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I am still working on this article - I aim to expand it some more later, but appropriate additions are welcome User:Jurriaan 19 July 2010 23:39 (UTC)
Thank you for the comment. It is not the purpose of the article however to discuss the concept of the authentic self, merely to define the concept of character mask and illustrate how the concept has been used. There is, surprisingly, a great paucity of literature on the concept in the English language, even although the term is still used by scholars and journalists. That's why I thought an article might be useful.
I do not claim to know everything about the subject, but I do think the idea that the self is built up exclusively out of a "layering of character masks" fails.
The two main reasons I have for this are:
(1) that human beings emerge in the womb and begin life already before they really know how to mask themselves in social and physical settings.
(2) much of the life-experience that shapes their identity requires an unmasked (spontaneous) response from them, and that response may often be unmasked, precisely because the individual has not yet learnt to mask it, or does not know (yet) how to mask it (we say for example that "someone is caught out unawares").
In other words, to a very large extent, masking has to be learnt, something that is admitted by Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson.
Whereas some masking may be instinctive or genetically coded (a primal urge to protect oneself by covering oneself, inscribed in the human species as an evolutionary adaptation through an enormously long battle with nature, which perhaps begins with shading the eyes), I would think that a real character mask (as distinct from a neutral mask) cannot be genetically transmitted, because its formation requires that the living individual can creatively draw or improvise a distinction between his/her own identity and the identity which the environment or social setting requires of him/her. That setting, and its changes, is not itself given by genetics. At best genetic structure can provide a certain disposition towards certain kinds of adaptations, responses and choices.
In other words, the character mask presupposes that there is a character which can be masked with another character in a more or less conscious way, in response to, and in interaction with, enviromental or social settings. This requires from the individual that a sub-conscious or conscious distinction can be made between the "real" character (the stable personal traits the organism has) and the character mask created.
No doubt that distinction is not absolute and may not be easy to draw; people can "mutate" in some sense, or develop into a different identity through some kind of "system shock", and the lengthy habituation to a role may make it part of the normal character of the person.
My argument is, that the character mask is a character masked by another character. Your argument I think is, essentially, that "the mask masks another mask" ad infinitum, somewhat analogous to an image reflected in an endless series through two faced mirrors. It is just that I think, that the human memory empirically contains traces of both masked and unmasked responses, and thus, there does exist a distinction between "authentic" and "masked" characteristics, even if that distinction may be difficult to define in practice, particularly if the individual habitually masks his behaviour as a survival strategy.
The term "human character" is not a completely "scientific" and "measurable" concept, insofar as it refers not just to durable traits, but to a moral dimension in a dual sense: the typical ("characteristic") way in which individuals or groups evaluate their own experience, which is influenced by their surrounds, social and physical - and, crucially, to how these evaluations are evaluated by others at the same time, socially. We may be able to predict human character fairly accurately in a probabilistic sense, but it is not fully predetermined, insofar as the individual always has the ability to make choices (some degree of behavioural flexibility) and indeed to form "a new mask". And therefore human character is not completely fixed once and for all, but amenable to change in various degrees.
The concept of "authenticity" is likewise in dispute, because it could refer to "how I usually or normally would do it", or it could refer to "how I necessarily have to do it, being what I am". It is ultimately just very difficult to define authenticity, through a series of negations and affirmations, without resorting to tautology ("my definition against yours", "this is what I mean"). In the end, people are likely to say, "well, this is how I am, believe it or not."
This sport of analysis opens up a whole area of research which I cannot cover in a wikipedia article. I could for example include examples of CIA torture of prisoners who do not want to reveal their identity, and so on. I have to consider the intention of wikipedia and its protocols, and not overdo things. The ordinary reader wants a brief and succinct introduction to the concept, and the issues related to it, not a dissertation (I reference some dissertations). However, a brief indication of your idea could be included in the article (I already list some concerns under the "criticism" heading). I have also referred in a note to the idea of a "chameleon personality" such as it is used in the literature. User:Jurriaan 12 August 2010 15:48 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.136.223.40 ( talk)
First off I'd like to say thank you 4 lightning me Witcher Best knowledge The way you can wordI can definitely already tellI can definitely or detail I'm logged off Maybe 1 day gets opportunity of the sit down breakup coffee in Speech brain The knowledge the to hold this fast And I can tell you love the shirtDustin masculineS_m_s coming What stress over to order a handle on your own Grand caravan mass The cover of something you're not comfortable with Overcoming to meet I think you can have Certain things to play mask End of believe the matter how many miles care dumbass a person puts on the door was tom on top of the return Humptybogart ( talk) 01:10, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
I have taken out the bits about "Russian doll" because apparently it offended some people, who feel the analogy is not well-taken since the Russian doll has nothing to do with "character masks" per se. I've done most of the work on the article I want to do for now. I should really not have made the page before I had finished it, but when I had published the pilot it triggered off some more relevant ideas. It was just a tat difficult to write it, properly User:Jurriaan 17 August 2010 01:50 (UTC)
I see that this article is still in the process of being developed. However, I am concerned by what appears to be substantial original research here. It is full of claims that are unsubstantiated with reliable sources. The opening sentence is incomprehensible. Some of the citations that are provided are incorrect (the first Marx quotation in "Accurate translations", for instance, gives the penguin p.70 when it must be p.170). The repeated bold-formatting of terms that the author wants us to understand as synonyms looks like special pleading, rather than a commonly-accepted interpretation. I see that "Charaktermasken" is used by Marx in one sentence in the Commodity Fetishism chapter of vol.1 Capital. The PDF cited (not a reliable source) points to one other instance. How widespread, within Marx's writings, is the use of the word Charaktermasken? Isn't it the case that the most common formulation of the concept being described is as "bearers" (Träger) of social relations? This is hardly the same thing as a "character mask". Where are the reliable sources that support most of what is being claimed in the article? In its present state, it reads like a blog entry, not an encyclopedia article. DionysosProteus ( talk) 19:51, 22 August 2010 (UTC)
Thank you for your response. It seems clear to me from what you've said so far that the article is, as I'd suspected, "original research". It might be worth your while taking a look at the policy document if you want to develop the article further in a manner consistent with Wikipedia's aims. Wikipedia means something very specific by the term: it is not a distinction between "new" thinking and well-established ideas. Instead, it follows from the nature of Wikipedia as a particular kind of publication. Wikipedia is a "digest" of established knowledge and information. This means that everything that appears in an article here ought to be "second-hand"--i.e., it can be verified that someone in a reliable, third-party source has already made the argument presented here. We are not even allowed to "synthesize" material from different sources if that bringing together produces, in any way, new ideas. ("Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources. If one reliable source says A, and another reliable source says B, do not join A and B together to imply a conclusion C that is not mentioned by either of the sources. This would be a synthesis of published material to advance a new position, which is original research.") So, you see, the bringing together that you have done violates precisely these principles. This is in no way to say that your ideas are crazy, wrong, bad, etc. I'm not saying that people will not be interested in the material either. What it does mean, I'm afraid, is that Wikipedia is not an appropriate place for them.
There is no reason why your work should be wasted, however. You have several options, which I invite you to consider. If it is true that you have identified a genuine lacuna in English-language Marxist theory, then this is worth writing up into an article and seeking to get it published in a journal. Then (and only then) Wikipedia would be allowed to detail that research by citing your article. Alternatively, there are plenty of online forums in which you could present the material. Another option, and one that in any case we need to look at here, is to cut this material down into a form that is acceptable to Wikipedia. I have to warn you, though, that (without having done any further research myself) I think this would demand some pretty radical cuts.
Let me make it clear that I'm not pursuing some vendetta. I lecture in drama, so I know about mimetic theories. I have a post-graduate degree that specialised in Marxist philosophy and social theory, so I'm familiar with Althusser, Frankfurt, etc. and I've read more Marx than anyone else I know. Since then, I've also gained a working ability to read German. I added this page to my watchlist when I noticed it a little while ago because it looked like it would intersect with many of my interests. What I mean is, I am not unsupportive of the project that you are trying to pursue. I am assuming that this is your first big edit of Wikipedia too, and I don't want to discourage you. I know that my first edits were, now that I look back on them, pretty out of step with Wikipedia's policies. It takes a little while to get the hang of it. So here's my suggestions, if you are interested enough to try to give this material a home here...
I recommend that you take a close look at the Wikipedia 5 pillars and think about starting from the ground up. All of the current material can be preserved in your user-space (create a page such as User:Jurriaan/CharacterMask). Then, start to build up a new article, but moving very slowly.
I recommend that you proceed by means of a little thought experiment. Imagine that you have a hostile and skeptical reader, who disbelieves every single word that you write here. You have to write the article in such a way that it is neutral, objective, and factual. Therefore, every sentence that you add to the article should have a citation. The citation must be a reliable, third-party source, as defined by the Wikipeida policy of Verifiability. It is preferable if it is in English, but not absolutely necessary. Preferable too if it's available online (google books preview, for instance) but this is even less necessary than to be in English--I only mention this because it makes it easy to verify. What it can't be is a website, blog, etc. Then, your imaginary skeptical reader can, in principle, go and consult the source that you've cited to confirm that it says what you say it does and supports the point for which you're using it as evidence. Even the most hostile and skeptical reader, then, can go check it for themselves.
This makes writing even one sentence in an article a fairly work-intensive activity. It also means, however, that it can't be deleted without another editor giving a very good reason. As it stands, pretty much all of the article could be deleted "at any time".
Try to refrain, too, from going off-topic. Remember, the article is on a narrowly-defined subject: "character mask". This means that every casual use of the verb "to mask"/"to unmask" doesn't fall within its scope. If Althusser uses that term, you can describe how he uses it and provide citations. You can't, however, tell us why he's wrong (even if he is). If someone else has explained this, then you can cite them, so long as it is in relation to his argument about "character mask", rather than merely a general denouncement of the structuralist method or A's work in particular. At no point can you present your own thoughts in any form, no matter how accurate, interesting, etc. they may be.
This prohibition includes, specifically, many of the instances that you give in your reply above--namely, "[Marx] does very often refer to masks and masking - including contexts where he means specifically a character mask, and including contexts which are absolutely crucial to his arguments about how the appearances and essences of things differ". For that kind of material to be included, you need a reliable, third-party source that says that the instances that you're referring to are about the concept of "character masks" specifically. You can't make that interpretation. At least, not here, anyhow. Same goes for what you say about "making explicit" aspects hidden in other's commentaries. Unless they say it explicitly, it's not allowed to go in here. This is what I meant by "special pleading." You say that these instances refer to the concept of "character masks". I am not so sure. As I understand it, the words (guise, unmask, etc.) are being used as metaphors... they do not refer to that specific concept (Charaktermasken). If you want to say that they do, you need a source that says so. It's not that the sources will support your interpretation (that should be true of all scholarly research, you see, including encyclopedia articles AND original research). It must be instead that the sources make exactly the interpretation that you present here, second-hand. That is quite a big difference. Otherwise, it can't appear in this article.
As a side note, I am an expert in theatre and I still don't understand what the first sentence means. I wrote most of the article on " character" too. Note, that there's no such thing as a "real human character". A character is, by definition, an appearance, a representation. There are real human people, but that's not the same thing. Those people may have "character" but that's not the same thing.
Another side note: there is no conflict with a theatre terminology. It's not a recognised theatre term. Someone would have moved it from Character mask (Marxism) simply because the disambiguation (Marxism) is unnecessary, not because they demanded a wider scope.
So, in conclusion, I recommend starting again (sorry!) and going slowly. Start with:
and provide a citation at the end of the sentence that confirms everything you claim in that sentence. If an author doesn't use that exact term, you can't put it in. If they do, provide a citation.
I hope that's helpful and not too discouraging. Regards, DionysosProteus ( talk) 04:09, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
I had not looked at your user-page when I wrote my comments above. I assumed, on the basis of the edits presented here, that the article's substantial deviations from accepted Wikipedia policy were the result of inexperience with Wikipedia (rather than indicating your level of academic experience). I am afraid that the article, in its present state, does not merely contain "some errors or inaccuracies", but rather that the overwhelming majority of it is unsuitable for Wikipedia. I have only glanced at your other articles, but I see a pattern, so it is worth discussing this. We can conduct this discussion on your talk page or here, whichever you prefer. I have expertise in some of the areas for which you've created articles, and glancing at those, I see the same problems that I see here--specifically, I looked at Abstract labour and concrete labour. I'm happy to discuss in detail the problems I see in that article, but for the purposes of a discussion about this one I note that they appear to suggest a problem with your editing in general. I see from your talk page that others have tried to address this with you. I note too, from the blurb on your user-page, that it would appear to arise from a misunderstanding of the policy about original research. You write: "I think real innovation in a genre usually requires a very good background knowledge of the genre, otherwise you just end up doing what somebody already did before." That is precisely the problem: in Wikipedia, you are only allowed to add what somebody has done before. Otherwise it is original research. So you see, the criterion is not whether a reader may find your additions interesting or valuable. Of course, we could spend our time debating their merits, but that is to miss the point.
To addresses your points:
Yes, I see the German Wiki-article. I also notice that it is poorly referenced. I am not arguing that we should have no article whatsoever, only that what is in it must be supported by citations from reliable, third-party sources throughout, whether in English or German. The overwhelming majority of the material here is unsourced or provides sources that do not support the specific interpretation presented.
"Character mask" is not a commonly-used technical term in theatre and I would not expect an article on it to compete for the namespace. It is the term, not the practice of using masks, that is at issue. There are plenty of starting points for research into "character" in that article. None of them, however, collapse "character" into "person". A person is not a character; a character is a representation. It is usually a good idea in these cases to begin with reference works that are analagous to the Wikipedia project: other encyclopedias, specialist dictionaries, etc. That way, you can be sure that the information that you present here from them is unlikely to be a minority, POV opinion.
With regard to the "idea of character", it has nothing to do with any historical determination of personality or transformation in the history of ideas. Marx is quite specific in his philosophical approach; he doesn't confuse categories of production with those of expression or representation (that is one aspect of his revolutionary approach with regard to abstract, subjective labour). You are the one that appears to be confusing them.
The issues of translation that you raise may well be vaild, as the rendering of Charaktermasken in Capital indicates; however, and again, for any of this to appear in an article, that specific point must have been made by someone writing in a reliable, 3rd-party source. You can't make that argument. That is not what Wikipedia is for, however valid, interesting, useful, important, etc., we might agree the point may be.
With regard to using "character" as a synonym for "personality": the problem arises from the varied genealogical trajectories of the Greek word ethos. Note that "moral character" is not a synonym in that sense and that all of the articles that you offer are unreferenced. Collapsing "personality" into "character", furthermore, obscures and confuses precisely the issues that you are trying to detail in the article. As far as I know, Marx is not making a claim about personality. He is describing a social relation that particular individuals "bear". If you want to argue that a personality claim is what he's doing, again, you need a source that says so. Your use of "character" to describe "identity" confuses the concept unnecessarily. An actor is not a character. And with regard to what I assume are swipes against "postmodernism", again, i recommend a better historical grounding in these ideas. Ideas about the personality as a series of layers are present in Marx's time and have a long history, as do those that claim it derives from some "essence". You appear to want to make an argument for Marx as an essentialist in these terms. I would disagree strongly, on the basis of my knowledge and understanding of his work and ideas, but the point is not for us to debate it and agree or not, but rather to provide citations for any claims that are to appear in the encyclopedia.
You appear to misunderstand my criticisms under the rubric of "metaphor." I am not debating whether or not Marx's thought unfolds along an axis of reality--appearance. I am saying that the claims you are making about the concept of "mask" are relying on metaphorical uses--the connection between the two is dubious. When Marx talks about the perverted, unreal world that arises with the real subsumption of society under capital, or the realm of commodity exchange and consumption as distinct from the dark workshops of production, he is not utilising a concept of "character mask".
We will agree, I suspect, that the social relations of the captialist mode of production structure our activity regardless of our conscious intent. This theme has a long history in Marxism, stretching well beyond Althusser's structuralism. Concepts such as "ideology", "class consciousness", the "class-in-itself" and "-for-itself," etc, give some sense of the complexity of the genealogy of these themes. If you want to link all of this to the concept of "character mask", you need, again, a reliable, third-party source that does so. These ideas turn on a careful series of distinctions between social relations, social identity, personality, and consciousness, which the article, in its present state, collapses.
To write that Marx "unmasks" the capitalist system is, precisely, a metaphor, not an actual description of his theoretical process. You could just as easily describe it, a la Wizard of Oz or Brecht, as "pulling back the curtain on"; or "penetrating to the heart of". These are metaphorical relations, not conceptual ones. Both in terms of Wikipedia's policies, and I would also add in theoretical terms (though that is besides the point here), you cannot assume that every time Marx describes a phenomonon of "appearance" that he is talking about the concept of Charaktermasken.
Your arguments above about "raising oneself above social relations to understand them" etc., is mimicking Althusser's distinction between theory and ideology. If you want to link Marx's notion of Charaktermasken to processes of ideology and those of production, all well and good. But you (a) need sources that do so; and (b) should not collapse the distinct concepts of Charaktermasken and ideology into one another.
So, you see, I am making two distinct points: firstly, and most relevantly, the non-conformity of the majority of this article to Wikipedia policies, specifically those prohibiting Original Research. That there is "no systematic scholarly exposition of the concept" in English is fine, so long as you are sourcing an exposition that someone else in a reliable, third-party source has done in German, say. This is to comply with the Verifiability policy. What you can't do, however, is to create that exposition, whether in English or in German (at least, not here).
My second, and less relevant point, is a theoretical one: I am arguing that you are misrepresentating Marx's thought, which is, I suggest, far more careful in making distinctions and more precise in its philosophical approach (production, expression, representation, etc.) than the argument presented here. The idea that there is a "dominant Marxist ideology" in academia is a little silly, and I'm sure that you don't mean it seriously. Marxist thought is in no way dominant in academia; nor, within those who could be grouped together as thinking in these terms, is there any "dominant" approach. There is as wide a range of Marxist theorists in academia as there are Marxists in the rest of social life. Which branch of Marxist theory do you think is the "dominant" one?
So, yes, I do think that the only realistic solution is to start again from the ground up, as I suggested in my previous posting, restricting yourself to statements that, in essence, paraphrase what someone else has already said about this concept in a reliable source. A well-sourced article on Charaktermasken would be a welcome addition to the encyclopedia, but as it stands, this article is a long way from providing that. DionysosProteus ( talk) 15:27, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
I see, then, that much of what I wrote fell on deaf ears. I wrote that my previous posting was made under the assumption that you were new to Wikipedia and that I was not impugning your academic or intellectual credentials. On Wikipedia, our academic experience is, for the purposes of discussion and improvement of articles, irrelevant. We may of course describe our backgrounds to one another, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating--in other words, we defer such discussions to information and opinions given in reliable, third-party sources, not in relation to the competencies of the editors. The purpose of this talk page is to provide a forum in which questions may be raised about the content and quality of the article and I have raised some questions about this article. There is little to be done if you find a question-and-answer dialogue unbearably oppressive.
To address the things that you have written in your last posting in the order in which you wrote them:
Perhaps you could to edit this talk page and add bold marks to the place at which I questioned your translation of Charaktermasken, as you claim? You discern an abrupt change of tone where there was none. I questioned whether the most common term used by Marx to discuss the phenomenon that this article describes wasn't, in fact, "bearers of social relations" (Träger). That is a conceptual, not a linguistic, query. You claim that you have provided sources for the debate about the translation of Charaktermasken, as if I hadn't read it. I referred to "The PDF cited (not a reliable source)"--namely, the only citation that you give for the "accurate translations" issue in that section (Hans Ehrbar). It is precisely for instances such as this that the Wikipedia policies exist--it is up to you to provide a citation for each claim that you make. For you to point to those made in different sections for different claims doesn't fulfil those criteria.
Thankyou for your recommendations to go check with a reputable theatre school to consult an expert regarding the use of the term "character mask" in that discipline. I looked in the mirror and did so and am happy to report that you are mistaken. Seriously, though, as I said above, our qualifications and expertise are not the issue. I have a number of specialist books from the field and can confirm that the term isn't a technical one that we use. No entry appears in the Cambridge Guide to Theatre, Pavis' A Dictionary of Theatre, and so on. The substantial quotation that you cite in evidence of the claim in the article isn't a reliable source. Again, it is up to you to provide a source adequate to Wikipedia's criteria.
I regard all demands for "respect," such as those you make above, as the micro-fascistic nonsense they clearly are--amusing though your "You will not question my authority" posing is. You may find the experience of engaging with criticism a distressing experience, but please note that the terms in which they have been made in the posts above are not personal and concern the article and its relation to policies. I am applying to this article the standards that Wikipedia sets. I am familiar with them because I follow them rigorously myself--you will find, if you consult the articles on which I work, that I do not indulge in original research, however fascinating or important I may regard my own ideas to be; you will find, too, that every single sentence that I add to the encyclopedia is supported with a citation to at least one, if not several, reliable, third-party sources. You write: "I may not be “the” scholarly authority on this topic (there is none, so far)" If that is true, then it is not a suitable subject for an article here, since we only present material already published elsewhere; our job as editors is merely to pass on such material in a non-copyright-violating form. I don't understand why I need to repeat this.
I presume that by "unsupported insinuation" you are refering to my having mentioned the other article by you at which I looked, abstract labour and concrete labour? If so, as I wrote in my posting, I am happy to discuss the problems that I see there too--there is nothing "insinuated" about them. Where, for example, is the discussion about tendency, or the true in practice, both of which are absolutely central to the concept of abstract labour? The discussion limits itself to a fordist regime, whereas Marx's concept ranges far more widely--and relevantly for our own times. One reference to Ricardo? None to Smith? There is nothing "unsupported" about these concerns, and I'm happy to point you towards the relevant material if necessary. I limited myself to merely mentioning a concern precisely because this is the talk page for a different article.
It is precisely with regard to the potential readers that I voice my concerns. Wikipedia has a terrible reputation; despite this, it is widely used. The project responds to this responsibility as best it can with its policies. This may appear to be a bureaucratic limitation of your creative freedom, but the policies are there for a reason. My concerns about this article are based on what I understand as substantial deviations from those policies. You may fantasize all you please about me and my motives, suggest personal attacks where there very clearly are none, and rave about your pet hates as much as you like; none of that addresses the issue.
Perhaps I have not been clear about the point concerning the relationship between citations and original research (your "stack of references" claims). In fact, the paragraph following that in your last posting illustrates the broader problem.
For the most part, the problems with the article that you concede are not problems! Listing the instances within Marx's writings in which the term Charaktermasken is used is not original research! In fact, that would be very useful and appropriate for the article.
You should not, however, provide your own translation, but rather give the passage in the published English translation and provide the German equivalent passage in a footnote, with Charaktermasken in bold, for example. Not amending anything, you provide only the evidence. This isn't misleading the reader or confusing--I am assuming that the passages would appear as part of the discussion about transmission. To follow my suggestion involves no interpretation of the source material on your part. If you are able to link to the passage in the online German text, even better.
The point is that a reader has to be able to go and check something for themselves, whether online or in print. If I see a passage from the English version and have you tell me that this contains the term Charaktermasken, then I want to be able to confirm that. That is what I tried to do when I examined in detail your "Accurate translations" section. The fact that Charaktermasken was deleted or replaced is relevant too, and if other scholars have pointed this out/argued this, saying so in the article isn't original research--it just needs a citation that the reader can go check. When I went to check the translation of the passage from the 18thBrum, I was disturbed to find that the term "character mask" does not appear there--neither in the original nor in the translation.
The view that you take of the English translations, detailed above, is a good example of original research. This is my point. Let's imagine that you wanted to provide that information (express those opinions) in the article. Unless someone else says these things, they can't appear in the article. You can't cite Capital 1, Grundrisse, or CII as if they are evidence. You have to say: "John Smith argues that the translations of Capital I..." etc. and provide a citation.
You write: "Since my ideas are frequently apt to get stolen or misrepresented by miserable, parasitic “thinkers” who can do no better than profit by dotting the i’s on other people’s work, I am more or less obliged to publish, even if only to defend myself against false smears." Yes, yes, no doubt THEY are all clamouring for your wisdom. I recommend aluminium foil in your hat. Releasing your precious insights into the public domain is perhaps not the best way to protect them. But could we please try to limit the discussion to improving the article?
For the point-by-point concerns:
(1) "Errors and inaccuracies" appeared in my post in quotation marks, because I was quoting you from your previous post. Libel? Very amusing. I did point out one, for example: the very first sentence. It is and remains complete nonsense and illogical. How exactly do you understand Marx's concept to relate to mimesis? As I tried to indicate to you, this is to treat Marx's thought as if it turned on the category of representation, rather than production. To bear a social relation is not a mimetic process.
(2) I did indicate very precisely the pattern that I saw: to repeat it once more, the evidence of (a) the sentence on your user page, (b) the times others have warned about original research on your talk page, (c) my assessment of the abstract labour article. It's a "slur on your reputation"? Reach for the tin-foil hat, I'm sure that'll protect you. Your attempts to characterise my criticisms as something other than concerns about violations of policy render your motives dubious. Perhaps you could confine yourself to addressing the concerns instead and quit the victimised role-play?
(3) Perhaps you do not spend much time browsing Wikipedia's other articles? I assume so, from the logic of your suggestion that the fact that your articles have remained unamended indicates widespread acceptance and validation by the world at large of the quality of their content. It doesn't--Wikipedia simply doesn't work like that. For someone to object requires someone to know the subject well and to take the time to raise a question. All kinds of conditions have to be in place for such an event to occur. Note, too, that I did in fact offer to discuss the problems I see on the relavant talk pages. Suggesting that I do something that I have already suggested I could do simply makes you seem paranoid and defensive. "HOW DARE HE IMPUGN MY MIGHTY SCHOLARSHIP?" you seem to be crying... Again, can we do without the histionicism?
(4) I have made a number of specific criticisms.
(5) I regarded that sentence on your user page in relation to the other evidence I had seen, most substantially this article itself. It wasn't understood in isolation but as part of a pattern. On its own, I would have disregarded it. And whether you claim to be doing anything original is besides the point. It's not about your intentions or self-understanding. It is a relationship between what appears in scholarly publications and how that is re-presented here. And, as I pointed you to in the policy, synthesis is explicity prohibited. Again, that your edits have gone unchallenged does not indicate validation.
(6) The sources are a problem. You seem to be refusing to deal with this. I can go through the article and tag each and every instance, but that would be time-consuming, make the article ugly and unreadable, and more than a little pedantic. The problem has nothing to do with German vs. English sources. It is about interpretation.
(7) see (6).
(8) The very first sentence, in its garbled incoherence, enacts precisely the collapse I describe, and the problem persists throughout.
(9) see (8). In the very first sentence. I fail to say what I mean by "a character is a representation"? It's the dictionary definition, man. You are confusing the substantive and genitive senses of the word ("natural human character"). And Charaktermasken is not an instance of self-presentation. When Marx says that buyer/seller or worker/capitalist are "character masks" it has nothing to do with a mimetic relationship. At least, if you want to argue that it does, you need to provide a source that says exactly that. You write: "The very aim of this article is to explain the concept of character mask, where one character is masked by another." That's precisely the problem I'm pointing to. That sentence is meaningless and illogical! My objection has nothing to do with any claim to scientificity.
(10) The recommendation about consulting dictionaries was made specifically with regard to the question of the technical term in theatre; the claim is unsourced. I made a recommendation for the kind of reference material you might consult were you to try to source it. Perhaps your tin-foil hat will protect you from any "patronising" energy in the ether. But again, less histrionicism please. Making a recommendation for research is exactly the kind of thing these talk pages are for. And, again, you can only "often go beyond it" (the article you reference) while standing on other's shoulders, as it were... otherwise it's OR.
(11) You write: "You say “with regard to the "idea of character", it has nothing to do with any historical determination of personality or transformation in the history of ideas.” This is where your understanding of what Marx writes and means is demonstrably poor, and again it appears that you have not thoroughly read the article. Compare, for example, footnote 104 [now footnote 105]." Are you being disingenuous? The "it" in that sentence does not refer to the idea of character but the problem we were discussing. The problem I have identified has nothing to do with whether or not personality is historically determined...! It's hard to take you seriously with this kind of response. As if I'm going to argue that personality isn't historically determined? I have not recently arrived from the Romantic era. I was responding to your paragraph entitled "THE IDEA OF CHARACTER". Hence the quotation marks!!!! In it, you wrote "I am very aware that in the 19th century, human beings were in some respects different from what they are now, and that people thought about human character in ways different from today" I responded: this is besides the point! You make it very difficult to take you seriously.
(12) As I explained to you above, yes, yes, yes, wearily, I know who Althusser is. I've read lots of his books. And the Frankfurt school, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas, etc... And Marx. And Engels. And Trotsky. And Lenin. Even Stalin and Mao. And Gramsci. And Thompson. And Williams. And Aglietta and the regulation school. And the Open Marxism lot. And Negri, Tronti, and the other autonomists. And a host of others, to say nothing of all the "post-Marxists" and leftist converts to thatcherism. Yes, yes, yes, for heaven's sake. I'm sure you think your take on Althusser is terribly revolutionary. YAWN. Structuralism as a bourgeois fad? PASSES OUT FROM THE SHEER WEIGHT OF TEDIUM OF YOUR RHETORIC. Yes, down with those damn thinkers. To the fields with them, sharpish! or better still, up against the nearest wall. But might we PLEASE pass on to more relevant matters? My understanding is not "strongly influenced" by Althusser. You seem to be missing the point. If anything, I would want to interrogate his theory for exactly the same problems I'm identifying in your own account in this article: the confusion of categories of representation (though, for him, mimesis has been replaced by signification) and production.
(13) As to my "posing", you will notice that I recommended the character article to you. The complex relationship with the Greek ethos is traceable from that. Read it for yourself. You write: "nowhere in the article have I suggested that character is the same as personality." So what does the first sentence do then?
(14) You write: "You state that “all of the articles that you offer are unreferenced.” This is simply false and I cannot take that seriously." Character structure? Notice the tag? Social character? Notice the complete absence of inline citations?
(15) YAWN. Yes, yes, I'm sure you're terribly authentic. Coal under the fingernails and everything. I'm fairly sure I could out-prole you anyday, but "Arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments." Your fantasies about me notwithstanding, the following is original research: "this does lead to a transformation of consciousness and to personal transformation as well. Maybe you are not aware of this because you are insulated in the academy, but really working in jobs does transform people. It is a completely obvious point in itself, incomprehensible only to people who have never done an honest day’s work themselves. At most we can debate about how it transforms people, but I do not propose to go into detail in this article." Where, exactly, does Marx describe such a transformation?
(16) You write: "Try telling to an actor that "an actor is not a character" and see what response you get. The whole point is that the actor is a character who acts out a different character, and in so doing he is masking his true self in some way, otherwise he would not be acting in the theatrical sense." I know it's not kind to laugh so, but this is so funny that I may in fact read it out in the first acting class that I teach when the term begins. Forgive me for saying so, but you have no idea what you're talking about. But the important thing is that you don't need to take my word for it. Consult some reliable sources. It's that garbled first sentence again.
(17) You wrote: "If it is nonsense, I would like to have a good, clearcut scientific argument why this is so, not some pomo bullshit story contrived by a free rider out of a clever pastiche of different definitions." "Pomo" isn't postmodernism then? Yet you write: "I do not make “swipes against postmodernism"" That must have been someone else then. And lo, the mighty historian again. It was your... whatever it was, swipe, considered remark... that I responded to, in which you implied that "identity as nothing but layers" was a pomo invention.
(18) Again, you misrepresent my argument. I was describing your own interpretation, not my assessment of Marx's. And the point, precisely, is not an epistemological one, it's an ontological one. Yes, the argument you present in your last post is one concerning epistemology. But we weren't discussing his epistemology, we were talking about the nature of being, subjectivity, identity, role, etc. These are ontological questions. I am responding to the arguments that you have presented here. When I wrote that you appeared to be presenting an essentialist view, it wasn't in response to your title "appearance/essence"; yes, yes, surely it is clear from the references that I've pointed at that I have expertise and understand these basic distinctions? Pretending they are about something else only obscures the issues.
(19) This is an article about the concept of "character masks". In the course of the article, in the quotations full of bold that I criticised, you want to link the concept of "character masks" to passages of Marx in which the term "character mask" does not appear. I am suggesting to you that that link is dubious and I would like citations to demonstrate that it is not. That is how Wikipedia works! The terms in question are clearly metaphors for a process that Marx is describing. They are metaphors, as you have suggested and as I have agreed, for a conceptal scheme structured around the axis reality (or truth) and appearance. "Unmasking", for example in the quotation about religion, involves a critical act that identifies politics beneath the theological appearance. It has nothing to do with characters, of any kind. You write: "It is true that the concept of the mask can be used metaphorically and I have indicated this explicitly in the article" Where, exactly, have you explained that this "unmasking" has nothing to do with "character masks" and is merely a metaphorical usage? Because it looks to me like you are marshalling that quotation as evidence for the concept "character mask". Which it plainly isn't.
You see, follow the line of argument in the "Sources of the concept" section: you trace a development of secularisation of the understanding of "human character"--by which, you mean, human personality. This is then linked, via the bold terms, to the quotation about religion. But the "masks" in that passage have absolutely nothing to do with the analysis of human personality (or human "character" or whatever you want to call it). This is rhetoric, not logic. Then you proceed to quote from the 18thBrum and claim that it is an example of Marx's use of "character masks". Marx writes: "So maskierte sich Luther als Apostel Paulus, die Revolution von 1789-1814 drapierte sich abwechselnd als römische Republik und als römisches Kaisertum, und die Revolution von 1848 wußte nichts besseres zu tun, als hier 1789, dort die revolutionäre Überlieferung von 1793-1795 zu parodieren." You want to argue that Marx's use of the word "maskierte", or the others, belongs to the conceptual matrix of "character mask" (rather than merely being a use of metaphor)? Fine. You need a source that says it is. This is what I'm trying to tell you about the problems with this article, which you seem to be ignoring. Then, no citation for the claim about the Frankfurt school. No citation for the claim that the concept is "important" in the sentence about the Penguin dict. And so on.
As regards my statement: "When Marx talks about the perverted, unreal world that arises with the real subsumption of society under capital, or the realm of commodity exchange and consumption as distinct from the dark workshops of production, he is not utilising a concept of "character mask"." The point is that you cannot use every instance of a surface/depth relationship in Marx's thought as evidence for the importance of the concept of "character mask". Unless another scholar has made this argument for you, who says that this equals that, or is related to that in some specific way, it is irrelevant to the article and misleading to include it. If it belongs to the conceptual matrix of "character mask" then you need a source that identifies that belonging. You say I'm talking nonsense...? Fine. Prove it, the onus is on you. Marx simply using the verb "to mask" doesn't do that! So you have identified many instances in which Marx uses the word "to mask" or some variation thereof. Wonderful. Now you need a source that links each one to the subject of this article--Charaktermasken. Those are the criteria for inclusion in Wikipedia. Someone else has to have said it...
Thank you for the lecture on free will and determinism. Yes, yes, yes, WEARILY, I'm quite familiar with the structure/struggle debate. You have said exactly what I stated. Bravo. Is it that I used the word structure??? Oh, and there you go raving against Althusser again. Anyone'd think he'd murdered your wife... Really, do you not have bigger fish to fry? Like, you know, opponents in the class struggle, for instance? Where does this paranoid delusion about Althusser's mighty influence come from? Most people read Althusser as a historical document these days. Who exactly are you fighting with such vitriol? Yes, yes, I'm not getting my Marx from an Althusser digest, thanks--I've read the man himself. No, not just Capital. Alright, not ABSOLUTELY everything (I haven't laboured through his uni thesis, for example), but for heaven's sake, a lot. How about the Frankfurt school? Haven't heard you take a pop at them yet, although they perform a very similar theoretical move. Ah... is the key in your "The German and Austrian Marxist discussions about the concept of character masks, by Haug, Ottomeyer etc. aim precisely to redress the balance"...? You need a straw opponent, right? Viva la revolution. You talk as if these guys are the first to make this argument...? This is not the 1970s... Yes, yes, no doubt Althusser's shadow will live on in caves for millennia, but really...
With regard to mentioning the related concepts of ideology, etc.: the relevance is in your use of the word "character". A theatre instead of a factory; representation instead of production.
Just what, precisely, do you find pretentious about "“a careful series of distinctions between social relations, social identity, personality, and consciousness”"? These are the things we have been discussing. They are related to the notion of "character", "character mask" and agent of production. The evidence is in your arguments, for heaven's sake. Again, I draw your attention to the gibberish of the very first sentence! It is you who, as the author of the article, is required to provide the citations.
Again, you misunderstand the objection about metaphors. And Marx is not a shaman. His thought is not based on metaphors. The mask no more describes the process conceptually than the curtain or the surgical knife. You haven't provided evidence that these are conceptual relations and not merely metaphors. And vulgarity is a pejorative term of the aristocracy's--lovely. A little crude thinking comes in handy sometimes. The point is that it is inappropriate for you to be talking in those terms.
You write: "there is also no evidence in my article that I do make such an assumption" (when I write that you cannot assume that every time Marx describes a phenomonon of "appearance" that he is talking about the concept of Charaktermasken.). I am responding to the arguments you have presented here, specifically those under the title APPEARANCE/ESSENCE above. "I have been working on these issues for thirty years and was a top philosophy student. You are just being pretentious and I find it objectionable." Well bully for you. Must've been a low ceiling if the articles I've read so far are anything to go by. Is it possible that you'll address the issues raised about the article and its assumptions, rather than all this swaggering? There is nothing "pretentious" about questioning the logic of your argument.
The "raising oneself above social relations" AGAIN was a response to what you've written above in the essence/appearance section. Do you forget what you've written in composing the subsequent response? I see you've added in a Marx quotation since. This isn't going to become a game of catechisms, is it? What you seem to miss is that Marx is talking about ideology there!
And your: "In your summing up, you say I am “misrepresentating Marx's thought”, but you yourself cannot even spell “misrepresenting correctly. If you cannot even spell “misrepresenting” correctly, how can you understand my article – particularly since you show no evidence that you have read it properly?" I'd take my hat off to you for sheer denial, but you'd be forced to return the favour and I wouldn't want your tin-foil to blow away in the wind.
The point about the distinctions goes to the heart of the subject of this article. There is a problem with your attempt to use representational categories to describe a system of thought based on the category of production.
You identified the existence of such as thing as a "dominant Marxist ideology". You contradict yourself in the space of two sentences. More ranting against Althusser. SIGH and YAWN.
Now, the issue of "bearers" is important, because, as you've suggested, it is related to "character masks"--but it is important not at all in the way you describe. Marx does use the term "bearers" of a social relation. But you seem to misunderstand the import. I am thinking of the Grundrisse, both the intro and throughout. Yes, yes, the translation, but let's talk about Träger. It relates to the whole subjectivity/objectivity dynamic. It isn't simply a question of whether men make their own history, for heaven's sake. It has nothing to do with the old structure/struggle debate. You talk as if this were the 1970s. The living subjectivity of labour is not a person or a group of people! We are the bearers of that. Actually, this relates to the dimension of the concept of abstract labour that I found completely absent in that article, so I shouldn't be surprised. Now, I could spend some time talking though this, but I suspect that you are too paranoid and defensive to hear anything I say. You've also complained about me not having provided evidence... as if that were my responsibility. Talk pages do not require citations, ARTICLES do. But since you want a 3rd party source, try Negri's Marx Beyond Marx. It is a detailed, section by section reading of the Grundrisse. No, he's not a structuralist, before you start foaming at the mouth. The tendency of abstract labour to become true in practice. Capital doesn't "code" us, it "axiomizes" us. The abstraction and indifference of the relation bears directly on the concept of character masks. It has nothing to do with "human character"/personality/the subject... call it what you will.
In summary: you have failed to engage with the substance of the concerns I have raised here. Instead you have "conceded" a problem where there is none (or hardly one). The substantial problem remains: this article is original research in its present form. You haven't seemed to understand the core principle: we only reproduce what others have already written. Yes, there are footnotes in this article. But that is not the same thing as that required by Wikipedia policy. The argument you make in the article HAS TO HAVE BEEN MADE ELSEWHERE, and you provide a citation TELLING US EXACTLY WHERE. All of your foaming at the mouth about Althusser or your attempts to characterise my previous postings as something that they clearly are not, all of your fantasising about me personally, and your swaggering about your intellectual or proletarian credentials, all of that is irrelevant. I have asked, again and again, for sources for the claims made. I have pointed you towards sources of research that confirm what I have argued (the character article, for a start). I have tried to disentangle your confusion of the 'substantive' and 'genitive' senses of the word "character". The problems with this article start with the first sentence and continue throughout. I have been extremely specific in the criticisms I have made. I have attempted to engage with its theoretical dimensions. You keep trying to lecture me as if I have not read the books concerned (actually, both about Marxism and the theatre). Unfortunately, I have expertise in both areas, so your repeated attempts to characterise me as ignorant won't wash. I responded to specific points that you made here, and you treated them as if I was talking about something else entirely. And in general you have lowered the tone of the discussion by becoming hysterical, histrionic, defensive and paranoid. Please try to stick to the issue: the relation of the article to the wikipedia policies that I have identified. 00:20, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
Fine. Fix the article, or I'll propose it for deletion. Your threats and rants against academics and those seeking to steal your thoughts don't bring you any closer to fixing the problems with this article. Yes, no doubt you are terribly proletarian and revolutionary to your very core--the unbounded paranoia and micro-fascism so evident from your rants clearly demonstrate that. And from the poor state of the articles by you that I've seen, you could do with a little more reading yourself: Uncle Joe's big red book of DIAMAT just doesn't cut it. DionysosProteus ( talk) 11:38, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
I have improved the article and taken the tag off meantime. Personal attacks from so-called academic "experts" who waft their "authority" without any solid knowledge about the subjectmatter of the article and the related literature are not acceptable. Vague insinuations and insults are not acceptable. If problems remain with the article, an exact specification of what they are is required (not general conceptual waffle), criticisms have to be proved and argued for, and a precise indication should be given of how the critic thinks the object of his criticism in the article can be fixed. Without this, I will leave the article as it is, except for possible small alterations. The aim of the article is to provide an intro to the concept of character masks and the issues related to it, indicating different uses by different authors, not to push any particular ideological bandwaggon. User:Jurriaan 14 September 2010 15:09 (UTC)
At 185KB, this article is very long, making it slow to load and difficult to edit. WP:SIZE advises that articles over 100KB long should generally be split if possible. Would it be possible to break some sections of this article off into separate article(s), per WP:Summary style? Robofish ( talk) 16:23, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
The article is way too long and complex to read comfortably. It's not an encylopeadia article. Have you thought about publishing this elsewhere and then just putting a summary on wikipedia? It's almost a book! Halon8 ( talk) 00:53, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
After the author of this article was lambasted by a third-rate academic tyrant for his effort, this article on character masks was stolen in 2011 by a company called "Webster's Digital Services" and published for private profit, fraudulently presenting someone called "Stuart Sloan" (a fictitious name) as the author and editor. See: Stuart Sloan, Political Concepts: Character Mask and Marxism. Webster's Digital Services (May 12, 2011) ISBN-10: 1241686726 ISBN-13: 978-1241686727. It is advertised on Amazon.com The claim of the publishers is that the article is being "curated" under a creative commons license, while all they do is extract private profit from the sale of the article with a false claim to authorship. Wikipedia authorities did nothing to stop this fraud. User:Jurriaan 31 October 2011 14:12
"The difficulty in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood. That is why you sometimes have to begin with the most difficult things in order to understand the easier things properly." - Pierre Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power. Polity Press, 1991, p. 207.
"Without a proper amount of solitude in our lives there is little time to reflect, or even consider, what the other might be thinking or feeling. It is in solitude that we are able to peel away the layered masks we wear and come to a place of self revelation where we “see” ourselves in true light, for we cannot know who we are without spending time reflecting, contemplating, thinking about who we are in relation to others. It is there, springing from regular solitude and silence, that we are better prepared to bring an authentic self to the table of relationship. Without it there is little room for intimacy. These interior activities are natural and essential to the flourishing of the human soul, but they are thwarted daily, not only by the psychological means of self-protection we exhibit by closing ourselves off from others, but by the need to make a living and exist in the world. Indeed, today, these very human needs are exacerbated by the deluge of data that comes our way through our personal mobile media and overall communication environment.(...) Subsumed by the din of noisy crowds, machinery, and other environmental intrusions, the spoken word hangs like the lingering, last leaf of autumn. In so many ways it seems to await a final gust from the north, dangling in the wind of the technophilic love affair with digitality. The antidote? Find the quiet places in the busyness of life; protect them. Seek to be with others. Determine to be fully engaged. Enjoy being fully present. Speak." - Stephanie Bennett, Palm Beach Atlantic University, "Seeking the Sound of Silence: Human Presence and the Acoustics of Solitude." Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association, Volume 11, 2010, p. 63-64. [2]
I have labelled this article, Character Mask for clean up, in order that it be rewritten specifically about the subject, Economic Masking, as applied in Marxist economics, and not about the opinions of an editor who feels very strongly about the subjects, including the Marxism.
24.1.181.44 ( talk) 14:19, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
24.1.181.44 ( talk) 23:21, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
You can't hide / your lyin' eyes / And your smile / is a thin disguise / I thought by now / you'd realize / There ain't no way / to hide your lyin eyes.
- the Eagles, Lying eyes (1975).
By popular demand, I am working on a publishable book on character masks and maskings, which goes into much more detail and depth than the article I have presented here, but it will take a while yet (I am not a rich academic with a research staff and research grants that pay for my costs). User:Jurriaan 19 August 2012 19:14 (UTC)
In an effort to reduce the length of the article, User:Nikkimaria has chopped out quite a few bits of the article, without stating any reasons. So let's just say that the article I intended was the version at 1 September 2012, before other users started to chop into it. User:Jurriaan 2 September 2012 21:33 (UTC)
The article needs to be shortened because it cannot be comfortably read in one sitting. Although this has been discussed earlier ( Talk:Character mask#Article size), this issue wasn't resolved.
The existence of other articles which are also too long does not mean that Character mask isn't too long. Arguments that this article doesn't need to be shortened because other articles (such as Glass–Steagall Act) are also very large are not convincing.
The article size guideline is not meant to be arbitrary. Technical limitations have pretty much been removed as computers are now able to load and edit long articles without problem. The issue with this article is that no normal person could reasonably be able to read this article in one sitting.
This also isn't a question about content notability. The article appears to be well-sourced and well-written, but surely the comprehensive sections can be split out into individual articles (maintaining notability and depth) while retaining a succinct summary (improving readability). If structured well, regular readers will be able to find the same information while new readers will find the article more accessible.
Please let me know what you think. Kind regards, Matt ( talk) 05:35, 26 October 2012 (UTC)
I don't agree with the fact that it should be split up. First of all, the problematic of it being big and extended is part of 'marxist development' itself. The marxist movement has been very broad, so necessarily articles that really want to grip certain concepts in their historical (and thus diverse) interpretation tend to become large.
Secondly, the section on marx's argument in das kapital shows how this theorization is an essential aspect in understanding marx. This can't be included in the other sections on marx's theory (namely value-form theory or alienation or commmodity fetishism). This part deals more explicitly with the cultural or subjective countering of commodity fetishism wich is implicit in marx's theoretical critique as a whole, but wich isn't explicitly theoretically developed at any other place than in his more philosophical and political writings. In this sense it gives counterweight to the often highle objectivist interpretation of marxism.
Lastly, i found the article very helpful and enriching. It's true that you can't read it in one sitting session, but by splitting it up you can't have the overview you have now. There are lot's of posts which are shorter but not so readible like this, the style is very fluent. And the categorization is very sufficient and clear. I think the writer should decide, since he wrote it and the quality of the article is very high.
141.134.34.37 ( talk) 17:51, 2 November 2012 (UTC)
The article's length and level of detail may make it appropriate for an encyclopedia on Marx, but not for a general encyclopedia like WP. It really needs to be shortened and made more succinct. Marked as such. Sleety Dribble ( talk) 14:32, 22 September 2015 (UTC)
--Speaking as a Marxist: why is anyone surprised that Marxists wrote an article about their own philosophy that is both overly long and only interesting to a small audience? This is, like, the thing we're best at and most enthusiastic about --JeremyCorbynsSeventhBiggestFan — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.42.149.140 ( talk) 21:32, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
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WHAT is this sentence supposed to mean? "Economic analysis not only studies the total social effect of human actions, which is usually not directly observable to an individual, other than in the form of statistics or television." I am just asking why "...or television"? And in fact asking what the sentence has to do with the article at all? I'm apparently not the only person who finds the article rather odd. According to http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-worst-wikipedia-articles.php "this page... is mostly maintained by two people who are probably mentally ill. This is Wikipedia at its worst". Have a great day on the ant hill.
Both "neo-Stalinism" and "structural-functionalist" are incorrect characterizations of Althusser. The rest of this section is also very biased, but it would require rewriting to correct, so at the very least such inaccurate labels should be removed. It is also not appropriate to describe Althusser's perspective as "totalizing" as though this were objective fact (it is misleading because he presents a critique of different types of totality). So this should be attributed to one particular perspective. The second paragraph of the section "Marxism as a character mask" does not support any of its claims, and does not explain why they are relevant to the preceding discussion. It is highly inaccurate as a characterization of Althusser, so it should be removed and the sections should be merged. The use of the term "totalitarianism" preceding this is not supported. While the rest of these sections are contentious interpretations, they are prevalent enough interpretations, with some correspondence to the literature, so they can be left despite their bias. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 100.38.3.171 ( talk) 15:44, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
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I am still working on this article - I aim to expand it some more later, but appropriate additions are welcome User:Jurriaan 19 July 2010 23:39 (UTC)
Thank you for the comment. It is not the purpose of the article however to discuss the concept of the authentic self, merely to define the concept of character mask and illustrate how the concept has been used. There is, surprisingly, a great paucity of literature on the concept in the English language, even although the term is still used by scholars and journalists. That's why I thought an article might be useful.
I do not claim to know everything about the subject, but I do think the idea that the self is built up exclusively out of a "layering of character masks" fails.
The two main reasons I have for this are:
(1) that human beings emerge in the womb and begin life already before they really know how to mask themselves in social and physical settings.
(2) much of the life-experience that shapes their identity requires an unmasked (spontaneous) response from them, and that response may often be unmasked, precisely because the individual has not yet learnt to mask it, or does not know (yet) how to mask it (we say for example that "someone is caught out unawares").
In other words, to a very large extent, masking has to be learnt, something that is admitted by Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson.
Whereas some masking may be instinctive or genetically coded (a primal urge to protect oneself by covering oneself, inscribed in the human species as an evolutionary adaptation through an enormously long battle with nature, which perhaps begins with shading the eyes), I would think that a real character mask (as distinct from a neutral mask) cannot be genetically transmitted, because its formation requires that the living individual can creatively draw or improvise a distinction between his/her own identity and the identity which the environment or social setting requires of him/her. That setting, and its changes, is not itself given by genetics. At best genetic structure can provide a certain disposition towards certain kinds of adaptations, responses and choices.
In other words, the character mask presupposes that there is a character which can be masked with another character in a more or less conscious way, in response to, and in interaction with, enviromental or social settings. This requires from the individual that a sub-conscious or conscious distinction can be made between the "real" character (the stable personal traits the organism has) and the character mask created.
No doubt that distinction is not absolute and may not be easy to draw; people can "mutate" in some sense, or develop into a different identity through some kind of "system shock", and the lengthy habituation to a role may make it part of the normal character of the person.
My argument is, that the character mask is a character masked by another character. Your argument I think is, essentially, that "the mask masks another mask" ad infinitum, somewhat analogous to an image reflected in an endless series through two faced mirrors. It is just that I think, that the human memory empirically contains traces of both masked and unmasked responses, and thus, there does exist a distinction between "authentic" and "masked" characteristics, even if that distinction may be difficult to define in practice, particularly if the individual habitually masks his behaviour as a survival strategy.
The term "human character" is not a completely "scientific" and "measurable" concept, insofar as it refers not just to durable traits, but to a moral dimension in a dual sense: the typical ("characteristic") way in which individuals or groups evaluate their own experience, which is influenced by their surrounds, social and physical - and, crucially, to how these evaluations are evaluated by others at the same time, socially. We may be able to predict human character fairly accurately in a probabilistic sense, but it is not fully predetermined, insofar as the individual always has the ability to make choices (some degree of behavioural flexibility) and indeed to form "a new mask". And therefore human character is not completely fixed once and for all, but amenable to change in various degrees.
The concept of "authenticity" is likewise in dispute, because it could refer to "how I usually or normally would do it", or it could refer to "how I necessarily have to do it, being what I am". It is ultimately just very difficult to define authenticity, through a series of negations and affirmations, without resorting to tautology ("my definition against yours", "this is what I mean"). In the end, people are likely to say, "well, this is how I am, believe it or not."
This sport of analysis opens up a whole area of research which I cannot cover in a wikipedia article. I could for example include examples of CIA torture of prisoners who do not want to reveal their identity, and so on. I have to consider the intention of wikipedia and its protocols, and not overdo things. The ordinary reader wants a brief and succinct introduction to the concept, and the issues related to it, not a dissertation (I reference some dissertations). However, a brief indication of your idea could be included in the article (I already list some concerns under the "criticism" heading). I have also referred in a note to the idea of a "chameleon personality" such as it is used in the literature. User:Jurriaan 12 August 2010 15:48 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.136.223.40 ( talk)
First off I'd like to say thank you 4 lightning me Witcher Best knowledge The way you can wordI can definitely already tellI can definitely or detail I'm logged off Maybe 1 day gets opportunity of the sit down breakup coffee in Speech brain The knowledge the to hold this fast And I can tell you love the shirtDustin masculineS_m_s coming What stress over to order a handle on your own Grand caravan mass The cover of something you're not comfortable with Overcoming to meet I think you can have Certain things to play mask End of believe the matter how many miles care dumbass a person puts on the door was tom on top of the return Humptybogart ( talk) 01:10, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
I have taken out the bits about "Russian doll" because apparently it offended some people, who feel the analogy is not well-taken since the Russian doll has nothing to do with "character masks" per se. I've done most of the work on the article I want to do for now. I should really not have made the page before I had finished it, but when I had published the pilot it triggered off some more relevant ideas. It was just a tat difficult to write it, properly User:Jurriaan 17 August 2010 01:50 (UTC)
I see that this article is still in the process of being developed. However, I am concerned by what appears to be substantial original research here. It is full of claims that are unsubstantiated with reliable sources. The opening sentence is incomprehensible. Some of the citations that are provided are incorrect (the first Marx quotation in "Accurate translations", for instance, gives the penguin p.70 when it must be p.170). The repeated bold-formatting of terms that the author wants us to understand as synonyms looks like special pleading, rather than a commonly-accepted interpretation. I see that "Charaktermasken" is used by Marx in one sentence in the Commodity Fetishism chapter of vol.1 Capital. The PDF cited (not a reliable source) points to one other instance. How widespread, within Marx's writings, is the use of the word Charaktermasken? Isn't it the case that the most common formulation of the concept being described is as "bearers" (Träger) of social relations? This is hardly the same thing as a "character mask". Where are the reliable sources that support most of what is being claimed in the article? In its present state, it reads like a blog entry, not an encyclopedia article. DionysosProteus ( talk) 19:51, 22 August 2010 (UTC)
Thank you for your response. It seems clear to me from what you've said so far that the article is, as I'd suspected, "original research". It might be worth your while taking a look at the policy document if you want to develop the article further in a manner consistent with Wikipedia's aims. Wikipedia means something very specific by the term: it is not a distinction between "new" thinking and well-established ideas. Instead, it follows from the nature of Wikipedia as a particular kind of publication. Wikipedia is a "digest" of established knowledge and information. This means that everything that appears in an article here ought to be "second-hand"--i.e., it can be verified that someone in a reliable, third-party source has already made the argument presented here. We are not even allowed to "synthesize" material from different sources if that bringing together produces, in any way, new ideas. ("Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources. If one reliable source says A, and another reliable source says B, do not join A and B together to imply a conclusion C that is not mentioned by either of the sources. This would be a synthesis of published material to advance a new position, which is original research.") So, you see, the bringing together that you have done violates precisely these principles. This is in no way to say that your ideas are crazy, wrong, bad, etc. I'm not saying that people will not be interested in the material either. What it does mean, I'm afraid, is that Wikipedia is not an appropriate place for them.
There is no reason why your work should be wasted, however. You have several options, which I invite you to consider. If it is true that you have identified a genuine lacuna in English-language Marxist theory, then this is worth writing up into an article and seeking to get it published in a journal. Then (and only then) Wikipedia would be allowed to detail that research by citing your article. Alternatively, there are plenty of online forums in which you could present the material. Another option, and one that in any case we need to look at here, is to cut this material down into a form that is acceptable to Wikipedia. I have to warn you, though, that (without having done any further research myself) I think this would demand some pretty radical cuts.
Let me make it clear that I'm not pursuing some vendetta. I lecture in drama, so I know about mimetic theories. I have a post-graduate degree that specialised in Marxist philosophy and social theory, so I'm familiar with Althusser, Frankfurt, etc. and I've read more Marx than anyone else I know. Since then, I've also gained a working ability to read German. I added this page to my watchlist when I noticed it a little while ago because it looked like it would intersect with many of my interests. What I mean is, I am not unsupportive of the project that you are trying to pursue. I am assuming that this is your first big edit of Wikipedia too, and I don't want to discourage you. I know that my first edits were, now that I look back on them, pretty out of step with Wikipedia's policies. It takes a little while to get the hang of it. So here's my suggestions, if you are interested enough to try to give this material a home here...
I recommend that you take a close look at the Wikipedia 5 pillars and think about starting from the ground up. All of the current material can be preserved in your user-space (create a page such as User:Jurriaan/CharacterMask). Then, start to build up a new article, but moving very slowly.
I recommend that you proceed by means of a little thought experiment. Imagine that you have a hostile and skeptical reader, who disbelieves every single word that you write here. You have to write the article in such a way that it is neutral, objective, and factual. Therefore, every sentence that you add to the article should have a citation. The citation must be a reliable, third-party source, as defined by the Wikipeida policy of Verifiability. It is preferable if it is in English, but not absolutely necessary. Preferable too if it's available online (google books preview, for instance) but this is even less necessary than to be in English--I only mention this because it makes it easy to verify. What it can't be is a website, blog, etc. Then, your imaginary skeptical reader can, in principle, go and consult the source that you've cited to confirm that it says what you say it does and supports the point for which you're using it as evidence. Even the most hostile and skeptical reader, then, can go check it for themselves.
This makes writing even one sentence in an article a fairly work-intensive activity. It also means, however, that it can't be deleted without another editor giving a very good reason. As it stands, pretty much all of the article could be deleted "at any time".
Try to refrain, too, from going off-topic. Remember, the article is on a narrowly-defined subject: "character mask". This means that every casual use of the verb "to mask"/"to unmask" doesn't fall within its scope. If Althusser uses that term, you can describe how he uses it and provide citations. You can't, however, tell us why he's wrong (even if he is). If someone else has explained this, then you can cite them, so long as it is in relation to his argument about "character mask", rather than merely a general denouncement of the structuralist method or A's work in particular. At no point can you present your own thoughts in any form, no matter how accurate, interesting, etc. they may be.
This prohibition includes, specifically, many of the instances that you give in your reply above--namely, "[Marx] does very often refer to masks and masking - including contexts where he means specifically a character mask, and including contexts which are absolutely crucial to his arguments about how the appearances and essences of things differ". For that kind of material to be included, you need a reliable, third-party source that says that the instances that you're referring to are about the concept of "character masks" specifically. You can't make that interpretation. At least, not here, anyhow. Same goes for what you say about "making explicit" aspects hidden in other's commentaries. Unless they say it explicitly, it's not allowed to go in here. This is what I meant by "special pleading." You say that these instances refer to the concept of "character masks". I am not so sure. As I understand it, the words (guise, unmask, etc.) are being used as metaphors... they do not refer to that specific concept (Charaktermasken). If you want to say that they do, you need a source that says so. It's not that the sources will support your interpretation (that should be true of all scholarly research, you see, including encyclopedia articles AND original research). It must be instead that the sources make exactly the interpretation that you present here, second-hand. That is quite a big difference. Otherwise, it can't appear in this article.
As a side note, I am an expert in theatre and I still don't understand what the first sentence means. I wrote most of the article on " character" too. Note, that there's no such thing as a "real human character". A character is, by definition, an appearance, a representation. There are real human people, but that's not the same thing. Those people may have "character" but that's not the same thing.
Another side note: there is no conflict with a theatre terminology. It's not a recognised theatre term. Someone would have moved it from Character mask (Marxism) simply because the disambiguation (Marxism) is unnecessary, not because they demanded a wider scope.
So, in conclusion, I recommend starting again (sorry!) and going slowly. Start with:
and provide a citation at the end of the sentence that confirms everything you claim in that sentence. If an author doesn't use that exact term, you can't put it in. If they do, provide a citation.
I hope that's helpful and not too discouraging. Regards, DionysosProteus ( talk) 04:09, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
I had not looked at your user-page when I wrote my comments above. I assumed, on the basis of the edits presented here, that the article's substantial deviations from accepted Wikipedia policy were the result of inexperience with Wikipedia (rather than indicating your level of academic experience). I am afraid that the article, in its present state, does not merely contain "some errors or inaccuracies", but rather that the overwhelming majority of it is unsuitable for Wikipedia. I have only glanced at your other articles, but I see a pattern, so it is worth discussing this. We can conduct this discussion on your talk page or here, whichever you prefer. I have expertise in some of the areas for which you've created articles, and glancing at those, I see the same problems that I see here--specifically, I looked at Abstract labour and concrete labour. I'm happy to discuss in detail the problems I see in that article, but for the purposes of a discussion about this one I note that they appear to suggest a problem with your editing in general. I see from your talk page that others have tried to address this with you. I note too, from the blurb on your user-page, that it would appear to arise from a misunderstanding of the policy about original research. You write: "I think real innovation in a genre usually requires a very good background knowledge of the genre, otherwise you just end up doing what somebody already did before." That is precisely the problem: in Wikipedia, you are only allowed to add what somebody has done before. Otherwise it is original research. So you see, the criterion is not whether a reader may find your additions interesting or valuable. Of course, we could spend our time debating their merits, but that is to miss the point.
To addresses your points:
Yes, I see the German Wiki-article. I also notice that it is poorly referenced. I am not arguing that we should have no article whatsoever, only that what is in it must be supported by citations from reliable, third-party sources throughout, whether in English or German. The overwhelming majority of the material here is unsourced or provides sources that do not support the specific interpretation presented.
"Character mask" is not a commonly-used technical term in theatre and I would not expect an article on it to compete for the namespace. It is the term, not the practice of using masks, that is at issue. There are plenty of starting points for research into "character" in that article. None of them, however, collapse "character" into "person". A person is not a character; a character is a representation. It is usually a good idea in these cases to begin with reference works that are analagous to the Wikipedia project: other encyclopedias, specialist dictionaries, etc. That way, you can be sure that the information that you present here from them is unlikely to be a minority, POV opinion.
With regard to the "idea of character", it has nothing to do with any historical determination of personality or transformation in the history of ideas. Marx is quite specific in his philosophical approach; he doesn't confuse categories of production with those of expression or representation (that is one aspect of his revolutionary approach with regard to abstract, subjective labour). You are the one that appears to be confusing them.
The issues of translation that you raise may well be vaild, as the rendering of Charaktermasken in Capital indicates; however, and again, for any of this to appear in an article, that specific point must have been made by someone writing in a reliable, 3rd-party source. You can't make that argument. That is not what Wikipedia is for, however valid, interesting, useful, important, etc., we might agree the point may be.
With regard to using "character" as a synonym for "personality": the problem arises from the varied genealogical trajectories of the Greek word ethos. Note that "moral character" is not a synonym in that sense and that all of the articles that you offer are unreferenced. Collapsing "personality" into "character", furthermore, obscures and confuses precisely the issues that you are trying to detail in the article. As far as I know, Marx is not making a claim about personality. He is describing a social relation that particular individuals "bear". If you want to argue that a personality claim is what he's doing, again, you need a source that says so. Your use of "character" to describe "identity" confuses the concept unnecessarily. An actor is not a character. And with regard to what I assume are swipes against "postmodernism", again, i recommend a better historical grounding in these ideas. Ideas about the personality as a series of layers are present in Marx's time and have a long history, as do those that claim it derives from some "essence". You appear to want to make an argument for Marx as an essentialist in these terms. I would disagree strongly, on the basis of my knowledge and understanding of his work and ideas, but the point is not for us to debate it and agree or not, but rather to provide citations for any claims that are to appear in the encyclopedia.
You appear to misunderstand my criticisms under the rubric of "metaphor." I am not debating whether or not Marx's thought unfolds along an axis of reality--appearance. I am saying that the claims you are making about the concept of "mask" are relying on metaphorical uses--the connection between the two is dubious. When Marx talks about the perverted, unreal world that arises with the real subsumption of society under capital, or the realm of commodity exchange and consumption as distinct from the dark workshops of production, he is not utilising a concept of "character mask".
We will agree, I suspect, that the social relations of the captialist mode of production structure our activity regardless of our conscious intent. This theme has a long history in Marxism, stretching well beyond Althusser's structuralism. Concepts such as "ideology", "class consciousness", the "class-in-itself" and "-for-itself," etc, give some sense of the complexity of the genealogy of these themes. If you want to link all of this to the concept of "character mask", you need, again, a reliable, third-party source that does so. These ideas turn on a careful series of distinctions between social relations, social identity, personality, and consciousness, which the article, in its present state, collapses.
To write that Marx "unmasks" the capitalist system is, precisely, a metaphor, not an actual description of his theoretical process. You could just as easily describe it, a la Wizard of Oz or Brecht, as "pulling back the curtain on"; or "penetrating to the heart of". These are metaphorical relations, not conceptual ones. Both in terms of Wikipedia's policies, and I would also add in theoretical terms (though that is besides the point here), you cannot assume that every time Marx describes a phenomonon of "appearance" that he is talking about the concept of Charaktermasken.
Your arguments above about "raising oneself above social relations to understand them" etc., is mimicking Althusser's distinction between theory and ideology. If you want to link Marx's notion of Charaktermasken to processes of ideology and those of production, all well and good. But you (a) need sources that do so; and (b) should not collapse the distinct concepts of Charaktermasken and ideology into one another.
So, you see, I am making two distinct points: firstly, and most relevantly, the non-conformity of the majority of this article to Wikipedia policies, specifically those prohibiting Original Research. That there is "no systematic scholarly exposition of the concept" in English is fine, so long as you are sourcing an exposition that someone else in a reliable, third-party source has done in German, say. This is to comply with the Verifiability policy. What you can't do, however, is to create that exposition, whether in English or in German (at least, not here).
My second, and less relevant point, is a theoretical one: I am arguing that you are misrepresentating Marx's thought, which is, I suggest, far more careful in making distinctions and more precise in its philosophical approach (production, expression, representation, etc.) than the argument presented here. The idea that there is a "dominant Marxist ideology" in academia is a little silly, and I'm sure that you don't mean it seriously. Marxist thought is in no way dominant in academia; nor, within those who could be grouped together as thinking in these terms, is there any "dominant" approach. There is as wide a range of Marxist theorists in academia as there are Marxists in the rest of social life. Which branch of Marxist theory do you think is the "dominant" one?
So, yes, I do think that the only realistic solution is to start again from the ground up, as I suggested in my previous posting, restricting yourself to statements that, in essence, paraphrase what someone else has already said about this concept in a reliable source. A well-sourced article on Charaktermasken would be a welcome addition to the encyclopedia, but as it stands, this article is a long way from providing that. DionysosProteus ( talk) 15:27, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
I see, then, that much of what I wrote fell on deaf ears. I wrote that my previous posting was made under the assumption that you were new to Wikipedia and that I was not impugning your academic or intellectual credentials. On Wikipedia, our academic experience is, for the purposes of discussion and improvement of articles, irrelevant. We may of course describe our backgrounds to one another, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating--in other words, we defer such discussions to information and opinions given in reliable, third-party sources, not in relation to the competencies of the editors. The purpose of this talk page is to provide a forum in which questions may be raised about the content and quality of the article and I have raised some questions about this article. There is little to be done if you find a question-and-answer dialogue unbearably oppressive.
To address the things that you have written in your last posting in the order in which you wrote them:
Perhaps you could to edit this talk page and add bold marks to the place at which I questioned your translation of Charaktermasken, as you claim? You discern an abrupt change of tone where there was none. I questioned whether the most common term used by Marx to discuss the phenomenon that this article describes wasn't, in fact, "bearers of social relations" (Träger). That is a conceptual, not a linguistic, query. You claim that you have provided sources for the debate about the translation of Charaktermasken, as if I hadn't read it. I referred to "The PDF cited (not a reliable source)"--namely, the only citation that you give for the "accurate translations" issue in that section (Hans Ehrbar). It is precisely for instances such as this that the Wikipedia policies exist--it is up to you to provide a citation for each claim that you make. For you to point to those made in different sections for different claims doesn't fulfil those criteria.
Thankyou for your recommendations to go check with a reputable theatre school to consult an expert regarding the use of the term "character mask" in that discipline. I looked in the mirror and did so and am happy to report that you are mistaken. Seriously, though, as I said above, our qualifications and expertise are not the issue. I have a number of specialist books from the field and can confirm that the term isn't a technical one that we use. No entry appears in the Cambridge Guide to Theatre, Pavis' A Dictionary of Theatre, and so on. The substantial quotation that you cite in evidence of the claim in the article isn't a reliable source. Again, it is up to you to provide a source adequate to Wikipedia's criteria.
I regard all demands for "respect," such as those you make above, as the micro-fascistic nonsense they clearly are--amusing though your "You will not question my authority" posing is. You may find the experience of engaging with criticism a distressing experience, but please note that the terms in which they have been made in the posts above are not personal and concern the article and its relation to policies. I am applying to this article the standards that Wikipedia sets. I am familiar with them because I follow them rigorously myself--you will find, if you consult the articles on which I work, that I do not indulge in original research, however fascinating or important I may regard my own ideas to be; you will find, too, that every single sentence that I add to the encyclopedia is supported with a citation to at least one, if not several, reliable, third-party sources. You write: "I may not be “the” scholarly authority on this topic (there is none, so far)" If that is true, then it is not a suitable subject for an article here, since we only present material already published elsewhere; our job as editors is merely to pass on such material in a non-copyright-violating form. I don't understand why I need to repeat this.
I presume that by "unsupported insinuation" you are refering to my having mentioned the other article by you at which I looked, abstract labour and concrete labour? If so, as I wrote in my posting, I am happy to discuss the problems that I see there too--there is nothing "insinuated" about them. Where, for example, is the discussion about tendency, or the true in practice, both of which are absolutely central to the concept of abstract labour? The discussion limits itself to a fordist regime, whereas Marx's concept ranges far more widely--and relevantly for our own times. One reference to Ricardo? None to Smith? There is nothing "unsupported" about these concerns, and I'm happy to point you towards the relevant material if necessary. I limited myself to merely mentioning a concern precisely because this is the talk page for a different article.
It is precisely with regard to the potential readers that I voice my concerns. Wikipedia has a terrible reputation; despite this, it is widely used. The project responds to this responsibility as best it can with its policies. This may appear to be a bureaucratic limitation of your creative freedom, but the policies are there for a reason. My concerns about this article are based on what I understand as substantial deviations from those policies. You may fantasize all you please about me and my motives, suggest personal attacks where there very clearly are none, and rave about your pet hates as much as you like; none of that addresses the issue.
Perhaps I have not been clear about the point concerning the relationship between citations and original research (your "stack of references" claims). In fact, the paragraph following that in your last posting illustrates the broader problem.
For the most part, the problems with the article that you concede are not problems! Listing the instances within Marx's writings in which the term Charaktermasken is used is not original research! In fact, that would be very useful and appropriate for the article.
You should not, however, provide your own translation, but rather give the passage in the published English translation and provide the German equivalent passage in a footnote, with Charaktermasken in bold, for example. Not amending anything, you provide only the evidence. This isn't misleading the reader or confusing--I am assuming that the passages would appear as part of the discussion about transmission. To follow my suggestion involves no interpretation of the source material on your part. If you are able to link to the passage in the online German text, even better.
The point is that a reader has to be able to go and check something for themselves, whether online or in print. If I see a passage from the English version and have you tell me that this contains the term Charaktermasken, then I want to be able to confirm that. That is what I tried to do when I examined in detail your "Accurate translations" section. The fact that Charaktermasken was deleted or replaced is relevant too, and if other scholars have pointed this out/argued this, saying so in the article isn't original research--it just needs a citation that the reader can go check. When I went to check the translation of the passage from the 18thBrum, I was disturbed to find that the term "character mask" does not appear there--neither in the original nor in the translation.
The view that you take of the English translations, detailed above, is a good example of original research. This is my point. Let's imagine that you wanted to provide that information (express those opinions) in the article. Unless someone else says these things, they can't appear in the article. You can't cite Capital 1, Grundrisse, or CII as if they are evidence. You have to say: "John Smith argues that the translations of Capital I..." etc. and provide a citation.
You write: "Since my ideas are frequently apt to get stolen or misrepresented by miserable, parasitic “thinkers” who can do no better than profit by dotting the i’s on other people’s work, I am more or less obliged to publish, even if only to defend myself against false smears." Yes, yes, no doubt THEY are all clamouring for your wisdom. I recommend aluminium foil in your hat. Releasing your precious insights into the public domain is perhaps not the best way to protect them. But could we please try to limit the discussion to improving the article?
For the point-by-point concerns:
(1) "Errors and inaccuracies" appeared in my post in quotation marks, because I was quoting you from your previous post. Libel? Very amusing. I did point out one, for example: the very first sentence. It is and remains complete nonsense and illogical. How exactly do you understand Marx's concept to relate to mimesis? As I tried to indicate to you, this is to treat Marx's thought as if it turned on the category of representation, rather than production. To bear a social relation is not a mimetic process.
(2) I did indicate very precisely the pattern that I saw: to repeat it once more, the evidence of (a) the sentence on your user page, (b) the times others have warned about original research on your talk page, (c) my assessment of the abstract labour article. It's a "slur on your reputation"? Reach for the tin-foil hat, I'm sure that'll protect you. Your attempts to characterise my criticisms as something other than concerns about violations of policy render your motives dubious. Perhaps you could confine yourself to addressing the concerns instead and quit the victimised role-play?
(3) Perhaps you do not spend much time browsing Wikipedia's other articles? I assume so, from the logic of your suggestion that the fact that your articles have remained unamended indicates widespread acceptance and validation by the world at large of the quality of their content. It doesn't--Wikipedia simply doesn't work like that. For someone to object requires someone to know the subject well and to take the time to raise a question. All kinds of conditions have to be in place for such an event to occur. Note, too, that I did in fact offer to discuss the problems I see on the relavant talk pages. Suggesting that I do something that I have already suggested I could do simply makes you seem paranoid and defensive. "HOW DARE HE IMPUGN MY MIGHTY SCHOLARSHIP?" you seem to be crying... Again, can we do without the histionicism?
(4) I have made a number of specific criticisms.
(5) I regarded that sentence on your user page in relation to the other evidence I had seen, most substantially this article itself. It wasn't understood in isolation but as part of a pattern. On its own, I would have disregarded it. And whether you claim to be doing anything original is besides the point. It's not about your intentions or self-understanding. It is a relationship between what appears in scholarly publications and how that is re-presented here. And, as I pointed you to in the policy, synthesis is explicity prohibited. Again, that your edits have gone unchallenged does not indicate validation.
(6) The sources are a problem. You seem to be refusing to deal with this. I can go through the article and tag each and every instance, but that would be time-consuming, make the article ugly and unreadable, and more than a little pedantic. The problem has nothing to do with German vs. English sources. It is about interpretation.
(7) see (6).
(8) The very first sentence, in its garbled incoherence, enacts precisely the collapse I describe, and the problem persists throughout.
(9) see (8). In the very first sentence. I fail to say what I mean by "a character is a representation"? It's the dictionary definition, man. You are confusing the substantive and genitive senses of the word ("natural human character"). And Charaktermasken is not an instance of self-presentation. When Marx says that buyer/seller or worker/capitalist are "character masks" it has nothing to do with a mimetic relationship. At least, if you want to argue that it does, you need to provide a source that says exactly that. You write: "The very aim of this article is to explain the concept of character mask, where one character is masked by another." That's precisely the problem I'm pointing to. That sentence is meaningless and illogical! My objection has nothing to do with any claim to scientificity.
(10) The recommendation about consulting dictionaries was made specifically with regard to the question of the technical term in theatre; the claim is unsourced. I made a recommendation for the kind of reference material you might consult were you to try to source it. Perhaps your tin-foil hat will protect you from any "patronising" energy in the ether. But again, less histrionicism please. Making a recommendation for research is exactly the kind of thing these talk pages are for. And, again, you can only "often go beyond it" (the article you reference) while standing on other's shoulders, as it were... otherwise it's OR.
(11) You write: "You say “with regard to the "idea of character", it has nothing to do with any historical determination of personality or transformation in the history of ideas.” This is where your understanding of what Marx writes and means is demonstrably poor, and again it appears that you have not thoroughly read the article. Compare, for example, footnote 104 [now footnote 105]." Are you being disingenuous? The "it" in that sentence does not refer to the idea of character but the problem we were discussing. The problem I have identified has nothing to do with whether or not personality is historically determined...! It's hard to take you seriously with this kind of response. As if I'm going to argue that personality isn't historically determined? I have not recently arrived from the Romantic era. I was responding to your paragraph entitled "THE IDEA OF CHARACTER". Hence the quotation marks!!!! In it, you wrote "I am very aware that in the 19th century, human beings were in some respects different from what they are now, and that people thought about human character in ways different from today" I responded: this is besides the point! You make it very difficult to take you seriously.
(12) As I explained to you above, yes, yes, yes, wearily, I know who Althusser is. I've read lots of his books. And the Frankfurt school, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas, etc... And Marx. And Engels. And Trotsky. And Lenin. Even Stalin and Mao. And Gramsci. And Thompson. And Williams. And Aglietta and the regulation school. And the Open Marxism lot. And Negri, Tronti, and the other autonomists. And a host of others, to say nothing of all the "post-Marxists" and leftist converts to thatcherism. Yes, yes, yes, for heaven's sake. I'm sure you think your take on Althusser is terribly revolutionary. YAWN. Structuralism as a bourgeois fad? PASSES OUT FROM THE SHEER WEIGHT OF TEDIUM OF YOUR RHETORIC. Yes, down with those damn thinkers. To the fields with them, sharpish! or better still, up against the nearest wall. But might we PLEASE pass on to more relevant matters? My understanding is not "strongly influenced" by Althusser. You seem to be missing the point. If anything, I would want to interrogate his theory for exactly the same problems I'm identifying in your own account in this article: the confusion of categories of representation (though, for him, mimesis has been replaced by signification) and production.
(13) As to my "posing", you will notice that I recommended the character article to you. The complex relationship with the Greek ethos is traceable from that. Read it for yourself. You write: "nowhere in the article have I suggested that character is the same as personality." So what does the first sentence do then?
(14) You write: "You state that “all of the articles that you offer are unreferenced.” This is simply false and I cannot take that seriously." Character structure? Notice the tag? Social character? Notice the complete absence of inline citations?
(15) YAWN. Yes, yes, I'm sure you're terribly authentic. Coal under the fingernails and everything. I'm fairly sure I could out-prole you anyday, but "Arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments." Your fantasies about me notwithstanding, the following is original research: "this does lead to a transformation of consciousness and to personal transformation as well. Maybe you are not aware of this because you are insulated in the academy, but really working in jobs does transform people. It is a completely obvious point in itself, incomprehensible only to people who have never done an honest day’s work themselves. At most we can debate about how it transforms people, but I do not propose to go into detail in this article." Where, exactly, does Marx describe such a transformation?
(16) You write: "Try telling to an actor that "an actor is not a character" and see what response you get. The whole point is that the actor is a character who acts out a different character, and in so doing he is masking his true self in some way, otherwise he would not be acting in the theatrical sense." I know it's not kind to laugh so, but this is so funny that I may in fact read it out in the first acting class that I teach when the term begins. Forgive me for saying so, but you have no idea what you're talking about. But the important thing is that you don't need to take my word for it. Consult some reliable sources. It's that garbled first sentence again.
(17) You wrote: "If it is nonsense, I would like to have a good, clearcut scientific argument why this is so, not some pomo bullshit story contrived by a free rider out of a clever pastiche of different definitions." "Pomo" isn't postmodernism then? Yet you write: "I do not make “swipes against postmodernism"" That must have been someone else then. And lo, the mighty historian again. It was your... whatever it was, swipe, considered remark... that I responded to, in which you implied that "identity as nothing but layers" was a pomo invention.
(18) Again, you misrepresent my argument. I was describing your own interpretation, not my assessment of Marx's. And the point, precisely, is not an epistemological one, it's an ontological one. Yes, the argument you present in your last post is one concerning epistemology. But we weren't discussing his epistemology, we were talking about the nature of being, subjectivity, identity, role, etc. These are ontological questions. I am responding to the arguments that you have presented here. When I wrote that you appeared to be presenting an essentialist view, it wasn't in response to your title "appearance/essence"; yes, yes, surely it is clear from the references that I've pointed at that I have expertise and understand these basic distinctions? Pretending they are about something else only obscures the issues.
(19) This is an article about the concept of "character masks". In the course of the article, in the quotations full of bold that I criticised, you want to link the concept of "character masks" to passages of Marx in which the term "character mask" does not appear. I am suggesting to you that that link is dubious and I would like citations to demonstrate that it is not. That is how Wikipedia works! The terms in question are clearly metaphors for a process that Marx is describing. They are metaphors, as you have suggested and as I have agreed, for a conceptal scheme structured around the axis reality (or truth) and appearance. "Unmasking", for example in the quotation about religion, involves a critical act that identifies politics beneath the theological appearance. It has nothing to do with characters, of any kind. You write: "It is true that the concept of the mask can be used metaphorically and I have indicated this explicitly in the article" Where, exactly, have you explained that this "unmasking" has nothing to do with "character masks" and is merely a metaphorical usage? Because it looks to me like you are marshalling that quotation as evidence for the concept "character mask". Which it plainly isn't.
You see, follow the line of argument in the "Sources of the concept" section: you trace a development of secularisation of the understanding of "human character"--by which, you mean, human personality. This is then linked, via the bold terms, to the quotation about religion. But the "masks" in that passage have absolutely nothing to do with the analysis of human personality (or human "character" or whatever you want to call it). This is rhetoric, not logic. Then you proceed to quote from the 18thBrum and claim that it is an example of Marx's use of "character masks". Marx writes: "So maskierte sich Luther als Apostel Paulus, die Revolution von 1789-1814 drapierte sich abwechselnd als römische Republik und als römisches Kaisertum, und die Revolution von 1848 wußte nichts besseres zu tun, als hier 1789, dort die revolutionäre Überlieferung von 1793-1795 zu parodieren." You want to argue that Marx's use of the word "maskierte", or the others, belongs to the conceptual matrix of "character mask" (rather than merely being a use of metaphor)? Fine. You need a source that says it is. This is what I'm trying to tell you about the problems with this article, which you seem to be ignoring. Then, no citation for the claim about the Frankfurt school. No citation for the claim that the concept is "important" in the sentence about the Penguin dict. And so on.
As regards my statement: "When Marx talks about the perverted, unreal world that arises with the real subsumption of society under capital, or the realm of commodity exchange and consumption as distinct from the dark workshops of production, he is not utilising a concept of "character mask"." The point is that you cannot use every instance of a surface/depth relationship in Marx's thought as evidence for the importance of the concept of "character mask". Unless another scholar has made this argument for you, who says that this equals that, or is related to that in some specific way, it is irrelevant to the article and misleading to include it. If it belongs to the conceptual matrix of "character mask" then you need a source that identifies that belonging. You say I'm talking nonsense...? Fine. Prove it, the onus is on you. Marx simply using the verb "to mask" doesn't do that! So you have identified many instances in which Marx uses the word "to mask" or some variation thereof. Wonderful. Now you need a source that links each one to the subject of this article--Charaktermasken. Those are the criteria for inclusion in Wikipedia. Someone else has to have said it...
Thank you for the lecture on free will and determinism. Yes, yes, yes, WEARILY, I'm quite familiar with the structure/struggle debate. You have said exactly what I stated. Bravo. Is it that I used the word structure??? Oh, and there you go raving against Althusser again. Anyone'd think he'd murdered your wife... Really, do you not have bigger fish to fry? Like, you know, opponents in the class struggle, for instance? Where does this paranoid delusion about Althusser's mighty influence come from? Most people read Althusser as a historical document these days. Who exactly are you fighting with such vitriol? Yes, yes, I'm not getting my Marx from an Althusser digest, thanks--I've read the man himself. No, not just Capital. Alright, not ABSOLUTELY everything (I haven't laboured through his uni thesis, for example), but for heaven's sake, a lot. How about the Frankfurt school? Haven't heard you take a pop at them yet, although they perform a very similar theoretical move. Ah... is the key in your "The German and Austrian Marxist discussions about the concept of character masks, by Haug, Ottomeyer etc. aim precisely to redress the balance"...? You need a straw opponent, right? Viva la revolution. You talk as if these guys are the first to make this argument...? This is not the 1970s... Yes, yes, no doubt Althusser's shadow will live on in caves for millennia, but really...
With regard to mentioning the related concepts of ideology, etc.: the relevance is in your use of the word "character". A theatre instead of a factory; representation instead of production.
Just what, precisely, do you find pretentious about "“a careful series of distinctions between social relations, social identity, personality, and consciousness”"? These are the things we have been discussing. They are related to the notion of "character", "character mask" and agent of production. The evidence is in your arguments, for heaven's sake. Again, I draw your attention to the gibberish of the very first sentence! It is you who, as the author of the article, is required to provide the citations.
Again, you misunderstand the objection about metaphors. And Marx is not a shaman. His thought is not based on metaphors. The mask no more describes the process conceptually than the curtain or the surgical knife. You haven't provided evidence that these are conceptual relations and not merely metaphors. And vulgarity is a pejorative term of the aristocracy's--lovely. A little crude thinking comes in handy sometimes. The point is that it is inappropriate for you to be talking in those terms.
You write: "there is also no evidence in my article that I do make such an assumption" (when I write that you cannot assume that every time Marx describes a phenomonon of "appearance" that he is talking about the concept of Charaktermasken.). I am responding to the arguments you have presented here, specifically those under the title APPEARANCE/ESSENCE above. "I have been working on these issues for thirty years and was a top philosophy student. You are just being pretentious and I find it objectionable." Well bully for you. Must've been a low ceiling if the articles I've read so far are anything to go by. Is it possible that you'll address the issues raised about the article and its assumptions, rather than all this swaggering? There is nothing "pretentious" about questioning the logic of your argument.
The "raising oneself above social relations" AGAIN was a response to what you've written above in the essence/appearance section. Do you forget what you've written in composing the subsequent response? I see you've added in a Marx quotation since. This isn't going to become a game of catechisms, is it? What you seem to miss is that Marx is talking about ideology there!
And your: "In your summing up, you say I am “misrepresentating Marx's thought”, but you yourself cannot even spell “misrepresenting correctly. If you cannot even spell “misrepresenting” correctly, how can you understand my article – particularly since you show no evidence that you have read it properly?" I'd take my hat off to you for sheer denial, but you'd be forced to return the favour and I wouldn't want your tin-foil to blow away in the wind.
The point about the distinctions goes to the heart of the subject of this article. There is a problem with your attempt to use representational categories to describe a system of thought based on the category of production.
You identified the existence of such as thing as a "dominant Marxist ideology". You contradict yourself in the space of two sentences. More ranting against Althusser. SIGH and YAWN.
Now, the issue of "bearers" is important, because, as you've suggested, it is related to "character masks"--but it is important not at all in the way you describe. Marx does use the term "bearers" of a social relation. But you seem to misunderstand the import. I am thinking of the Grundrisse, both the intro and throughout. Yes, yes, the translation, but let's talk about Träger. It relates to the whole subjectivity/objectivity dynamic. It isn't simply a question of whether men make their own history, for heaven's sake. It has nothing to do with the old structure/struggle debate. You talk as if this were the 1970s. The living subjectivity of labour is not a person or a group of people! We are the bearers of that. Actually, this relates to the dimension of the concept of abstract labour that I found completely absent in that article, so I shouldn't be surprised. Now, I could spend some time talking though this, but I suspect that you are too paranoid and defensive to hear anything I say. You've also complained about me not having provided evidence... as if that were my responsibility. Talk pages do not require citations, ARTICLES do. But since you want a 3rd party source, try Negri's Marx Beyond Marx. It is a detailed, section by section reading of the Grundrisse. No, he's not a structuralist, before you start foaming at the mouth. The tendency of abstract labour to become true in practice. Capital doesn't "code" us, it "axiomizes" us. The abstraction and indifference of the relation bears directly on the concept of character masks. It has nothing to do with "human character"/personality/the subject... call it what you will.
In summary: you have failed to engage with the substance of the concerns I have raised here. Instead you have "conceded" a problem where there is none (or hardly one). The substantial problem remains: this article is original research in its present form. You haven't seemed to understand the core principle: we only reproduce what others have already written. Yes, there are footnotes in this article. But that is not the same thing as that required by Wikipedia policy. The argument you make in the article HAS TO HAVE BEEN MADE ELSEWHERE, and you provide a citation TELLING US EXACTLY WHERE. All of your foaming at the mouth about Althusser or your attempts to characterise my previous postings as something that they clearly are not, all of your fantasising about me personally, and your swaggering about your intellectual or proletarian credentials, all of that is irrelevant. I have asked, again and again, for sources for the claims made. I have pointed you towards sources of research that confirm what I have argued (the character article, for a start). I have tried to disentangle your confusion of the 'substantive' and 'genitive' senses of the word "character". The problems with this article start with the first sentence and continue throughout. I have been extremely specific in the criticisms I have made. I have attempted to engage with its theoretical dimensions. You keep trying to lecture me as if I have not read the books concerned (actually, both about Marxism and the theatre). Unfortunately, I have expertise in both areas, so your repeated attempts to characterise me as ignorant won't wash. I responded to specific points that you made here, and you treated them as if I was talking about something else entirely. And in general you have lowered the tone of the discussion by becoming hysterical, histrionic, defensive and paranoid. Please try to stick to the issue: the relation of the article to the wikipedia policies that I have identified. 00:20, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
Fine. Fix the article, or I'll propose it for deletion. Your threats and rants against academics and those seeking to steal your thoughts don't bring you any closer to fixing the problems with this article. Yes, no doubt you are terribly proletarian and revolutionary to your very core--the unbounded paranoia and micro-fascism so evident from your rants clearly demonstrate that. And from the poor state of the articles by you that I've seen, you could do with a little more reading yourself: Uncle Joe's big red book of DIAMAT just doesn't cut it. DionysosProteus ( talk) 11:38, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
I have improved the article and taken the tag off meantime. Personal attacks from so-called academic "experts" who waft their "authority" without any solid knowledge about the subjectmatter of the article and the related literature are not acceptable. Vague insinuations and insults are not acceptable. If problems remain with the article, an exact specification of what they are is required (not general conceptual waffle), criticisms have to be proved and argued for, and a precise indication should be given of how the critic thinks the object of his criticism in the article can be fixed. Without this, I will leave the article as it is, except for possible small alterations. The aim of the article is to provide an intro to the concept of character masks and the issues related to it, indicating different uses by different authors, not to push any particular ideological bandwaggon. User:Jurriaan 14 September 2010 15:09 (UTC)
At 185KB, this article is very long, making it slow to load and difficult to edit. WP:SIZE advises that articles over 100KB long should generally be split if possible. Would it be possible to break some sections of this article off into separate article(s), per WP:Summary style? Robofish ( talk) 16:23, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
The article is way too long and complex to read comfortably. It's not an encylopeadia article. Have you thought about publishing this elsewhere and then just putting a summary on wikipedia? It's almost a book! Halon8 ( talk) 00:53, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
After the author of this article was lambasted by a third-rate academic tyrant for his effort, this article on character masks was stolen in 2011 by a company called "Webster's Digital Services" and published for private profit, fraudulently presenting someone called "Stuart Sloan" (a fictitious name) as the author and editor. See: Stuart Sloan, Political Concepts: Character Mask and Marxism. Webster's Digital Services (May 12, 2011) ISBN-10: 1241686726 ISBN-13: 978-1241686727. It is advertised on Amazon.com The claim of the publishers is that the article is being "curated" under a creative commons license, while all they do is extract private profit from the sale of the article with a false claim to authorship. Wikipedia authorities did nothing to stop this fraud. User:Jurriaan 31 October 2011 14:12
"The difficulty in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood. That is why you sometimes have to begin with the most difficult things in order to understand the easier things properly." - Pierre Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power. Polity Press, 1991, p. 207.
"Without a proper amount of solitude in our lives there is little time to reflect, or even consider, what the other might be thinking or feeling. It is in solitude that we are able to peel away the layered masks we wear and come to a place of self revelation where we “see” ourselves in true light, for we cannot know who we are without spending time reflecting, contemplating, thinking about who we are in relation to others. It is there, springing from regular solitude and silence, that we are better prepared to bring an authentic self to the table of relationship. Without it there is little room for intimacy. These interior activities are natural and essential to the flourishing of the human soul, but they are thwarted daily, not only by the psychological means of self-protection we exhibit by closing ourselves off from others, but by the need to make a living and exist in the world. Indeed, today, these very human needs are exacerbated by the deluge of data that comes our way through our personal mobile media and overall communication environment.(...) Subsumed by the din of noisy crowds, machinery, and other environmental intrusions, the spoken word hangs like the lingering, last leaf of autumn. In so many ways it seems to await a final gust from the north, dangling in the wind of the technophilic love affair with digitality. The antidote? Find the quiet places in the busyness of life; protect them. Seek to be with others. Determine to be fully engaged. Enjoy being fully present. Speak." - Stephanie Bennett, Palm Beach Atlantic University, "Seeking the Sound of Silence: Human Presence and the Acoustics of Solitude." Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association, Volume 11, 2010, p. 63-64. [2]
I have labelled this article, Character Mask for clean up, in order that it be rewritten specifically about the subject, Economic Masking, as applied in Marxist economics, and not about the opinions of an editor who feels very strongly about the subjects, including the Marxism.
24.1.181.44 ( talk) 14:19, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
24.1.181.44 ( talk) 23:21, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
You can't hide / your lyin' eyes / And your smile / is a thin disguise / I thought by now / you'd realize / There ain't no way / to hide your lyin eyes.
- the Eagles, Lying eyes (1975).
By popular demand, I am working on a publishable book on character masks and maskings, which goes into much more detail and depth than the article I have presented here, but it will take a while yet (I am not a rich academic with a research staff and research grants that pay for my costs). User:Jurriaan 19 August 2012 19:14 (UTC)
In an effort to reduce the length of the article, User:Nikkimaria has chopped out quite a few bits of the article, without stating any reasons. So let's just say that the article I intended was the version at 1 September 2012, before other users started to chop into it. User:Jurriaan 2 September 2012 21:33 (UTC)
The article needs to be shortened because it cannot be comfortably read in one sitting. Although this has been discussed earlier ( Talk:Character mask#Article size), this issue wasn't resolved.
The existence of other articles which are also too long does not mean that Character mask isn't too long. Arguments that this article doesn't need to be shortened because other articles (such as Glass–Steagall Act) are also very large are not convincing.
The article size guideline is not meant to be arbitrary. Technical limitations have pretty much been removed as computers are now able to load and edit long articles without problem. The issue with this article is that no normal person could reasonably be able to read this article in one sitting.
This also isn't a question about content notability. The article appears to be well-sourced and well-written, but surely the comprehensive sections can be split out into individual articles (maintaining notability and depth) while retaining a succinct summary (improving readability). If structured well, regular readers will be able to find the same information while new readers will find the article more accessible.
Please let me know what you think. Kind regards, Matt ( talk) 05:35, 26 October 2012 (UTC)
I don't agree with the fact that it should be split up. First of all, the problematic of it being big and extended is part of 'marxist development' itself. The marxist movement has been very broad, so necessarily articles that really want to grip certain concepts in their historical (and thus diverse) interpretation tend to become large.
Secondly, the section on marx's argument in das kapital shows how this theorization is an essential aspect in understanding marx. This can't be included in the other sections on marx's theory (namely value-form theory or alienation or commmodity fetishism). This part deals more explicitly with the cultural or subjective countering of commodity fetishism wich is implicit in marx's theoretical critique as a whole, but wich isn't explicitly theoretically developed at any other place than in his more philosophical and political writings. In this sense it gives counterweight to the often highle objectivist interpretation of marxism.
Lastly, i found the article very helpful and enriching. It's true that you can't read it in one sitting session, but by splitting it up you can't have the overview you have now. There are lot's of posts which are shorter but not so readible like this, the style is very fluent. And the categorization is very sufficient and clear. I think the writer should decide, since he wrote it and the quality of the article is very high.
141.134.34.37 ( talk) 17:51, 2 November 2012 (UTC)
The article's length and level of detail may make it appropriate for an encyclopedia on Marx, but not for a general encyclopedia like WP. It really needs to be shortened and made more succinct. Marked as such. Sleety Dribble ( talk) 14:32, 22 September 2015 (UTC)
--Speaking as a Marxist: why is anyone surprised that Marxists wrote an article about their own philosophy that is both overly long and only interesting to a small audience? This is, like, the thing we're best at and most enthusiastic about --JeremyCorbynsSeventhBiggestFan — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.42.149.140 ( talk) 21:32, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
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WHAT is this sentence supposed to mean? "Economic analysis not only studies the total social effect of human actions, which is usually not directly observable to an individual, other than in the form of statistics or television." I am just asking why "...or television"? And in fact asking what the sentence has to do with the article at all? I'm apparently not the only person who finds the article rather odd. According to http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-worst-wikipedia-articles.php "this page... is mostly maintained by two people who are probably mentally ill. This is Wikipedia at its worst". Have a great day on the ant hill.
Both "neo-Stalinism" and "structural-functionalist" are incorrect characterizations of Althusser. The rest of this section is also very biased, but it would require rewriting to correct, so at the very least such inaccurate labels should be removed. It is also not appropriate to describe Althusser's perspective as "totalizing" as though this were objective fact (it is misleading because he presents a critique of different types of totality). So this should be attributed to one particular perspective. The second paragraph of the section "Marxism as a character mask" does not support any of its claims, and does not explain why they are relevant to the preceding discussion. It is highly inaccurate as a characterization of Althusser, so it should be removed and the sections should be merged. The use of the term "totalitarianism" preceding this is not supported. While the rest of these sections are contentious interpretations, they are prevalent enough interpretations, with some correspondence to the literature, so they can be left despite their bias. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 100.38.3.171 ( talk) 15:44, 13 February 2021 (UTC)