our children dies the moment we expect them to become adult. Once we believe that art is self-expression, then the individual can be criticised not only for his skill or lack of skill, but simply for being what he is.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I suppose i was trying to get past the binaries... public/private, online/offline, authentic, fake etc

I agree that's a good thing to try to do

pre-Internet writers weren't dealing in binaries either but they were closer to them - easier to separate your public and private selves

the Internet - specifically social media, dating apps, slack/discord/etc, and so on - has blurred the public/private self

 

[sus]

sounds like you just need practice. adopt personnas while drinking and talking to strangers. invent histories. jobs. even accents. barty said he got so good at pulling he would give himself challenges like only pick up girls while pretending to be a Russian while on shore leave from the navy.

Could well be! Picking up girls is a historic weakspot. All the girls I've got with have picked up me, and all the girls I've tried picking up wouldn't have a minute of it.

 

[sufi]

So you got this "mask" that you're using to communicate - when does it start replacing your actual personality?

that's what happens with most of your tech, isnt it, and why twitter is driving humankind batty?

 

[sufi]

& how do we feel about that? probably a bit of an improvement?

 

[luka]

what is you 'actual personality'? load of bollocks probably. thats what shiels is saying.

 

[sufi]

& how do we feel about that? probably a bit of an improvement?

an upgrade?