"Society is a play" mapping or the tyranny of abstract fictions

By Rodrigo Cáceres, anthropologist, semiotician, phenomenologist, ecolinguist. M.A in environmental management, Université de Lyon.

We naturally experience ourselves as gendered beings, but how exactly do we become gendered? What is gender? How does it shape us? 

Gender has two distinct dimensions. The first of them is abstract and general. "Femininity" and "masculinity" are prototypes-archetypes or models, which are abstract and general, rule-like kinds of forms that have particularities of their own (e.g. masculine is strong, upright, unemotional, tense,  dominating, etc.). The second dimension of gender is factual (as opposed to the general, rule-like dimension) and it concerns how gender is instantiated or brought from the abstract domain to the concrete factual world. It is the facticity of all the people that behave according to these gender archetypes.

In the very beginning, we must note that as babies and kids our spontaneous attitude is one of trust: we simply accept whatever we are presented with. Our parents bestow us with boy-clothes and girl-clothes, they bestow us with categories, "my girl" or "my boy" and as we grow up we see and we are told that boys and girls are different, separate and mutually exclusive things: how boys act is not how girls act and viceversa. 

It is no surprise that we identify with the things we are bestowed with: we identify with our clothes, we identify with our categories of "boy" or "girl" and we accept what they show us as an (incompatible) relationship between these categories. In this manner, they become important to us as we think of them as part of our identity. If one accepts the category "boy" and accepts that boys and girls are mutually exclusive, then one does not want to act like a girl.

It is, of course, important to note that the gender structure is fully arbitrary and fictional, since there is no basis to believe that the categories "girl" and "boy" are mutually exclusive or incompatible, that there is no space of coincidence between them. However, these fictions are fully effective, as they shape the ways of being of "boys" and "girls", how each of these "boys" and "girls" identifies with these arbitrary fictions and, finally, how they enforce them by, for example, shaming boys that act in a feminine way and shaming girls that act in a masculine way. 

In formal terms, the factual actions of most human beings seem to be governed by something that is general and abstract. In this case, it is a model or archetype of what is "boy" and "girl" and the thought-rule of the mutual exclusivity between these abstract categories.

Interestingly enough, this dynamic applies to society as a whole. We should first note how the theater vocabulary is anchored very deeply in social theory: we talk of social roles, gender roles, family roles, social actors, the political scenario, the economic scene, individual performance, individual character, we are all the time dressing with the costumes that fit the roles each one is playing : man, woman, businessman, politician, journalist, etc. It seems that we are unable to do social theory without these theater metaphors.

What if the world is just a big stage where everyone is playing along? If that is the case, who is the scriptwriter who is defining what the roles are? Who defined the plot, the costumes and what the actors usually do? Horrifically enough, most people have blindly accepted the basic structure of the dominant uni-form plot: the famous transport-work-eat-buy-entertainment-sleep cycle. Is that all there is to it? Is that the ultimate and best plot we could collectively imagine? 

We are all forced to con-form to the rules of the plot that everyone is playing, to play along with what is established, which in general comes down to work for a specific kind of organization called "firm" or "corporation", in which one actually has to play a character that is different from one's spontaneous way of being. One has to pretend, simulate being a worker and play along with the rules that this organization sets, which normally are all oriented towards maximizing money.

We already saw that in the case of gender, we had the existence of abstract archetypes that work like molds kids try to fit in, and thereafter the mold turns into a habitual way of being, where the kid and the upcoming adult finally ends up stuck in the mold of masculine or feminine gender, he or she cannot avoid behaving in a gendered way.

In the case of the society, we have the existence of a full-blown play or reality-show that is also general and functions as a mold where individuals have to fit in or conform: there is the prototypical role of the consumer, of the capitalist-businessman, of the politician, of the worker, of the mother, of the father and so on.

But what plot do these actors play? It is the plot-story of economic growth: always more and new products, brands and technologies available for purchase, always creating more artificial needs to satisfy, everything so that the global economic factory keeps running to produce money. Running because, of course, everyone is in a race: political careers, academic careers, professional careers, arms races, space races, etc. that make this plot a competitive one at its heart, everyone against everyone, the best wins, the bests are ahead and, of course, losers always behind.

Once again, we need to note that this play and its script are completely arbitrary and fictional: there is no specific reason why we should be all racing in order to produce and consume evermore products, we might as well be doing something else. But we are not. We are all trapped inside the plot that someone imagined and that somehow got established as real. The human problem, then, arises when individuals take the play and the plot they're in too seriously, as if it were real and not for what it really is: a fiction that someone at some point imagined. 

In this sense, individual awakening happens when one gets the sensation that everything was pretense all along -politics, economic growth, frontiers, etc.- that everyone was acting out all along, blindly following and enacting the roles, rules and actions that the cultural "script" was telling them to play. Awakening means not taking the cultural narrative seriously, but taking it for what it really is: Just a game ! A game where someone defined the rules, defined who is in control and who should submit, who has authority and who hasn't, defined roles, defined how we should perceive and employ time, defined what our dreams should look like, defined the gender "models" where we must fit in and where we end up trapped inside.

We are trapped inside fictions because we literally become individuals within the context of these general-rule-like fictions, we are utterly shaped by these general abstract constructs such as gender and cultural scripts because we take them to be real; in other words, we end up being the by-product of these narratives because we accept and con-form with them, we acquire our very form out of them in the moment we identify with these narratives. We are nothing but the shadow of what these tyrannical abstract forms demand from us: to be "boys", to be "girls", to be "consumers", to be "in fashion", to "succeed in careers" and so on.

To conclude in formal terms, I have presented a conventional mapping "Society is a play" that is useful for separating (1) the abstract-general-rule-like and the (2) concrete-particular-factual dimensions at play: (1) the "script" or "model" where the plot, roles and characters are specified is something general because it can be enacted infinite times and it will never wear out in its capacity to be enacted. And then (2) the enactment of the play by concrete people is particular and factual. One can note that the abstract-general-rule-like has primacy over the concrete-particular-factual because the latter acts in order to follow what is specified by the former.

This distinction between both domains amounts to the twofold structure of habitus in Pierre Bourdieu's theory. In his Distinction, he defines habitus as: "structuring structure which organizes practices and the perception of practices, habitus is also structured structure: the principle of division in logic classes which organizes the perception of the social world is, in turn, a product of the incorporation of the division of social classes". Joining this definition to what has been said in this essay, we note that the abstract-general-rule-like dimension is structuring structure, such as gender archetypes that organize practices: act like a boy, act like a girl, don't act like a boy, don't act like a girl. In turn, as these kids incorporate these general archetypal structures, their individual perception of the social world is organized according to these general archetypes.

But what is novel in this account is that we can incorporate semiotician C.S. Peirce distinction between Thirdness and Secondness: the structuring structure is a Third, in the sense that is general-abstract-rule-like, that it does not get worn out by use, it can be instantiated an infinite amount of times. The structured structure is a Second, a factual-particular-concrete happening of an individual that behaves according to a Third (like a gender archetype) and through repetition of behavior according t this Third, it becomes a habitual pattern of behavior in the self (the self becomes gendered and cannot avoid acting in a gendered manner).

Metaphorically speaking, the abstract-general-rule-like is the puppeteer and the concrete-particular-factual is the puppet, only that the puppet is actively trying to simulate what is specified by the puppeteer. The puppet voluntarily wants to fit in to the abstract-general molds in order to be accepted by his or her peers. In other words, we are all actors that voluntarily want to participate in the great theater of society.

I will not claim that "Society is a play" is a conventional metaphor because it is not "understanding something in terms of another kind of thing". In other words, it would seem that the theater frame directly represents society, so it is not really a different kind of thing that is mapped or superposed into society. For example, in the metaphor "an argument is a combat" there is high (but not total) similarity between both source and target domain: one effectively gets exasperated or aggressive in this situation and uses arguments as if yielding swords with the opposite party, only that the combat is not really a physical one.

I claim that in the "a society is a play" the similarity is full or perfect, the mapping of source domain into target domain generates a reflection or transparence, one fits exactly into the other, which allows us to say that this is not precisely a metaphor.

The useful thing about the "play schema" it is precisely that is schematizes different concepts "role", "script", "act", "actor", "character" into a coherent whole. I think that an interesting question we should ask is: what about the cultures where theater does not exist? What does it change that a culture does not have access to the theater imaginary nor to its embedded concepts of "role", "character" or "actor"?