In order to explain why it was that my beliefs and values were so far from the popular consensus when the Thatcher government was elected in 1979 I started writing a kind of self analytical journal. See Starting Points. This was an attempt, as I put it then, to ‘historicise my feelings’, in other words, to work out why I felt the way I did about the world in relation to the historical circumstances I was born into. This led me to formulate an idea about the character-type that I thought was prevalent or typical of British society at that point in history. I called this type the ‘imperialist personality’. Since then, still deeply intrigued by historical circumstances in relation to personal and social change and vice versa, I have developed other ideas such as ‘the image of the human’ and the ‘inner icon’. These are connected to ideas about cultural change and cultural action.
The idea of character is very attractive to anyone working in drama. In one respect character refers to an integral individual human being. Character, in one sense, suggests uniqueness. On the other hand character is partial. It is an assembly of characteristics. In this sense it is a part of a whole in the way that a letter of the alphabet is semiologically dependent on the whole set of letters. The character is the vibrant centre of the actor’s work because, on the one hand, they must develop in their work a specificity or an individuality and, on the other, they must make their creation a part of the whole play or drama.
How far the character of a human being is determined by unconscious drives that derive from the evolution of the species or by the specific immediate political regime or social structure is an interesting question if it doesn’t have to be answered categorically. Carl Gustav Jung believed that conscious history was illusory and that the unconscious or archetypal history was true history (see the essays on Jung and History in Part 1 of Sexual Revolution: Psychoanalysis, History and the Father edited by Gottfried Heuer). Another early member of the psychoanalytic movement, Wilhelm Reich, understood character as being the embodiment of the socially specific resistances to sexual drives and gratification. He analysed the psychology of fascism in these terms. This latter thinker was very influential on me and I felt that his work explained how it was that the National Socialist regime managed to produce and cultivate the sadistic personalities needed to carry out its policies. I looked with a similar optic at the kind of characters that were advanced by the Thatcher regime and this deepened my sense of an imperialist personality structured by myths of power that were created and internalised through mimetic processes. I won’t here go into what these mimetic processes might be but I would invite the interested reader to look at the work of Rene Girard. I also realised that Reich was not alone in his attempt to understand the reaction presented by the rise of fascism. The work of the Frankfurt School: Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin, Habermas, Sohn-Rethel, Horkheimer, Fromm were also impelled by the advent of reaction, the growth of fascism, into thinking more profoundly about social processes. My view is that the legacy of these thinkers is decisive in understanding our current situation.
The embodiment of spiritual and psychic experience and the unlocking of sources of creative energy that can carry an actor towards the expression of archetypal forms is significant in the work of Jerzy Grotowski. Theatre has the capacity through physical expression and work on character to link conscious history with unconscious history.
The question of how a political regime or social structure reproduces itself and of how values and beliefs are internalised by individuals is connected to how forms of resistance are incorporated and accommodated by adaptations and reforms that the regime may make. These movements of appeal and response, of demand and negotiation are the workings of cultural change. When a political regime is no longer perceived to be in accord with a commonly held ‘image of the human’ it will fall.
My experience in Cairo in April 2011 directly relates to this idea. The key stories that I was told by participants in the revolutionary movement were of the ‘inhumanity’ of the regime both from the point of view of the violence it had perpetrated as well as the poverty it had institutionalised. These stories about the regime were articulated alongside expressions of personal transformation and exhilarating liberation. I am not commenting here on the outcome, effectiveness or longevity of this social movement. I am describing a process in which people expressed a powerful movement of humanisation that was connected to the downfall or overthrow of inhumanity.
In our lives we more or less identify ourselves with the social group from which we have our origin. In an international arena we are aware of different versions of humanity, variations on the human story. In so far as the society with which we identify embodies values and consists of processes that are consonant with our sense of our humanity, we adhere to the given order or regime. Millions of people in the UK dissociated themselves from the Blair government’s invasion of Iraq (though that action was spun in terms of humanitarianism) and the popular slogan for this dissent was: ‘Not in my name’. This action was not in itself enough to destroy the popular consent to the establishment or ruling elite’s regime in the UK. Other aspects of the regime remained sufficiently credible and acceptable.
Is it true that social movements are really negotiated through images of the human that we have internalised?
In order to live as human beings we have to be able to recognise other human beings. We are interdependent as creatures and this faculty of recognising other members of our species is vital. Of course this identification may be restricted by nationality, ethnicity or by gender and there are many instances of societies that have set definitions of humanity which exclude another human group or groups. The agony of the development of the human species as it has become aware, through processes of imperialism and globalisation, of itself as a total planetary entity is punctuated by these traumas of exclusion.
In order for us to recognise other human beings we must have an available image of what this humanness consists. This must also be based on our experience of being ourselves. There has recently been work in evolutionary biology that relates to this question of kin selection. See the work of E. O. Wilson. Our sense of ourselves as a developing person, undertaking a life journey that reflects on the phylogenetic evolutionary development of the species, is a collective social process. We make each other. This reflexivity could be said to be a quality that is especially exercised in theatre work with the actor’s seeking out of similitudes and dissimilitudes in their work on character. I have written about these processes at more length for readers interested in following this line of observation.
No political regime can sustain itself through coercion alone, especially over relatively long periods of time. I think of the process of consent as being like the generation of an inner icon, an internal object that holds the individual in place and in basic obedience. I believe that at moments of social change and revolution this ‘inner icon’ breaks as the individual withdraws belief and consent from the ruling order.
I have to work through images and I am aware of how idiosyncratic and insubstantial these formulations are. In speaking about these processes of identification in a world situation that he considers to be characterised by domination, Freire talks in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed about the tendency for the oppressed to identify themselves with the oppressor. In other words, when asked who they feel they are like the oppressed will see themselves as being like the oppressor. They can not imagine being like themselves!
It is through the generation of iconic figures, objects of admiration and to some extent of envy, that the system ‘naturally’ gains its adherents. The regime has to constantly construct images of the human which are simultaneously installed and lived out by the individuals within its rule. This is by no means a simple process and these images are often connected dynamically to survival and enrichment and also to ideas about the autonomy of the individual. It is this proposition of independence that structures ideas of freedom and renders individuals dependent. These processes remind me of Marcuse’s formulation of ‘repressive desublimation’ and brings me back in this short tour around ideas about ‘the image of the human’ to the key work of the Frankfurt School.
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