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The self as other
What does that person think of me? This is a question we wrestle with every single day. The gaze of another is the yardstick that tells us who we are and what we mean to that person. Jean-Paul Sartre said, "Others hold a secret—the secret of who I am."
I happened to come across the book The Second Humanity at a small neighborhood library in Suwon. As I leafed through the pages, I stumbled on a chapter titled The Self as Other. The subtitle pulled me in, so I stopped and sat down. Even though I have spent a considerable amount of time being myself, it feels as though I come to know myself less through any full understanding of who I am, and more through the tone, attitude, or expression of others when they deal with me. Of course, what I notice in that way is not really me itself, but rather the gaze of others.
Having lived not a short stretch of life, how do I actually think about myself? It might sound a bit ridiculous when said plainly. But, joking aside, honestly, there isn't all that much I can say. I wake up in the morning, go to work, come home, study, spend time on dramas and such… busy? Rather than busy, I wonder if I've simply been packing my time so full, without a single gap, that I leave no room for myself.
To be honest, this book isn't exactly my usual genre. It felt rather novel-like, but there were a few scenes I wanted to keep in memory, and since it felt a pity to simply let them pass, I'm leaving a few related excerpts here.
How is knowing different from recognizing?
Marcel Proust explains it this way: "But even in the most trivial matters of daily life, we are not beings of a uniform nature, beings whom anyone can read at a glance, like a ledger or a will. Within society, our personality is a mental creation of others. Even the simple act of 'going to see someone we know' is, in part, a mental activity. We fill in the physical appearance before us with all the ideas we have formed about that person, and from this we construct the total figure of them. And the total figure we construct matters most. In the end, those ideas plump out the person's cheeks, give the bridge of their nose the shape closest to reality, and lend a timbre to the resonance of their voice as if wrapping it in a transparent envelope. Every time we see that face or hear that voice, what we rediscover and listen to are those ideas."
Who I am reveals itself through the gaze of others. And the gaze of others is filled with the ideas they have formed about me and the wishes they hold for me. The self is nothing but another.
In the middle of the book, a certain film was introduced. It was a film I had watched through a cultural event once held on the 29cm app. At the time I hadn't caught the interpretation mentioned here, and now I find myself wanting to watch it again.
<Portrait of a Lady on Fire> is not simply a portrait Marianne paints of Héloïse; it is also Marianne's own self-portrait. The two women become themselves through each other. Marianne paints not only Héloïse posing, but also her sleeping, after they have made love, helping Sophie through an abortion, and wearing a dress in flames. Yet none of these paintings captures Héloïse in full. The work that describes Héloïse best is all of these paintings lined up side by side. Were Héloïse's mother, the countess, to paint her daughter, a wholly different picture would emerge; the result painted by her future husband would be different still. Every person has a different persona (mask). And the most common misunderstanding is the belief that behind all of these countless masks a 'real me' is hiding. The self is nothing but another.
Who is the real me?
Private life and public life are not as distinctly separated as they were in the transition to modernity. The Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman said, "We all perform on a stage." In his famous work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: How We Perform on the Stage of the Everyday, Goffman described the roles we play when we meet others.
Goffman divided the stage of the world into a front stage (where we move purely as our role) and a back stage (where we can step out of our role). We do not perform our roles alone. Other 'performers', namely the people around us, schools, universities, and co-workers, all 'hail' us, as another well-known philosopher put it. The role others expect of us and the role we are capable of performing are experienced according to the general conventions and the situation of the society into which we have been thrown. Goffman wrote, "The individual turns this way, flips over, and rolls forward. (…) Like an acrobat continually keeping balance, straightening posture, and finding harmony." We not only perform roles, we also become the audience for others. And we try to see behind the role someone else is performing. In any way we can, we try to catch the moment when another briefly removes their mask.
To that end, "we examine people's outward behaviors thoroughly as unconscious expressions. When we can barely perceive unconscious actions such as rich gestures, breathtakingly fluent speech, or a face suddenly flushing red, we become convinced that the other person is performing their role even more thoroughly. (…) Perhaps human beings have always engaged in this kind of double reading to grasp the intentions around them clearly. Because everyone else knows this too, the symmetry of the communication process is restored. People assume there is intention behind the unconscious behavior of others, and the observed person makes it hard for the observer to easily recognize their 'true' attitude. This hiding, discovering, disguising, and rediscovering circles on infinitely."
What Goffman described also fits the internet age. We must be careful not to become even more honest when expressing emotions that arise spontaneously and unconsciously than when showing a self we have staged deliberately and intentionally. If we really are all performers, then the more experience we accumulate in concealing impulsive emotions, the more adept we will become at staging ourselves to deceive others.
Even spontaneous feelings, unconscious emotional excitement, and impulsiveness need to be performed. People who want to show what their 'real' self looks like on social media make use of this technique of performance. It is astonishing to think how many people see such posts, tweets, and blog entries and fall for them as that person's 'true self' rather than a 'staged life'. But do we really perform our roles only to be seen by others? Or do we also perform for ourselves?
Goffman said there is a back stage where no one sees us, so we can step out of our roles. Does a back stage still exist today? Did it ever really exist to begin with? Do we truly know our authentic, honest self? Perhaps for our entire lives we are spectators of our own lives, endlessly exploring who on earth it is we are watching from within this damned thing called the 'self'. The idea that we do not know ourselves at all, or that we misunderstand ourselves, is not a new ideology born in the internet era.
In the mid-1970s Sennett said, "For every individual, the self has become the heaviest burden. Knowing oneself is no longer a means of understanding this world, but has become an end in itself." If it is true, as some cultural philosophers claim, that we live in an age of deepening narcissism, then that age has already stood still for a surprisingly long time. Perhaps, just as in the more hierarchical and less free eras we have lived through, the world has turned into a place where even we ourselves cannot clearly grasp the roles we perform. We who live in industrial countries would do better to follow a somewhat predetermined path and always be finding ourselves, rather than possessing a 'self-crafted resumé' (though it need not necessarily be so).
The Austrian philosopher Isolde Charim spoke of a pluralized individualism. For Charim, pluralization is "the primary experience that a unique identity can no longer be taken for granted. It is the experience that today demands a decision from oneself. That is, the experience that one's own life, and one's access to one's own world, could have been completely different. It is (…) the way openness and uncertainty invade the very center of every identity." As Charim explained, the meaning of the representations by which we define ourselves has changed. From food to art, from the practice of the soul to sex and gender, today we must newly construct and piece together everything that defines us in order to show ourselves and the world who we are (and we must be able to do so).
Going further.. the book by Richard Sennett introduced above is also worth noting. If the chance arises I'd like to read it, so I'm also keeping some of the content from a related article here alongside the book.
투게더
현재 지구에 사는 최고의 지성 중 하나인 리처드 세넷의 신작. 그는 이번 책에서 사람들이 거리에서, 학교에서, 일터에서, 지역에서, 정치에서, 온라인에서 어떻게 협력하고 대화할 수 있는지 탐
www.aladin.co.kr
A key motif of this book is the comparison between 'dialectical dialogue' and 'dialogic dialogue', and between 'sympathy' and 'empathy'. While dialectical dialogue senses what is shared between the two sides and heads toward a synthesis, dialogic dialogue is characterized by embracing the differences between the two rather than presupposing an agreement, thereby broadening understanding. Whereas sympathy—'I feel your pain in exactly the same way'—presupposes identification with the other, empathy—'I give my attention to the pain you are feeling'—presupposes the distinction between you and me while still opening a path for us to engage with each other.
Sennett said, "The twentieth century distorted cooperation in the name of solidarity," and argued that "the demand for a sense of solidarity intended to restore confidence amid economic insecurity had the effect of making social life brutally simple." He therefore argues that, moving forward, we need to pay closer attention to the primal human capacity to bring about 'the social'. (Source: Hankyoreh)
