The second result is that their intellectual creations can then function as a mask for what is really at stake, as they portray the issue in a one-sided or distorted way – without them being aware of how that works.
[15] According to Marx and Engels, character masks of an era are the main symbolic expressions of self-justification or apologia, which disguises, embellishes or obscures social contradictions ("the bits that do not fit").
Such 'mystification', as it is commonly known, frequently takes the form of maskingMarx argues that, as capitalist class society is intrinsically a contradictory system – it contains many conflicting and competing forces – masking of its true characteristics is an integral feature of how it operates.
Hence Marx writes: Vulgar economics actually does nothing more than to interpret, to systematize and turn into apologetics – in a doctrinaire way – the ideas of the agents who are trapped within bourgeois relations of production.
[32] Other early literary uses of the German term charaktermaske are found in Joseph von Eichendorff's 1815 novel Ahnung und Gegenwart,[33] a veiled attack against Napoleon, and some years later, in writings by Heinrich Heine.
Contrary to Hegel's belief that states, nations, and individuals are all the time the unconscious tools of the world spirit at work within them,[44] Marx insists that: The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
[45] In 1861–63, the Austrian writer Alfred Meissner, the "king of the poets" criticized by Engels in his 1847 essay The True Socialists,[46] published three volumes of novels under the title Charaktermasken.
[49] English translators of other writings by Marx & Engels, or of classical Marxist texts, quite often deleted Charaktermaske as well, and often substituted other words such as "mask", "role", "appearance", "puppet", "guise" and "persona".
Marx's concept of character masks has therefore been little known in the English-speaking world, except through the translated writings of the Frankfurt School and other (mainly German or Austrian) Marxists using the term.
The first step in his argument is that when people engage in trade, run a business or work in a job, they adopt and personify (personally represent) a certain function, role or behaviour pattern which is required of them to serve their obligations; their consent to the applicable rules is assumed, as a necessity to succeed in the activities.
[74] A seventh step could in principle be added, namely a big crisis in society which sparks off a revolution and overturns the existing capitalist system.
These shared presuppositions have an intrinsic rationality, because human behaviour – ultimately driven by the need to survive – is to a large extent purposive (teleological), and not arbitrary or random (though some of it may be).
[96] Horkheimer stated the Frankfurt School perspective clearly: The equality of free individuals, which renews itself through the exchange, the labor of each as the basis of their possessions and power, in short, the principle of the bourgeoisie upon which rests its ideology, its justice, and its morality... reveals itself as a mere façade that masks the true relations.
[97] The Frankfurt School, and especially Herbert Marcuse, was also concerned with how people might rebel against or liberate themselves from the character-masks of life in bourgeois society, through asserting themselves authentically as social, political and sexual beings.
The Frankfurt School theorists intended to show, that if in bourgeois society things appear other than they really are, this masking is not simply attributable to the disguises of competitive business relationships in the marketplace.
[106] The historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has recorded how, in the Soviet Union, "The theatrical metaphor of masks was ubiquitous in the 1920s and '30s, and the same period saw a flowering of that peculiar form of political theater: the show trial.
[110] Much later, in 1973 (16 years before Slavoj Žižek entered the intellectual scene) the German New Left critic Michael Schneider claimed that: The animosity towards psychology that marked the Stalinist era and determines the communist reception of Freud to this day is based primarily on the Marxist concept of the "character mask".
The Leftist 'anti-psychologism' of neo-Stalinist and Maoist groups in Germany and elsewhere also seeks to condemn psychoanalysis time and again with the argument that Marx's concept of the "character mask" has superseded psychology once and for all.
Marx used it primarily to attack bourgeois psychologism which sublimated the principle of homo homini lupus est [i.e. 'man is a wolf to man'] into an eternal verity of human nature.
However, Raymond A. Bauer suggests that the communist suspicion of psychological research had nothing directly to do with the idea of "character masks" as such, but more with a general rejection of all approaches which were deemed "subjectivist" and "unscientific" in a positivist sense (see positivism).
[116] The positive utopian longing emerging in the 1960s was that of reaching a life situation in which people would be able to meet each other naturally, spontaneously and authentically, freed from any constraints of rank or status, archaic rituals, arbitrary conventions and old traditions.
To illustrate the spirit of the times, Anne-Marie Rocheblave-Spenlé who had previously authored a classic French text on role theory, in 1974 published a book titled, significantly, Le Pouvoir Demasque (Power unmasked).
Another reason for the popularity of the topic, noted by Richard Sennett in his book The corrosion of character, is the sheer number of different jobs people nowadays end up doing during their lifetime.
[140] In fact, Althusser recommended the psychological theory of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan in the French Communist Party journal La Nouvelle Critique specifically as a "science of the (human) unconscious".
[141] In the glossary of his famous book Reading Capital (co-written with Étienne Balibar), Althusser announces: The biological men are only the supports or bearers of the guises ("Charaktermasken") assigned to them by the structure of relations in the social formation.
C. Wright Mills developed a concept known as the sociological imagination, the idea being that understanding the link between "private troubles" and "public issues" requires creative insight by the researchers, who are personally involved in what they try to study.
[147] The academic popularity of structural-functionalism has declined, "role definitions" have become more and more changeable and vague, and the Althusserian argument has been inverted: human behaviour is explained in terms of sociobiology.
Slavoj Žižek attempts to create a new theory of masks, by mixing together the philosophies of Hegel, Karl Marx and Jacques Lacan with his understanding of fictional literature and political events.
Cynical reason is no longer naïve, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it.
It was as if, after all the pronouncements of theology and philosophy, after all the indications of experience, we had scarcely begun to understand ourselves... [According to Freud] our inner nature – the ultimate subject studied by all the moral sciences – lies hidden.