The Unmasking Style in Social Theory

Peter Baehr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351608343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the nature of unmasking in social theory, in revolutionary movements and in popular culture. Unmasking is not the same as scientific refutation or principled disagreement. When people unmask, they claim to rip off a disguise, revealing the true beneath the feigned. The author distinguishes two basic types of unmasking. The first, aimed at persons or groups, exposes hypocrisy and enmity, and is a staple of revolutionary movements. The second, aimed at ideas, exposes illusions and ideologies, and is characteristic of radical social theory since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

The Unmasking Style in Social Theory charts the intellectual origins of unmasking, its shifting priorities, and its specific techniques in social theory. It also explores sociology's relationship to the concept of unmasking through an analysis of writers who embrace, adapt or reshape its meaning. Such sociologists include Vilfredo Pareto, Karl Mannheim, Raymond Aron, Peter Berger, Pierre Bourdieu, Luc Boltanski and Christian Smith.

Finally, taking conspiracy theories, accusations of social phobia and new concepts such as micro-aggression as examples of unmasking techniques, the author shows how unmasking contributes to the polarization and bitterness of much public discussion. Demonstrating how unmasking is baked into modern culture, yet arguing that alternatives to it are still possible, this book is, in sum, a compelling study of unmasking and its impact upon modern political life and social theory.

Part 1
Elements and origins of the unmasking style

1
Elements of unmasking

The introduction offered a broad-brush orientation to unmasking. Following a brief retrospective on the persona, the original meaning of mask, this chapter describes the structure of the unmasking style in greater detail. It also distinguishes between theoretical unmasking on the one hand and satire and debunking on the other.

Unmasking is often equated with cynicism and the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” In this book, by contrast, the unmasking style is envisaged as a member of a family of exposure practices – the most important member to social theorists – that includes satire, debunking, muckraking and informing (Bok 1989: 210–229). This family has complex and incestuous relationships but, as a broad approximation, can be divided by standpoint: that of the insider and the outsider. Insider-exposure occurs when those privy to private, incriminating information decide to make it public. Informing and whistleblowing fall into this category. Informers expose third parties to the authorities, while whistleblowers expose the authorities to third parties. Outsider-exposure, by contrast, is evidenced in satire, debunking, muckraking and, our topic here, unmasking. It is practiced by intellectual virtuosi, spectators onto ways of life that are not their own.

I. Mask and persona

Long before they were equated with hypocrisy and domination, masks had very different associations in Western thought. Mask derives from the Latin persona (the Greek prosôpon or πρόσωπον). Originally it referred to a mask, made of thin wood or clay, worn by actors in Rome. A persona is literally “that which causes the voice to sound,” a “sound-through” contraption that drives the voice through one exit to make it ring out clearly in an open-air auditorium (Müller 1987: 33–34). As well as its acoustical function, a theatrical mask has two other purposes. The first is to dramatize the nature of the character that appears on stage. The second, mentioned by Nietzsche (1974: 134–135), is to focus audience attention on the speech of the actor rather than on idiosyncratic and potentially distracting facial gestures.

Masks also had ritual functions in the ancient world. The Greek historian of Rome, Polybius (c. 200–118 BCE), describes one of them in Book Six of his Histories. At a Roman notable’s funeral, the dead man, usually sitting upright, was addressed by his eldest son. In the company of the funeral guests, the son would praise his father, recalling his exploits and virtues, and creating an atmosphere of loss that moved all present. After burial, a lifelike mask of the man was placed in a wooden shrine in a conspicuous part of the family home. As generations passed, several such masks came to be displayed. On public holidays, they were taken out of the shrine and decorated. Following the death of an especially illustrious person, the masks were retrieved from the shrines and worn by those descendants who most resembled them. In the funeral procession, the masked men dressed in the clothes appropriate to the deceased’s station – for instance a former praetor in purpled-bordered trim – before arriving by chariot to the rostra where they sat in a row on ivory chairs. Finally, an individual delivered the panegyric, first to the recently dead man and then to the other ancestors in turn. Polybius (2010: 409–410) remarks:

What spectacle could be more wonderful than that? … The reputation these heroes of the past earned for excellence is thus constantly renewed, so that the fame of those who performed noble deeds never dies, and the glory of those who benefited their homeland becomes common knowledge and is passed down from generation to generation. But the most important thing is that young men are inspired to heroic feats of endurance for the common good, in order to gain the glory that accrues to the brave.

The French sociologist Marcel Mauss (1985) reckons that Latin peoples originally borrowed persona and several other nouns ending in – na from the Etruscans, “a ‘mask’ civilization.” Their wooden and terra-cotta masks survive. But only the Latins, especially the Romans, initiated a decisive change in the concept of the person.

We have seen the close association between a Roman family and its particular mask, particularly during the commemoration of a notable’s death. But when the prerogative of a father to kill his son was discontinued, and plebian civil rights against the patrician aristocracy were established, a more complex idea of the person emerged in the Roman world. Under the penumbra of citizenship, persons became bearers of rights and obligations, members of a political community more extensive than any particular family or clan (Arendt 1963: 102–103). So began a process that steadily expanded human powers of representation,¹ eventually attaching legal personality to ecclesiastical orders, guilds, towns, universities, trade unions, professions and other collective actors and corporations.²

The concept of the person followed several trajectories. One was its mutation into Christian ideas of the human soul and the three persons of God. This development, Mauss (1985: 20) says, firmly established the person as “a rational substance.” Another transformation of the person emerged during the Protestant Reformation, whose radical individualism influenced, by repulsion as much as by emulation, the theoretical systems of philosophers as different as Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume and Kant (Hollis 1985: 226–229). The history of sociology has its own history of entanglement with the person, conceived variously as an actor, social actor, agent, vector, role player and so forth.³

The early theatrical connotation of the mask or persona, and the fact that as a metaphor it came to be understood as an attribute of a res publica (commonwealth), created something akin to a second being: a rights-and-duty bound self, an equal of others who, while in other respects strangers, are bound together by the common tie of citizenship. Political cooperation enables such a being to see and be seen from multiple points of view. But from our modern perspective masking is imposture, a way of not being seen. Only un masking provides visibility and transparency. Theatrum mundi, the enduring image of the polity, and later the world, as a stage on which humans act, is no longer the setting of distinction it was for the Greeks and the Romans. It is proof that “illusion and delusion” are “fundamental questions of social life” (Sennett 1974: 35). Far from suggesting the equality of citizenship, the mask signals human domination within and outside of the political sphere.

The chasm separating modern from ancient and medieval notions of masking is evident in the importance we accord the qualities of sincerity, authenticity and, probably at their root, autonomy (Trilling 1971). In each case, masking is anathema and unmasking an obligation. Sincerity puts a premium on wholeness, on the mirroring of private and public selves. The sincere person says: I really am what I profess to be; what I profess to feel, I do feel. Authenticity insists on a self-created and original identity. Its bearer says: I am who I am and I am different from you and from others. Join me but only by being yourself. Autonomy requires persons to think for themselves and assess critically the judgments of others. The autonomous person says: I am not, and will not be, a dupe of anyone.

All three of these “values,” as we now call them, drew energy from their nemesis, Society, the alleged source of conformism, fakery, and standardized mechanical reproduction. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s crusade to tear from court society the “deceitful veil of politeness” which conceals “fears, coolness, reserve, hate, and betrayal” was the opening salvo in the unmasking war.⁴ Sociological theories of society were originally more ambivalent than Rousseau’s, and, depending on the theorist, more benign. Catholic counter-revolutionary thinkers, such as Louis de Bonald, considered society to be the very condition of civilized life. Humans depend on society for their personal attachments and their channel to the divine. From this standpoint, so-called natural law and natural right are abstractions of the estranged consciousness (Nisbet 1966). But whenever power and domination were considered to define social relations, rather than simply to affect them, sociology too was prone to the unmasking temptation: to show hidden, pernicious forces working beneath the skin of human conduct, determining what agents feel, think and do.

II. Unmasking techniques

In modern English and several other European languages, unmask has several meanings.⁵ Some are now archaic, such as a military maneuver that becomes visible to the enemy, or esoteric, such as the practice exercised by US government officials of “requesting the identity of an American whose name has been redacted from an intelligence report.”⁶ Other uses of unmasking are more familiar. Unmask may refer to the actual removal of some kind of face covering (a cloak, a hood, a veil as well as a mask) by the persons hitherto concealed or by others to expose them. More rarely, it may denote the frank admission of a feeling, mood or disposition previously hidden by the person who now divulges it. Unmask also refers to a metaphorical removal of a disguise performed by one person on another. Unmasking in social theory trades chiefly on this sense, albeit it with many variations. To unmask something is to see through and thence to remove a political disguise, decipher a social hieroglyph, dissolve a mystification, or expose a delusion. It is an action, or set of actions, performed by the theorist that aims to show that what people believe to be true is in reality false.

There are similarities between what Richard Hofstadter calls “the paranoid style in politics” and what I call the unmasking style. Recurring features of the paranoid style, he says, are the accusation of conspiracy and the evocation of an enemy who is “sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving.” The paranoid style elevates observers of conspiracy to membership of an elite vouchsafed with an infallible method of exposure. A glut of documentation backs up the indictment. “McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet McCarthyism contains no fewer than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s fantastic assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, is weighed down by a hundred pages of bibliography and notes” (Hofstadter 2008: 37). Facts are facts. What makes them paranoid is the way they are organized, guided by an idée fixe that leads to an ineluctable conclusion.

Like the paranoid style, the unmasking style that I am about to describe is accusatory. In both, an intellectual vanguard is gifted with powers of exposure. Conspiracy is also a common theme of the unmasking style when social movements employ it, particularly after they achieve political power. Jacobinism and Bolshevism are the two cases I examine in this book. Yet the revelation of conspiracy is only one mode of the unmasking style, and not an essential component of it. Since the nineteenth century, social theorists (unlike social movements) have been largely contemptuous of the notion that society’s ills are due to a mysterious cabal. Theorists assert, instead, that it is social structures and developmental tendencies that shape reality. Conspiracies are a sideshow.

Paranoid style also has an unwelcome overhang. It elides political convictions with a psychological disorder. It shifts the clinical meaning of paranoia, referring to an individual’s anxiety about forces ranged against that individual personally, to a commentator’s polemic about the fate of a nation. And, in political and social matters, the term paranoid is inevitably tendentious and self-serving. Much like the attribution of illusion and delusion to ideas we do not like, it is only other people’s style that is paranoid, never our own. Paranoid style is also open to the rebuttal that what someone calls paranoid is actually an accurate assessment of the situation, at least in part.⁷ The concept of unmasking style, as I develop it, avoids this quagmire.

In the distillery of critique, the spirit of unmasking is available in concentrated and diluted forms. Served neat in both politics and in politicized social theory it consists of five major rhetorical techniques: weaponization, reduction, positioning, inversion and deflation.⁸ All are mutually reinforcing; sometimes, only a nuance separates one from another. By their own declaration, writers or speakers who employ these techniques seek to facilitate the emancipation of persons, groups or society as a whole. The overall effect of unmasking writing is invariably hyperbolic; moderate and balanced appraisals are strangers to unmasking discourse. I now elaborate on each of these ingredients.

Weaponization

Weaponization is the extreme edge of accusation. It is the use of terms, different in each culture, that when invoked transform a disagreement into enmity.

Arguments by one party often fail to persuade another. In most cases, this does not matter. We can agree to disagree on whether the Beatles or the Rolling Stones were the greater rock band of the 1960s. However, where the stakes of an argument are high and impinge on major ideal and material interests – religious confession, national identity, class advantage – terms often become markers for antagonistic relationships. Because argument is by nature adversarial, combative language pervades it. Fight, clash, confront, parry, contest are just a few of the terms that are used. Heavily stylized in a democratic polity, these words lose much of their “force.” They may not even apply to another human adversary.

When on September 3, 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced on the BBC that a state of war now existed between Britain and Germany, British listeners knew that war meant death, possibly their own. The Great War of 1914–1918 was a fresh memory. It included the memory of patriotism and victory but also suffering a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART 1 Elements and origins of the unmasking style
• PART 2 O, Sociology
• PART 3 Avoiding unmasking in an unmasking age
• Appendix: disclosing, enclosing, surveilling
• References
• Index