Social Appearances, by Barbara Carnevali. (chapter 2 excerpt)

SOCIAL APPEARANCES A Philosophy of Display and Prestige

BARBARA RA CCARNEVALI TRANSLATED BY ZAKIYA HANAFI

2 MASKS AND CLOTHES Medial Surfaces and the Dialectic of Appearing

The Freedom of the Mask If social life is a representation and human beings are actors on a stage, appearance can be thought of as a mask. An ambiguous object par excellence, the mask shows by concealing, because the instant it reveals an aspect of the personality, by displaying and communicating to others, the mask covers up another aspect with its own substance and opacity. What shows through the mask seems to exist but may not. Like a mask, appearance is always suspect, lending itself to the accusation of concealing, deforming, disguising, or distorting a more profound and authentic reality. Without masks, though, there could be no knowledge or social communication, because the spiritual world is invisible and formless, and without appearances human beings would have no reference point in social exchange: they would not be able to represent themselves or understand and interpret the behavior, or the representation, of others.1 Hence masks and appearances are mediating entities, and their role is always a medial one: they are the vehicle through which reciprocal relations between people are established and regulated, but also those between the psyche and the world— between the subjective, private inner world and the objective,

Masks and Clothes 21 accessible, public reality. The mask is like a diplomatic mediator between distant and potentially incompatible entities, because they are made of different, incommensurable, and indeterminate substances. The mask is a filter, a shock absorber: through its porous surface, resistant and flexible at the same time, the stimuli coming from the inside are transmitted to and manifested in the outer world, while those coming from the outside are received, selected, and adapted for the purposes of subjective assimilation.

The function of the mask is therefore always dual. It is exhibitory and ecstatic, drawing outward and leading outside itself, while at the same time also being protective: the mask is useful for opening up a crack in the inner space, for revealing interiority and communicating it to the outside, but also for safeguarding its fragile content and hiding it from the gaze and intrusions of the outside world. A beautiful German expression, Maskenfreiheit, accentuates this ambivalence: it signifies the freedom enjoyed when donning a mask or playing a role, the ludic freedom of representing oneself and, therefore, also of creating a fictional character, of giving oneself a new form (a freedom symbolized by the euphoria of carnival, when we try out identities and actions that would be unthinkable in “normal life”). But it also denotes the freedom of hiding behind a mask, of shielding oneself and protecting a part of oneself that is inaccessible to the gaze of others, to the demands and intrusions of the public social world, and hence a shadowy space for preserving a secret and a moment of intimacy. Not that behind the mask there necessarily lies an authentic face, an I that is different and more true than the one on display. On the contrary, it is more likely that there is actually no substantial reality at all, just a cocktail of possibilities waiting to be actualized behind the mask, or just a negative identity, the possibility of a no: the possibility of throwing down the mask to say, “I am not what appears like this” or “I am not only what appears like this.” In developing this insight, in my future work I intend to develop a theory of the self that is founded on the concepts of self-representation and negative authenticity. The representation of self is the capacity of the subject, as an actor on the world-stage, to represent his or her “person,” in the etymological sense of “personage” or “mask,” and to negotiate it with the other subjects in the dynamics of recognition and conflict.

Negative authenticity is the faculty of withdrawing from social representation to throw away the mask and draw on one’s still unexpressed

22 Appearing

possibilities of identity in order to bring out new self-representations. It consists in the epoche, the act of retreat that protects the irreducibility of the self from the social and opens the subjects’ space of freedom and creativity, their capacity to free themselves from given social constraints and, above all, to produce novelty.2 One of the anthropological characteristics in which human autonomy finds its ultimate expression is the capacity, always available to us, to modulate these two forms of freedom—one affirmative, the other negative; one creative, the other recessive—by measuring out the degree of display, the exposed public surface behind which there always lies concealed an invisible part, a dark side of the moon. Without this covering, there would never be any shade under which the self could protect itself and find relief from the blinding illumination of the public sphere: it would risk “spiritual burnout.”3 Conversely, one of the worst acts of brutality is to force people to strip themselves, literally or metaphorically, by forcibly denuding or unmasking them, to reveal their private parts in public—whatever they simply do not want or prefer not to show. Even prior to the physical act of sexual assault, the cruelty of rape consists in the preliminary act of denuding the victims by ripping off their clothes and, along with them, the “dignity” of their self-presentation. Erving Goffman has shown brilliantly that the inaugural—and most unbearable—act performed on new arrivals by “total institutions” such as insane asylums, hospitals, monasteries, and military academies is that of depriving them of their habitual “identity kit,” the set of objects (mirrors, combs, tools for hygiene, makeup, and hairstyling) and practices (hiding, privacy, secrecy) that form the precondition for self-presentation.

He has also shown that resistance to institutional power and recovery of a form of self-governance consist precisely in the most varied attempts to recapture a space of free representation and the freedom of the mask.4 On the same note, Hans Blumenberg has warned on several occasions of the potential for violence that even apparently innocuous hermeneutic activities such as physiognomy (and, by extension, graphology or even psychoanalysis) can inflict on the subjects involved: in reaction to a relentless pursuit of transparency, a “right to one’s own obscurity” was theorized early on from within the psychoanalytic movement itself. The loss of opacity, continues Blumenberg, can give rise to a specific form of distress,

Masks and Clothes 23 such as the one experienced by the character in Pirandello’s novella A Call to Duty: Paolino Lovico has the “misfortune” of being transparent and incapable of hiding or controlling his emotions.5 Simmel, who defined secrecy as one of “humanity’s greatest spiritual conquests,” a prerequisite for the precious vital substances—which could never tolerate absolute transparency—to reveal themselves, has similarly talked about a “right to secrecy” that should remain inviolable even in the most intimate love relations: the residue of mutual ignorance with which lovers should engage with each other ensures the permanence of desire but also the living dynamics of the relationship itself. We might understand these reflections as an antidote to the ideals diffused by the romantic culture, especially that of Rousseau and Rousseanism, which resurged during the second half of the twentieth century along with the existentialist culture of authenticity and sincerity and still exert a profound influence on our moral scene.6 The capacity to keep people “at the right distance,” preserving an individual’s “sacrality,” is also one of the functions that Goffman attributes to the rules of behavior such as the norms of tact and etiquette.7 The culture of liberalism has formulated the same insight in the regulatory sphere through the concept of privacy, viewing it as a right worthy of protection. Special laws have been created in defense of this value and it is one of the reasons the social norms of discretion and tact came into being: to discourage us from trespassing across the boundary line erected by other people in order to limit confrontation with us, and to encourage us to respect the image they use to represent themselves and to publicly exist.8 Appearance is basically a fabric caught between two conflicting, equally powerful impulses: displaying versus concealing, public versus private, vanity versus shame and decoration versus decorum. Whatever displays also conceals; whatever seeks to cover up is often precisely what exposes and highlights: a veil over a face, the strands of hair combed over a bald spot, or the blushing and stammering of someone who is intimidated, all end up calling attention to exactly what they seek to conceal. In 1930, when analyzing the psychological function of clothes and comparing it to the function of neurotic symptoms, the psychoanalyst John Carl Flügel proposed this brilliant definition: “clothes resemble a perpetual blush upon the surface of humanity.”9

PHILOSOPHERS have long distinguished between appearance and reality, and the opposition between a supposedly deceptive surface and a more profound truth is deeply rooted in Western culture. Barbara Carnevali rethinks the roles that appearances play in social life, offering a philosophical examination of society, ancient to contemporary, as an aesthetic phenomenon. She shows that an understanding of appearances is necessary to grasp the dynamics of interaction, recognition, and power in which we live—and to avoid being dominated by them.

“This is a powerful and paradigm-shifting aesthetics of society by a great philosophical talent.”

—Simon Critchley, author of Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us “Carnevali’s concept of social aesthetics is tremendously powerful and explains a lot of otherwise baffling phenomena. Carnevali makes me think that the rise of Orbán, Trump, and the Brexit movement is better understood as a matter of social taste than in terms of ideology, economics, or identity.”

—Blake Gopnik, author of Warhol “Oscar Wilde famously quipped that only shallow people do not judge by appearances. This elegant, profound, and erudite book explores the startling proposition that we may indeed be what we seem. The reader will not fail to be convinced that appearances are constitutive of society.”

—Eva Illouz, author of The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations “Every sentence in this brilliant book is a unit of thought; it’s as epigrammatic as Nietzsche and as seamlessly developed as Hume. Carnevali has restored aesthetics to its central role in philosophy.”

—Edmund White, author of The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

BARBARA CARNEVALI is associate professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where she holds a chair in social aesthetics. Her books include Romantisme et reconnaissance: Figures de la conscience chez Rousseau (2012).

COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CRITICISM, AND THE ARTS Cover image: Andy Warhol, Ethel Scull 36 Times, 1963. © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.

ISBN: 978-0-231-18706-0

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. Cover design: Lisa Hamm C O LU MBIA UNIVER SITY PRE S S / N E W YO RK

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