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Flute: Nay, faith, let me not play a woman. I have a beard coming.
Quince: That’s all one. You shall play it in a mask, and you may speak as small as you will.
- Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act I, Scene II
C.J. Sentell
November 2008
A mask is a covering for a face that disguises the true surface of the skin – the truth of its
alternately be total or partial, on the one hand, and material or immaterial on the other.
Total material masks overlay the entire face, completely obfuscating the appearance of
those who wear them, blocking their vision and muffling their voice. One such mask
worthy of note, precisely because it diverges slightly from this definition, is the death
mask. Used by cultures ancient and modern to capture the facial contours of the deceased
for effigy and remembrance, the contours of such masks are constructed not to disguise
molding its features around the contours of the living or recently living face.
More common, however, are partial material masks that cover only sections,
usually the upper half, of the face. Interestingly enough, even such partial masks typically
have holes fashioned in them, rupturing their surface so as to leave spaces through which
the eyes can see, peering out from the skull underneath. Another such rupture in partial
material masks, and in ancient Greek drama especially, is the break in its surface for the
mouth that amplified the voice of the speaker for an audience exterior to itself.
Traditionally, then, masks are instruments of theatre. Actors and actresses wear
masks, covering over the face of their everyday identity, representing a new figure in the
course of a plot or drama determined in advance. From the Renaissance to the early
1
modern period, masks were put on for masques or masquerades, which were formal,
courtly gatherings marked by music and dramatic performance, and often imbued with
ornate and intricate symbolic content. Other types of material masks are distinguishable
by considering a cosmetic mask or a heavy covering of the face with make-up or face
paint. A tattoo, too, can be considered a type of mask as the permanent adornment of the
skin with ink and image. In other contexts still, the mask can be a representation –
usually sculpted or carved – that serves a particular religious purpose or functions more
Set aside from the normal course of social life, masks are the outward sign of a
break in or suspension of the symbolic order, whereby meaning and mores can be
suspension, masks figure prominently in festivals and carnivals – Mardi Gras being a
noteworthy example – in which certain inhibitions and desires are allowed expression, if
but for a brief period, so as to provide patterns of relief and release in the course of
everyday life. But, generally speaking, the form of a mask expresses as it conceals; its
affect speaks by showing. This expression can be mute, showing nothing, or grotesque,
showing too much. In classical drama especially, the mask was alternatively tragic or
union.
important to consider the ways in which a mask can be immaterial. One such mask is the
performative masking through pretense or dissemblance; in this sense, the noun “mask”
is transformed into a verb “to mask,” the action of which covers over some truth so as to
2
distract, dissemble, or occasion the imagination. Another immaterial mask, and the one
most important for this essay, is the mask of persona or identity. Carl Jung, for example,
holds that an individual’s persona just is a mask, which is that set of behaviors meeting
continues the metaphor, which, at least for me, invokes the myth of Echo and Narcissus:
Whoever looks into the mirror of the water will see first of all his own face.
Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself. The mirror does not
flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely, the face we never show
to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor. But the
mirror lies behind the mask and shows the true face.1
Immaterially, then, one’s persona or identity is itself a mask that is worn to express one’s
being in the world. The mirror that reflects this face…Importantly, this immaterial sense
of mask points to the way in which the identity as a mask is both an aesthetic
phenomenon and a performative phenomenon. That is, the mask appears for others to see
In many ways following Jung’s analysis of persona, and writing more generally in
the psychoanalytic tradition, Franz Fanon in Black Skins, White Masks offers a detailed
analysis of racialized identity in the colonial situation. In this work – a work that is
explicitly written under the central image of skins and masks – Fanon provides at least
two ways of interpreting how race and skin color intersect with identity and masks. On
the one hand, as offering an account of the way the black person puts on a white mask to
become civilized, so as to take up the mantle of Man. On the other hand, Fanon figures
the black as the animal in man – the organic, corporeal, biological, and genital essence of
man – such that, in a sense, every person is black, putting on the mask of whiteness that
1
Carl Jung, "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" (1935), in Collected Works, Volume 9, Part I: The
Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1969): 43.
3
is culture. In this essay, then, I would like to inquire into these two interpretations not for
the sake of determining which one, in the end, is the correct one, or even the one Fanon
really intends. Rather, I seek to explore these interpretations – using as the guidepost the
dominant metaphorical trope of skins and masks – so that their consequences can be
drawn out for a more expansive consideration of the experience of identity, especially as
It is important to note at the outset the way in which “man,” for Fanon, is used in
a technical way. While Fanon does indeed talk about white men and women on the one
hand, and black men and women on the other – and the various dynamics that occur
between them – central to his project is a certain recovery or salvaging of the concept
“man,” or the universal concept human, so as to overcome the physical, symbolic, and
psychic violence inherent to the colonial situation. Indeed, he says: “I believe that the
individual should tend to take on the universality inherent in the human condition.”2 The
obvious problem, however, is that this concept sits at the heart of the white, colonialist
world. Heretofore, the concept man or human has served as the universalized essence of
human being, abstracted from all corporeal encumbrance and defined through the
possession of language and rationality. In short, the color of this man is white and its
gender male, while femininity and blackness have been defined in contradistinction. And
while I take up these issues in what follows, at this point I wish merely to state explicitly
that I will follow Fanon by retaining the language of “man” to refer to this “universality
inherent in the human condition,” but I do so with a good deal of reluctance and
2
Franz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (1952). Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. (New York:
Grove Press, 1967): 10.
4
confusion, and not without acknowledging a whole host of problems dealing with the
exclusionary nature of this language and its long history of consequential effects.
With this prefatory remark made, the first interpretation of the relationship
between skins and masks that I would like to explore is the most literal one, namely, that
over black skins white masks are placed. There are several steps to such an analysis, the
first and most obvious of which involves examining what, precisely, Fanon means by
“black face” and “white mask.” The second step, then, seeks to account for the action of
placing the mask over the skin of the face, while the third and final step attempts to
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon explicitly states that his project is meant to
provide certain analytical tools in the service of liberating the Negro from the constraints
“is help the black man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been
psychoanalytic theory, and applying them to both the experience of individuals and the
experience of social groups based within a collective identity, Fanon aims to initiate a
project of “disalienation” that seeks to interrogate the conditions under colonialism that
have created certain complexes in black experience under colonialism and reconstruct
complex, which is the result of a “double process” characterized one the one hand by an
economic inferiority that is the direct result of colonization and, on the other hand, by an
3
Ibid., 30.
5
internalization of that inferiority into the psychological structures of their consciousness.4
One consequence of this is that the world of the black is divided into two dimensions,
namely, that dimension of life exhibited among “his fellows” and that dimension
exhibited among whites.5 This division of the world, however, is actually a division in
but a double world. Black consciousness under colonialism, in other words, is marked by
a double nature that is the product of having two separate worlds to negotiate in the
being forced, by means of the colonial situation, to move between two distinct worlds in
These worlds are above all linguistic – or perhaps it is better to say that the
because, for Fanon, any person “who has a language consequently possesses the world
expressed and implied by that language.”6 It is by means of language, then, that worlds
come into existence. As the primary means by which understanding and meaning are
achieved, language is the central phenomenological feature of the world. “To speak,”
Fanon says, “means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of
this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of
4
Ibid., 8.
5
Ibid., 17.
6
Ibid., 18.
7
Ibid., 17-18.
6
world, to use a language is to enter into a world whose salient features and meanings are,
Within the scope of a particular language, then, an entire world comes into focus,
the features of which are marked by the contours of grammar and syntax, and the scope
the colonial situation the colonized is confronted not only with their own language and
world, but also with the violent imposition of another language and world, namely, that
of the colonizer, thereby producing the double structure of their consciousness. Fanon:
This dual nature of their reality poses a question of value in terms of the possibilities for
places the world of the colonizer in a superior position. Thus, by encountering the
language of the colonizer, the colonized “is elevated above his jungle status in proportion
renounces his blackness, his jungle.”9 To the extent that they take up the language
imposed upon them in the colonial situation, then, the colonized are able to enter that
normatively charged world of whiteness, but this always occurs at the expense of a
And it is here that we begin to see the sense in which the black skin of the
colonized puts on the white mask of the colonizer. So as to gain access and means of
8
Ibid., 18.
9
Ibid.
7
civilization defined through the white metaphysics from which it emanates – the
colonized black must take up and put on the white mask of the colonizer. While this
psychic movement is itself the condition for the possibility of another kind of movement,
namely, physical and social movement, for the colonizer it simultaneously produces an
internalization, inferiority is inscribed on the exterior of the skin, and this is the content
of what is internalized, i.e., that the black comes to the white as black, signified before
not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.”11
Fanon recognizes that some will want to assert that the opposite is true as well, namely,
that the white person knows their whiteness only in relation to the black person’s
blackness, but Fanon rejects this converse situation out of hand precisely because the
black man occasions no “ontological resistance” within the white world. Of such
The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.
Overnight the Negro has been given two frames of reference within which he has
had to place himself. His metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, his customs and the
sources on which they were based, were wiped out because they were in conflict
with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him.12
those practices are based, Fanon aims to show how the relation through which the black
10
Ibid., 11.
11
Ibid., 110.
12
Ibid.
8
comes to know the white is not one of reciprocal recognition, but one of determinate
negation. The imposition of white metaphysics, in other words, makes blackness into a
set of characteristics defined by the negation of whiteness. And this fact is not simply a
matter of theoretical consistency, but a fact grounded in material and psychic conditions
of colonialism.
With this asymmetrical relation in mind, Fanon seeks to interrogate the way in
which the colonial situation created “the Negro” by discovering them in the course of
colonialism. When the white encounters the black, they fit him into an already arranged
set of categories and concepts that explain away the humanity of the encounter. This is
because white world is a colonizing world; it is a world that has been expanded time and
again through exploration and conquest and subjugation: “The white man wants the
world; he wants it for himself alone. He finds himself predestined master of this world.
He enslaves it.”13 It is a world whose limits are constituted by the knowable, by that
dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed…I am laid bare. I feel, I see in
those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new
genus. Why, it’s a Negro!”14 Through this predetermined mastery, the colonizer sorts
and categories the things found in the course of exploration, and the colonized body just
Thus, when the black is forced to meet the eyes of the white they encounter a
formidable resistance, which precedes and predetermines the categories through which
they can be perceived. Recounting such an encounter in the first person, Fanon says:
13
Ibid., 128.
14
Ibid., 116.
9
“And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already
there, pre-existing, waiting for me.”15 Appearing under the sign of their skin, then, the
black appears within a semiotics whose signs are determined in advance – or at least
before their entrance – sketching the contours of possible meanings by which they can
legitimately appear. When meanings fall outside the scope of such a semiotics, a type of
resistance is met. And while Fanon calls this “ontological resistance,” we could equally
well think of it as a semiotic or hermeneutic resistance. The flesh itself becomes a sign
by which a whole host of meanings are transmitted and communicated without a word
being spoken or written. Enclosing the body under gaze, the skin demarcates, contains,
becomes a sign through which the colonial encounter is made possible; it is a sign that
precedes the colonized, determining him or her in advance for the gaze of the colonizer.
“I am overdetermined from without,” Fanon says, “I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that
others have of me but of my own appearance.”16 In this way, the experience of race in
general, and the fact of blackness in particular, is an aesthetic phenomenon the meaning
encounter before it actually begins in the course of language. In short, the skin itself
becomes a sign within the larger semiotic structures imposed in the course of the colonial
unaware of it as long as his existence is limited to his own environment; but the first
15
Ibid., 134.
16
Ibid., 116.
10
encounter with a white man oppresses him with the whole weight of his blackness.”17
This oppression occurs precisely by forcing the colonized to see their blackness as a sign
Such an encounter inevitably alienates the black from their own experience,
distorting the ideas and images of their own embodiment that emerge naturally in the
thinks of this set of ideas and images about the body as a “body schema,” which is “a
slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world.”18 It
Neither stage is primary, but each is dependent upon the other for its full
development and expression. This coming together of the self in medias res is precisely
that moment of recognition that Fanon gestures to when he says that he all at once found
himself an “object in the midst of other objects.”19 But the bodily schema Fanon invokes
structures that determines how objects within a given field (including the body) are to be
perceived. Rather, a schema is a “structuring of the self and of the world” that is
“definitive” insofar as it “creates a real dialectic between my body and the world.”20
17
Ibid., 150.
18
Ibid., 111.
19
Ibid., 109.
20
Ibid., 11.
11
environment one is thrown into and the experience of one’s self, i.e., the ego, within that
environment.
In the colonial environment, however, the body schema of the person of color is
skewed in advance, which is the source of inferiority that is Fanon’s target. Through the
colonial language that transmits and structures the self within a colonial world, the
the colonial subject is negatively constituted by the metaphysics of the white world.
The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color
encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness
of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The
body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.21
an “I,” the person of color in the colonial situation is caught in an affirming negation, by
which they are constituted through the negation of their appearance. The asymmetry this
complexes” under analysis, precisely because “assailed at various point, the corporeal
schema [of the colonized is] crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema.”22
In this sense, black consciousness is “born” into a white world characterized through and
Speaking of the formation of the ego more generally, Lacan refers to this as the
“specific prematurity of birth.”23 This birth is the birth of the ego, which always happens
21
Ibid., 110-111.
22
Ibid., 112.
23
Jacques Lacan, Ècrits Translated by Bruce Fink. (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002): 78.
12
consciousness developing in the child. The birth of the ego, in this sense, is always
premature precisely because the child is not aware that they are “pregnant” with it; they
do not know that their ego is about to make its appearance. Within psychoanalysis, this
Lacan occurs between six and eighteen months of age when the child can recognize itself
in the mirror but cannot control the actions and movements of its body.24 The recognition
of its self in the mirror occasions a specular image of the body that becomes the “root
stock of secondary identifications” and “situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its
social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any
single individual.”25 Through the course of development, this specular image of the body
transforms into a social image of the body, the two aspects of which constitute the frame
– or what Lacan calls the “gestalt” – through which an imago of the embodied self
emerges.
In the mirror period, then, the power (Lacan uses the French prégnance) of this
frame is linked to the species in that its potential for determining the scope of future
arrangement of corporeal material. But as such potential is realized, this frame comes to
symbolize the permanence of the ego while simultaneously prefiguring its “alienating
destination.”26 The ego, that is, comes to an awareness of its own alienated state – that it
is but an object amid a world of objects – and its alienating potential – through the
consciousness.
24
Ibid., 75.
25
Ibid., 76.
26
Ibid.
13
In a footnote discussing the relevance of Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage of
the upshot for the ego formation of the black is that “the real Other for the white man is
and will continue to be the black man….Only for the white man The Other is perceived
on the level of the body image, absolutely as the not-self – that is, the unidentifiable,
white within the colonial context, and the image of the black body to the white gestalt is
as its ultimate antithesis. Thus, “when the Negro makes contact with the white world,”
Fanon says, “a certain sensitizing action takes place. If his psychic structure is weak, one
observes a collapse of the ego. The black man stops behaving as an actional person. The
goal of his behavior will be The Other (in the guise of the white man), for The Other
alone can give him worth.”28 In this way, we are in a position to understand the way in
which “European culture has an imago of the Negro which is responsible for all the
conflicts that may arise” precisely because “the Negro faithfully reproduces that imago”
by taking up the European’s language and world. This taking up of the colonizer’s world
is the exact moment at which the black skin dons the white mask.
At this point, the general exegetical features are sufficiently in place so as to turn
to the second interpretation of the skins and masks that I would like to explore in this
essay, namely, that black skins stand for the biological essence of man and the white
masks are the cultural construction through which humanity is attained. This is a more
existential reading of skins and masks in Fanon’s work, which turns on understanding
how blackness figures as the animal nature in man, and whiteness the human nature in
27
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 161.
28
Ibid., 154.
14
man. Whiteness, in other words and to use Lacan’s striking turn of phrase, stands as the
color of “the madness by which we think we are men.”29 Within the white metaphysic, in
other words, blackness is the sign for this more primitive state of man, and whiteness for
associated with darkness, ignorance, sin, and savagery. Between civilization and
barbarism, then, the dual poles of the color spectrum are the animating features of a
Recalling Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious, Fanon says that European
While Jung locates the collective unconscious in the brain, Fanon argues that the
collective unconscious “is purely and simply the sum of prejudices, myths, collective
attitudes of a given group.”31 The result of the “unreflected imposition of a culture,” the
collective unconscious is the set of structuring practices by which the world is revealed.32
opposition, is just this set of prejudices, myths, and collective attitudes for those
29
Lacan, Ècrits, 153.
30
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 190.
31
Ibid., 188.
32
Ibid., 191.
15
above, the ideology of the human is the justificatory apparatus underpinning the sets of
instincts and habits. Instincts being associated with body, they are biological and passed
along in the genetic material of sexual reproduction; habits being associated the social
body, they are cultural and passed along in the transmission of habitual practices across
generations. This dualism fits precisely with the myth of humanity whereby the black
body represents the instinctual, genital nature of man, while the white body is in fact no
body at all – it is disembodied, abstract, and universal. That is, whiteness is the absence
of color and therefore the absence of instinct; it represents the suspension of the organic
and animal nature in man, i.e., culture. The underbelly of the archetype, then, is precisely
that which is repressed in the course of culture, but it is also precisely that which returns
when least expected. The black, animal side of man is feared and repressed in the
Unable to achieve closure – that precious source of stability and reassurance – the white
schema begins to repress that which prevents the realization of its desire. This
determinate negation of the archetype, Fanon says, is just “an expression of the bad
instincts, of the darkness inherent in every ego, of the uncivilized savage, the Negro who
slumbers in every white man.”34 It is here that the second reading receives its strongest
33
Ibid., 160.
34
Ibid., 187, my emphasis.
16
support, to wit, that within every white – below their skin and below the surface of their
flesh – there is a black lurking underneath. This blackness is not literally the blackness of
skin color. Rather, it is the blackness of animality, of instinctual desires and needs; it is,
in short, the animal in man that is the observe of the archetype of the human in man.
According to this archetype, the human is sui genre and different in kind from other
animals; the human is the animal with logos, which sets them apart from the rest of the
natural world and is, in turn, the legitimating basis upon which culture, knowledge, and
Stretching this skin to cover humanity in its existential predicament: within every
human there is an animal repressed, struggling to the surface, but whose continued
repression is the condition for the possibility of being human. The white mask, in this
sense, is the civilizing veneer of humanity that results from repressing man’s animality.
The black skin is this symbol of this animality within the metaphysics of whiteness and
the semiotics of colonialism, and it is by means of this symbol that domination and
oppression are accomplished. And so in the end, Fanon wants to reject this dualism of
white metaphysics while simultaneously holding on to the notion of humanity that forms
its legitimating basis. That is, Fanon wants to retain and assert his humanity amid the
35
Ibid., 222.
17
In this way, Fanon wants to retain the concept of humanity that sits at the heart of the
metaphysics of oppression that constitute the white, colonialist world. Finding himself
thrust into the world, Fanon recognizes that he has “one right alone: That of demanding
human behavior from the other.”36 Maintaining the idea that there is such behavior,
Fanon rejects the notion that there is such a thing as a white world: “There is no white
world, there is no white ethic, any more than there is white intelligence.”37 Fanon’s
humanism, in other words, persists in spite of – or because of? – his analysis of the
consequences of that very concept, i.e., humanity, for the consciousness of the colonized
This existential reading of skins and masks, then, follows the general structure of
the more literal, racialized reading outlined above, while simultaneously being in tension
with it. That is, both retain metaphors of depth and surface: on top of black skins, white
masks are placed so as to enter the realm of humanity in the colonial predicament; on top
of the black skin that is the animal in man, there is a white mask of humanity that
civilizes the savage and carries culture forward in a progressive march toward an
inevitable destiny of authentic relations. In both cases, masks are signs of repression and
forgetfulness; they are the dissembling gesture of there being something more, of the
consequences seem to be at odds. In other words, in the first interpretation the white
mask is ripped off, exposing the truth of blackness beneath, and in this process the project
of disalienation is brought to fruition. But in the second interpretation, when the white
36
Ibid., 229.
37
Ibid.
18
mask of Western metaphysics is removed, is seems as though what is left is the animality
of man unadorned – that we are animals aware of our nakedness and have learned to
communicate in a fairly sophisticated manner using language and signs and other tools.
Fanon, however, seems to resist the full import of this reading and seems to maintain that
colonialist metaphysics.
While I have doubts about the success of such a project in theoretical terms alone,
the issues under analysis do not turn on matters of theory alone. Rather, the project
possibilities for human interaction in the present – that is, in the actual context of
colonialist, racist oppression. Whites and blacks, then, must come to recognize the
inhumanity of the colonial situation, which unequivocally persists to this day, and realize
how the metaphysics of humanity has worked to dehumanize both the colonizer and the
Both must turn their backs on the inhuman voices which were those of their
respective ancestors in order that authentic communication be possible. Before it
can adopt a positive voice, freedom requires an effort at disalienation. At the
beginning of his life a man is always clotted, he is drowned in contingency. The
tragedy of the man is that he was once a child.39
To understand this tragedy of childhood, then, requires a return to the mirror stage of
psychic development.
Lacan is most helpful in this regard when he says that the function of the mirror
stage “turns out…to be a particular case of the function of the imagos, which is to
38
Cf. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1955). Translated by Joan Pinkham. (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2000): 35.
39
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 231, my emphasis.
19
establish a relationship between an organism and its reality.” It is in this establishment of
the original relation between ego and environment that the ineliminable alienation of
experience is first realized, thrusting the self into a world not of its own choice or
The mirror, in both a literal and a figurative sense, marks the entry point for the ego into
the world: it projects the individual into history and equips them with the tools of identity
that will figure its inexorable alienation from henceforth and forever more. But to
experience this projection requires eyes – one must look into the mirror before one can
see one’s self. When these eyes see themselves, an irretrievable moment of recognition
occurs that is at the same time a moment pregnant with the possibilities of self-
context of colonialism, what results is an “orthopedic form of its totality.” In this sense,
the body is not a body of flesh and skin, but a body of mere bones, the skeleton of a face
reflected in the mirror, eyes empty and hollow. For the colonial subject, then, an imago
emerges of an ego without eyes – or, more strangely still, an ego without an I. But again,
if Fanon succeeds in his project of disalienation, such an eye/I will be restored to the
colonized ego and a new form of humanity achieved. For, as Fanon says:
40
Lacan, Ècrits, 78.
20
The eye is not merely a mirror, but a correcting mirror. The eye should make it
possible for us to correct cultural errors. I do not say the eyes, I say the eye, and
there is no mystery about what the eye refers to; not to the crevice in the skull but
to that very uniform light that wells out of the reds of Van Gogh, that glides
through a concerto of Tchaikovsky, that fastens itself desperately to Schiller’s
Ode to Joy, that allows itself to be conveyed by the worm-ridden bawling of
Césaire.41
This uniform light is the light of a universal humanity, purportedly unencumbered with
the oppressive weight of white civilization, which is able to recognize and correct itself in
the very action of seeing. In this way, the mirror and the eyes that look into it are able to
enter the universal at the exact moment they recognize their irreducible particularity and
absolute alienation.
interpretations I have sketched. Thus, by way of conclusion I would only like to begin to
refigure the metaphorical trope of skins and masks with respect to identity formation
dichotomy there is more a general structure of opposition at work. On the one side of the
structure are the natural or biological bases of self, sex, and skin color, while on the other
side are the social or cultural constructs that correspond to the former as identity, gender,
and race. There is, then, a binary formation by which surface and overlay, base and
superstructure, and reality and appearance are set against each other in rigid and
I have attempted to show throughout the course of this essay, this dichotomy is loaded
41
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 202.
21
with normative and political implications that are difficult to overcome if the general
structure is maintained.
But the crucial point to notice is that these oppositions are metaphysical in
character precisely by their conditioning the possible ways in which we (are able to)
experience the world, understanding and explaining to each other and ourselves the
salient differences we find and make between us. It is not as if we are somehow slaves to
metaphysics; the orders to which we are called in living are not orders that we can
somehow freely assent to. Rather, we are thrown into a particular matrix of time and
place, within a nexus of material conditions that we are always born into, pace Lacan, by
the grammar of the world as we find it and are habituated into it from the outset by means
of its inherited orders. Speaking specifically about gender, but with equal relevance for
“To claim that the subject is itself produced in and as a…matrix of relations is not
to do away with the subject, but only to ask after the conditions of its emergence
and operation. The ‘activity’ of this…cannot, strictly speaking, be a human act or
expression, a willful appropriation, and it is certainly not a question of taking on a
mask; it is the matrix through which all willing first becomes possible, its
enabling cultural condition”.42
The taking on of a mask that Butler has in view here involves a particularly robust form
of agency that is the fulcrum around which Western metaphysics turns. To adequately
reconstruct such habits of metaphysics – just as agency is – thus does not involve a
wholesale rejection of the concept, but calls on us to account for the conditions through
42
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” . (New York: Routledge, 1993): 7,
second emphasis mine.
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which such habits appear at all. Noting the ways in which these habits constitute both the
psychic and material foundations of the world in which we actually live, Bourdieu says:
These dualisms, deeply rooted in things (structures) and in bodies, do not spring
from a simple effect of verbal naming and cannot be abolished by an act of
performative magic, since…far from being simple ‘roles’ that can be played at
will..., are inscribed in bodies and in a universe from which they derive their
strength. It is the order…that underlies the performative efficacy of words…and
it is also the order…that resists the spuriously revolutionary redefinitions of
subversive voluntarism.”43
course of future possibilities. Nietzsche, perhaps, captures the upshot of this best of all:
For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from the flash and takes the
latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular
morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a
neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or
not do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind doing,
effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is
everything.44
and a certain ordering of possible activity. The potential meanings of this performance,
therefore, are constructions within limits, for as Butler is keen to point out, “construction
is neither a subject nor its act, but a process of reiteration by which both ‘subjects’ and
‘acts’ come to appear at all. There is no power that acts, but only a reiterated acting that
is power in its persistence and instability”.45 Agency and subjectivity reveal themselves,
43
Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination . Translated by Richard Nice. (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001): 103.
44
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J.
Hollingdale. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989): 45.
45
Butler, Bodies that Matter, 9.
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therefore, among and amid the contours of these possibilities, but they are cumulative,
supervenient names added to the movements made in the course of living particularity.
Thus, with respect to metaphysics and the metaphorical trope of skins and masks,
instead of maintaining the rigid dichotomy between skins and flesh, on the one hand, and
masks and identity, on the other, perhaps we would do well to consider the ways the skin
itself is a type of mask. Rather than being a surface upon which a mask is placed, the skin
is itself that which masks the depths of being flowing as a susurrus just below. Covering
organs and lumps and bulges of various shapes and sizes, skins mask the vague tragedies
unfolding in every corner of our bodies. In this sense, masks go all the way does, and
skins cover every surface. Every skin is a mask of some sort or another, and every mask
is a skin. There is no ontological significance to the skins of our bodies, nor is there a sui
generis importance to the masks of persona and identity that are worn to adorn them.
They do not represent some unmarked barrier beyond which we dare not go, nor does
their meaning stand in some sacred or authentic relation to what lies beneath. Skin
sloughs off. New layers rise and replenish the death always already occurring at the
surface of things. Masks morph in the course of their movement in place and time. Their
surface acquires new shapes and contours in response to the resistance encountered amid
Skins and masks, then, always occur in a derivative of the ecology of their origin,
namely, the stage. We must resist the hypostatization of skins and masks that thinks
them only in static abstraction, and account for their appearance in the contexts of theatre,
ritual, and performance from which they originate. To ask someone wearing a mask,
Who are you? is perhaps the ultimate irony only when we forget that the world is but a
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stage with various scenes being staged within it. The world’s stages collide, scenes are
changed, new masks donned for old and new purposes. Held together by disparate skins
of narrative, masks cover and uncover eyes that see and voices that speak, always
concealing as they reveal the powers already calling the audience to order.
Perhaps in the end the death mask is the closest we can come to finding a material
But, no matter – thinking this way is merely meant to begin to extend a motion
beyond the various and sundry dualisms erected between essence and construction, which
No.
46
Oscar Wilde, Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Centenary Edition , 3 rd edition. (Glasgow:
HarperCollins Publishers, 1994): 1173.
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