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 Interrogations
By
Kassandra
An
eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.
Number
One: Self and Internet
One
of the most binding and sacred duties of human life is to dissemble--an
obligation we owe to our friends and relations, colleagues and bosses,
just as they owe it to us. We are required to make a show of more
interest, friendliness, engagement, amusement than we really feel,
and to conceal all traces of hostility, boredom and indifference.
Our authentically silent self-engrossed distracted ruthless selves
are of no interest or use to anyone. They won't get us hired or
promoted, loved or invited to dinner. '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. [William James, The Consciousness of Self]'
And we do not show ourselves to any of them as we do to an empty
room.
There
are advantages to this chronic falsity. We can protect our own peculiar,
mole-like selves by sending out the pleasant chatty emissary in
our place. This affable Golem is a screen between us and the prying
eyes of the world. In addition, for those who are good at it, there
is the sheer aesthetic pleasure of playing a role, taking part in
the universal dance of fraud and pretense and deceit. It's an art,
probably the oldest human art of all, one that makes pyramids and
cave paintings look like vulgar upstarts in comparison. And when
it's well done, it has not only the utilitarian value of social
harmony and the moral value of not hurting people, but also the
aesthetic value of beauty, amusement, play.
But
acting is one thing, wheedling is another. For all of us, Oscar-calibre
actors and lead balloons alike, it is this beseeching, ingratiating,
belly-up aspect of the role that alienates. 'Assume a virtue if
you have it not,' says Hamlet to his mother, and we do, but the
virtues we assume are those of the huckster. 'A grocer who dreams
is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a
grocer [Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday
Life].' We seldom have an opportunity to play the part of bluff
soldier, honest citizen, blunt Cordelia; much more of the time we
are Uriah Heep, plying our glib and oily arts to charm or mollify.
'You jig, you amble and you lisp,' says Hamlet again, and we can
only nod in sorrowful agreement.
We
are not entirely proud of these compliant, meretricious social selves
and their ability to fawn and flatter and toady and manipulate.
The talents of the prostitute and the estate agent are not quite
the ones we'd like to see carved on our tombstones. So it may be
that periods of solitude are a necessary part of human flourishing,
if only beccause when we're alone we're not trying to get anything
out of anyone, not even approval. Our solitary selves don't care
one way or the other what anyone thinks of us. The relational virtues
become irrelevant: we are neither rude nor polite, selfish nor generous.
There's no more call for devil-may-care bravado and cocking a snook
than there is for humble submission; instead there is the freedom
to get on with other things. Thus we need Woolf's room of one's
own, Montaigne's back shop all ours: a place to evade what Sartre
calls 'le regard', that stare of the world that pins us like butterflies
to everyone else's opinion of what we are.
By
way of compromise, there is the liminal zone of the Internet, midway
between solitude and sociability. It is a nice question which self
it is that interacts on the Net: whether it is the extroverted compliant
role-playing self or the introverted autonomous authentic one. Certainly
the Net is notoriously a playground for people who enjoy acting
a part. In the blindness and anonymity of cyberspace one can diverge
far more widely from one's real self than is possible in the flesh:
one can be different genders, ages, races, personalities (up to
a point--it is doubtful how convincingly one can pretend to be cleverer
or wittier than one really is, for example). But it can also be
the case that the original uncompromised self seems more available
there than it does in the clutter and chatter of daily life. The
clumsy amateurish translation we have to do to render the inside
of our heads intelligible to others can be much more fluent and
idiomatic in the logocentric medium of keyboard and screen.
In
the blank eyeless world of computer conversation, as physical visual
cues are irrelevant, so verbal and mental ones loom larger than
they do in real life. To people whose sense of self is bound up
in words and thoughts this can be a revelation. The trivial, superficial
aspects of communication disappear, and the ones that matter take
over. We are no longer on stage or on camera, not being watched
or inspected, so this pared-down abstract self, playing no part,
feels more real than the public one ever has. Freed of the requirement
to dramatize interest and affection, we are at liberty to experience
them for real.
Kassandra
is the pen name of Ophelia Benson.
.
Interrogations
will next be updated late May 2002
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