All of us are actors. We play roles every day in our normal lives. I am a husband, father, son, writer and lots of other things too. You probably have just as many or more roles to play in your life. As Hamlet says, “we jig, we amble, we lisp.” Yet none of these roles that we play exhausts our capacity for role-playing. For many of us, like stage actors, no single role ever touches to the very bottom of the self. Whatever the self might be, assuming that there even is one, we may never come to know it fully.
We are surely something more than the roles that we play in society.
Interestingly, the word “persona” originally meant the mask worn by tragedians in the theaters of ancient Greece. We all have “real” faces (presumably) behind the masks that we wear. Yet none of us can say for ourselves what these faces are really like, for we only know ourselves from the “inside” whereas others see us from the “outside.”
In solitude, of course, we allow our masks to slip. We slide out of our social disguises, permitting our actions and natures to be seen dispassionately – if only by ourselves, or by God, if He is “out there.” Solitude offers a liberation from the pressure to make ourselves attractive to others. We all arrange our personas so as to beguile and charm others, to make others smile or feel happy, especially when we ourselves are sad or in despair. We try somehow to fit in to a context, to become whatever is deemed “normal” for as long as we are interested in a particular context.
Maybe there is a little bit of Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” in all of us, forced to see ourselves in the mirror as we remove the grease paint and bright costume of the day.
In espionage novels, the “agent” is always “undercover,” pretending to be something other than what he or she is, in a world where nothing is what it seems. Both John Le Carre and Graham Greene, and also Michael Frayn and Tom Stoppard, have exploited this espionage genre to dramatize issues of identity and shifting metaphors of imaginative “self-creation” that now seem increasingly timely and relevant for all of us, spies and non-spies alike. We live in a time and place in which all of us are “undercover,” in a way.
Who are we really?
This is an old question. If we are merely the persons others claim to know, as Hume or Skinner might suggest, then we need to be clear about about exactly which group of others this might be. Very often, the people who know us privately do not know us publicly. Those who know us professionally do not know us socially. Those who know us intimately are not aware of us as economic or political agents. Each group of friends or “close strangers” knows a “character,” a performance.
Perhaps this is just as well, for their protection and our own. If, as Sartre says, the self is “only in the world” and ceases to exist as soon as we withdraw from the world, then each of us must achieve that withdrawal occasionally in order to really know him- or herself. Traditionally, the knowledge of God was equally impossible in society – and for similar reasons, because of the unreality of the world and of ourselves as actors in it.
Even in private we are still reacting to social expectations. We examine our actions, yes, but only in order to improve the performances that we will eventually give. It may be true that in the absence of others, there would be no need for a performance at all, no need for a self; and therefore no identity to fashion and protect, but only a “pure” being. Such a thing is almost inconceivable. Wittgenstein insisted that “there can be no private languages,” perhaps there can also be no identifiable “self” dwelling – like the British during the Edwardian period – in “splendid isolation.”
We need others to confirm who and what we are, to confirm our choices, our identities, and to serve as mirrors for the psyche. These others necessarily respond to an embodied self. The other sees a person who enters the room – a person of a particular age, gender, economic class, well-groomed or not. To be emboddied, then, is to be limited. It is to be seen.
When I say “limited,” I mean that these embodied characteristics serve as constraints on self-creation, so I resent them. The postmodern ambition is absolutist: we desire a total plasticity of identity. We want to be all things human; and, impossibly, to be limited to none. We do not wish to be pinned down to one identity as opposed to another. It is because I am male that I cannot be female; because I am a Westerner of European ancestry that I cannot be African or Asian; because I am middle class, casually dressed, say, that I cannot be in a blue suit from Brooks Brothers at the same time, or in traditional Arab or Japanese garb. To draw the Nietzschean conclusion, I can only act on the world or see it and express myself from my “perspective.” And every perspective is incomplete, only partial and hence, unsatisfactory. Yet this recognition alone tells us of a possible objectivity that transcends such perspectives.
The development of computer technology has done much to liberate us from these limitations. For the first time in human history millions have been emancipated from the condition of imprisonment within the corporeal, physical envelope of the body, thus allowing them to pursue meaningful interactions with others, who are similarly disembodied, in cyberspace.
Computers have allowed us to re-evaluate our identities. In the age of the Internet, we no longer give commands to a machine; but rather, we enter into dialogues – sometimes “personal” ones – with “friends” located (what does “located” mean in the computer age?) in different countries and cities. We navigate simulated worlds. We create virtual realities.
Computers allow us not only to communicate and exchange ideas, but also to assume personae of our own creation. Computers permit us to hide, while also revealing aspects of ourselves not seen in our daily lives; but they permit us, besides this, to become something different, to become the other. Computers invite us to reverse Nietzsche’s dictum and become “the persons we are not” – that is, to become disembodied and perspectiveless perceivers, finally achieving what Thomas Nagel might describe as: “the view from nowhere.” They offer us a way to be in a social space and yet NOT be seen or judged physically.
In cyberspace, everyone is a dualist, both a body and mind. Neither body nor mind is to be found, by the way, when the other is around on the net.
Sherry Turkle has examined this phenomenon in several books: “The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit” (1991) and “Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet” (1995). In these works, she traces a set of “boundary negotiations” telling the story of the growing impact of the computer on our psychological lives and our evolving ideas about minds, bodies, and machines.
Professor Turkle asserts that the new sense of identity is “decentered and multiple.” She describes trends in computer design, in artificial intelligence, and in people’s experiences of virtual environments that confirm a dramatic shift in our notions of self, other, machine and world.
“The computer emerges,” according to Ms. Turkle, “as an object that brings postmodernism down to earth.” The Internet serves to mediate FOR EVERYONE between a role-playing public self and the more honest and free private self. My screen self is both an entity that exists “out there” in cyberspace, and “in here” within the confines of my personal space – because both belong to or are connected with, the person sitting at his terminal on a lovely Autum afternoon in New York, sipping some tea and listening to Bach.
At what point do these selves meet? Or do they meet at all? Where is the boundary today between the human and technology? Will our technological extensions of human capacities change the human essence? Or have they already done so?
erspective in ethical theory from Kantian premises. He teaches at NYU, I believe.