Talk:Character mask/Archive 1

Archive 1

Archive 2

Original Research concerns

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 criticism, which helps to improve the article. You are correct, it is page 170 (a typo) and I have corrected the reference. This article arose when I noticed that several English-speaking leftists and Marxists used the concept, while there was apparently no substantive English article available about the concept. Literature searches failed to track down any article in English explicitly on this concept only - except for the article by Urbanek which discusses Marx's use of the idea of masking in roles generally. My "originality" consisted in taking the initiative and ask why, find the explanation, consult the German literature as well as the original German texts, translate the relevant passages, and collect references directly related to the concept (many of which are in German, and relate to German discussions of the concept). This is a normal procedure in writing any wikipedia article. The first sentence of the article is not incomprehensible, it states exactly what Marx means in one short sentence: that the character of a person is masked by the "character mask" he bears, which transforms one character into another for the spectator. People who have no understanding of theatre may find it incomprehensible, but that does not mean that it is in principle incomprehensible. Indeed, the point of the article is to make the concept comprehensible in an easily accessible way. I explain clearly what the concept is, how it differs from related concepts, provide examples and references, show how the concept is used, identify the sources, explain why the concept is relatively unknown in the English scholarly literature, identify controversy about the concept, and discuss the implications of the concept. It turns out that the concept plays an important role in Marx's theory of commodity fetishism and reification, as well as in his political theory. Marx does not explicitly refer to the word "character masks" very often (i.e. dozens or hundreds of times), but he 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. His idea is clearly that the appearance of things masks their essence, and there exists a large Marxist literature which aims to explain how that works; any Marxist scholar of repute can easily confirm this. This literature was strongly influenced in the last 40 years by the structuralist interpretation of character masks created by Louis Althusser, who, as I note, advanced a very specific interpretation - which, although influential, is mistaken, and led to serious confusion. I know this very well from 30 years of experience in this area of inquiry, and I think it would be a good idea if this confusion was cleared up. Marx's crucial epistemological distinction between essence and appearance has been criticized by empiricists and pragmatists, notably the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, and has been defended by philosophers such as Roy Bhaskar. Yet neither of these wellknown philosophers makes the concept of masking and character masks intended by Marx explicit. All I have done is to describe this explicitly in the format that I mentioned, summarizing the relevant literature on this topic and providing some additional pointers. I admit that it is not an easy topic to write on, because there is more to it, than meets the eye. A common mistake made by writers who use the term with reference to Marxist discussions or otherwise is, that they think that a character mask is a mask that simply hides real human character. I have carefully explained, in simple terms, that this is not what is meant, rather that the character mask does not simply hide real human character, but in addition presents a different character. This is also precisely the way in which the term has been used in the history of theatre. I have no ground for believing that the on-line German text of Das Kapital differs from the official Dietz edition, but in principle I can reference the page numbers to the Marx/Engels Werke or to the MEGA II edition. I have occasionally highlighted the word "character mask" in the quoted text to facilitate the reader, but it is not essential to the text of the article, and could in principle be removed. I do not engage in special pleading, but intend to alert the interested reader to the real significance of this concept. It was the subject of discussions for instance on the OPE-L list of Marxist scholars, but no one provided any scholarly references or clear explanation. I do not consider that I have done anything original other than bringing together the relevant information on the topic, and organizing it so that the English reader at last has an accessible source for the meaning of this concept. As I have explained and referenced in the article, those few scholars that have looked into the issue agree, that the concept of "character mask" was deleted from the English translations through mistranslation of Marx's text, even although English-speaking Marxists do use the concept. As a result, the concept filtered into English discussions via translations of works by the Frankfurt School. I worked on this article on and off across about six weeks but if it is considered "original" I am prepared to take it out of wikipedia. In that case the work would be wasted. I have made no claims of originality, merely described the origin, use and meaning of the concept. I think it would be ill-advised to take it off wikipedia, because would it not be better if all the readers who are evidently so interested in consulting the article could have it available as a resource? There is simply no other article available in English specifically on Marx's concept of character masks. I note further that originally the pilot title of my article was "Character mask (Marxism)", but this was changed to simply "Character mask" by someone else. That was not my intention, because I am well aware that the term "character mask" is also a technical term used in theatre, and thus that the specific Marxist use should not be conflated with the use of the concept in theatre. I could go on to reference each unreferenced claim in the article, but I think it might add too many footnotes. My thinking is that if people are prepared to consult the extensive references provided, they will easily see that the claims made about the meaning of the concept are well-supported by the actual ways in which it is used in the literature. It is true that a small amount of interpretation is involved on my part, but I have usually indicated references to support the interpretation, and the interpretations made are hardly controversial. If it can be proved with reputable evidence that they are controversial, the article can in principle be changed to remove the controversial point. User:Jurriaan 22 August 2010 03:12 (UTC)

• (NB: I've altered some of the formatting on this talk page, in line with usual practice)

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:

Character mask (German: Charaktermasken) is a term used by Karl Marx to describe...

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)

Thank you for your useful comments, explanations and suggestions, that is very helpful. You are not simply talking to a freshman writing an essay about what he did in the holidays, however. It is obviously not my purpose to insert an article that blatantly violates wikipedia protocols. As against that, I have sometimes written a pilot article to the best of my knowledge, in the hope that if it contains some errors or inaccuracies, these will be corrected by others; in that case I would learn from it as well. Many people in my experience cannot originate an article but can edit or add to an already existing article in their area of expertise. I have originated about 49 wiki articles and worked mainly on about 122 of them, as shown on my user page. Most of those articles have booked very few problems, except that some of them should, as I acknowledge on my talk page, be more carefully referenced. In total, I think the articles I worked on get circa one million hits per year, judging by the statistics, so it does seem that many people do find them useful in some way. A quick five points:

• Let me just note here that an article on character masks exists in the German wikipedia and is acknowledged to be a distinctive concept in Marx. In the Marxist tradition, as I have referenced, the concept of character masks is also understood as a distinctive concept and is used by lawyers, social scientists, journalists, political actors, artists etc.

• Let me also note that the term "character mask" is a technical concept in theatre, distinguished from a "neutral mask" and a "counter-mask" - quite independently of, and unrelated to, Marxian usage. I would acknowledge however, that in the acting world there is no perfect unanimity about how exactly these distinctions are to be understood and applied (how meaning is most appropriately conveyed), there are different schools of thought. This has, incidentally, always been the case in practice from the very beginnings of the history of theatre, whatever specific namings were used, and it is intrinsic to the art and profession of acting.

• Your advice is not completely clear, insofar as I do not know whether I should now simply remove the whole article, until such time as it is written in a way fully consistent with wikipedia protocols, or whether I should leave it where it is, until I get the re-edit done. I hope you can suggest what the best thing to do is. I am inclined to leave it where it is for a while, just to check if any other expert can introduce corrections or make relevant comment.

• Since you have technical/scientific expertise in this area, perhaps we can correspond about the concept of character masks via a talkpage or offline. I am certainly interested in good scientific advice to improve the article.

• Perhaps, since you claim to be an expert, you can refer me to what is in your opinion a scientifically/technically reputable text in the English literature on the definition of character and masking in theatre, or explain why the references which I have cited about this in the article are incorrect. I will try to get comment offline from eother experts.

For the sake of brevity, I will add just a short comment on two theoretical issues relating to your conceptual criticisms.

(1) THE IDEA OF CHARACTER: (a) 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. (b) Marx often uses the term "character" rather loosely to refer to the set of distinguishing characteristics of something, or to what we now call "personality", "identity", "shape", "representation", "manifestation", "being", "essence", "defining features", "Bestimmtheit" etc. (c) As a translator, I am also aware - as I indicate in the article - that some shades of meaning get lost in translation from the German to English. It is widely acknowledged that English is simply a more "empiricist language", and that in German the meaning of words denoting concepts - particularly philosophical ones - is often highly sensitive to the linguistic context in which they are used. This can be easily verified from a dictionary; a German word for a concept can convey more different meanings than the English equivalent, and mean things which the corresponding word in English simply cannot mean. (d) I think it is legitimate to say that a human being has a "character" which is part of the definition of his (durable) identity. Teachers talk about the formation of character and the media often talk about tests of character. In my whole life, I have never encountered any problem with that idea as such. But I am very aware, as acknowledged in the article, that character can be defined in different ways. Indeed this is acknowledged in the wikipedia, since there are separate entries for character structure, social character and moral character, and in addition there are related entries for concepts such as persona and mimesis.

Now, if a person has a natural character that is part of his real, durable identity, and if he dons a character mask (as distinct from a neutral mask), then his real character is masked by another character expressed by the character mask. Think of it this way: would you marry someone about whose identity and nature you have no knowledge whatsoever, or of whom you know that the way the person presents must be different from who the person really is? Maybe there are such cases, marriages of convenience and so on, but they are rare. The character mask could consist of a physical mask, but in Marx's sense it is usually a role which is being acted out, physically and socially, causing a discrepancy between how the actor appears and his (or its) real identity. This is also part of the very meaning of intentional "acting" in the theatrical sense, and effectively it means that one character (the real identity of the actor) is masked by another character (the assumed identity) as I said. I have no scientific proof that this idea is nonsense. 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.

(2) ESSENCE/APPEARANCE: It is in my judgement very clear, and I reference this, that as far as Marx is concerned the masking processes of capitalist society are necessary and inevitable, and not simply a matter of intentionality. They are according to Marx, as I have referenced, an objective, scientifically provable reality, and not simply a metaphor. Althusser had some intuition about this, waxes very profoundly about it, many Marxists ape this French flourish, but he fails to think it through to the end, and fails to hit the nail on the head. Marx notes that capitalist society features the juridical equality of human subjects as persons who own themselves, but also that it is (a) a stratified class society, (b) a society featuring generalized competition, and (c) a society based on generalized commodity production. This creates in his opinion plenty conflicts and divergences of interests, and contradictions between the formal and substantive properties of social relations, and that means that the masking will necessarily and inevitably occur, regardless of what particular intentionalities people may have. They may have a choice in the kinds of maskings they adopt, but have no choice about relating in ways which explicitly or implicitly involves masks. Marx then aims to unmask the real nature of the capitalist order scientifically, by explaining why social phenomena necessarily appear other than they really are, why the order of things such as it is observed and appears in human thought masks the real order of things. He makes it very explicit, as I reference, that whereas people can raise themselves subjectively above their social relations in order to understand the "real order of things", and that the "real order of things" is comprehensible to the popular mind, nevertheless the masking processes will occur anyway, because they are a necessary effect of the way people relate and are related in capitalist society; they must participate in relations of production which are independent of theit will. Whether or not Marx's analysis is correct or not is another matter, but that is not something that you can evaluate in a wikipedia article, you can only indicate different points of view on the topic.

The paradox then is, that whereas the concept of character masks and more generally the masking processes generally play a very central, and crucial role in Marx's works - Marx says ironically that there would indeed be no point in the scientific endeavour if the essence and appearance of things direct coincided, so that they are transparent - there exists no systematic scholarly exposition of the concept in the English language - the essence/appearance distinction is certainly acknowledged by scholars, but it is perpetually disputed how exactly this distinction should be drawn, and what exactly gives rise to it. I believe that this is in good part due to faulty translations, which are themselves influenced by the dominant Marxist ideology in academia. User:Jurriaan 23 August 2010 14:57 (UTC)

• Please note, when responding on a talk page, please try to keep the format consistent. This makes it easier for others to track the course of the discussion. This means that in this example you should indent each of your paragraphs with a full colon. I've added them in.

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)

Thank you for your lengthy message, but with due respect, I do find your comments somewhat patronising, pretentious and offensive. I am obliged to reply, and the reply is necessarily somewhat lengthy also since in making a great number of different points, you confuse many different issues.

As I said, you are not dealing here with a freshman penning an essay about what he did in the holidays. I studied for ten years at university, taught six years, and was in the workforce for twenty years or more. I have been discussing these issues on and off for thirty years, including with leading Marxists of the age, I was on the organizing committee of the OPE-L list, I am a published academic translator, editor and translator of books and articles, including with leading academic and Marxian publishers, and have been a trade union negotiator and activist among many other things. It does not mean at all, that I see myself superior to the rest, but it does mean that I am not very impressed with noise, if you can see my point. You make all sorts of claims without offering any convincing supporting argument and evidence, posing as an authority on the topic which you evidently are not, going by what you say. It is a style sort of like, “I ask the questions, you give the answers”, an old trick to establish authority. But that is not desirable here.

First you dispute my translation, then you say that my translation concern may be “valid”. They are valid, and I cite three scholars (Haug, Perelman, Fuchs et al.) who make precisely that point about the translation issue, which apparently escaped your attention because you did not read properly. First you say that “character mask” is not a technical term in theatre, then you say that character mask is not a “commonly used term” in theatre. It is quite simply a technical term in theatre and theatre training, but whether or not it is used, depends chiefly on practical circumstances – it depends on whether people have to distinguish between different sorts of masks, or learn to tell the difference between them. In drama tuition and the theory of theatre, where concepts are taught, actors do have to know the difference between different kinds of masks. Go to any reputable theatre school and they will tell you about it. In this article, I do have to make the relevant distinctions, since character masks are not just “any old mask” – something which I have carefully explained in the article with relevant detail.

Now, leaving aside that you then evidently don’t know what you are talking about here, you provide no evidence whatever for your assertions and just pose as a scholarly authority to make it stick. Come to that, my credentials with respect to this article are far more solid than yours, but that is not even the issue here; what we require is simply clear evidence and precise argument. I may not be “the” scholarly authority on this topic (there is none, so far), but I am the authority to the extent that I did the work, and I think you should be mindful of that and accord due respect. You want to impose standards on me, which you do not honor yourself in what you write. Whereas I am open to criticism, and try to pay careful attention to what you say to identify useful points that can assist in improving the article (which is, after all, the goal), I request that you desist from presenting unsupported insinuation as scholarly argument supported by solid evidence.

I did not write this article primarily for the benefit of academic pedants who never got off their butt to study the evidence, when they have every opportunity to do so, but for people from all walks of life who maybe don’t have access to all kinds of academic resources, and maybe don’t even know where to start, but who want to have a brief, succinct and balanced introduction to this complex topic. If I do not fully succeed in providing it, which is possible - nobody's perfect - the opportunity always exists for others to improve or change the article. To accommodate the pedants, I have deliberately provided an unusually large stack of additional references which may help them on their way. I do this as a service to the community, because I know from experience as educator how difficult it can be for people to find their way into a topic.

At a time when people ponder the causes of the financial crisis and the morality of Islamic dress, the topic of “character mask” is in fact highly relevant and topical. That is a also good reason for providing the article in the first place, and perhaps it explains why it received 4416 views in 21 days, an average of 210 hits per day.

I have checked the protocol, and in this light I do have to consider some of your concerns about originality and wikistyle as legitimate. There are some difficult issues here. For example, several scholarly authorities to whom I refer (Haug, Perelman, Fuchs et al.) note very explicitly, that the concept of “character mask” was deleted from English translations (and, as Haug notes, also from translations in several other main languages). Most of Marx’s references to character masks which I have listed are mentioned by various authors which I have referenced, yet no one has simply listed the different uses of the concept by Marx in Das Kapital, as I have done. To facilitate the reader, I have retranslated excerpts and indicated their location, which is useful. But it invites the objection that this is original research.

In order to overcome that problem, I would either have to cite the German original text, or I would have to cite each of the quotations as cited by reputable sources. If I cite the quotes in German, many English readers cannot read it. If I cite the translations as provided by reputable sources, then I have to collect those together first, but the problem there is that those translations themselves are often deficient, even if they do use the term “character mask” correctly, so I don’t really want to use them anyway if I can avoid it. The way I solved the problem is by adopting the simplest and straightforward solution, comprehensible to the ordinary reader, but paradoxically the translation itself seems to be “original research”, since it has never been published anywhere else before, even although it consists simply of citing the original text in a literally translated form.

Ben Fowkes’s translation of Capital, Volume I is admirable but demonstrably faulty from a scientific point of view, since he demonstrably adds words and ideas which are simply not there in the original, while deleting words and ideas in a way which changes the meaning of what is being said. In other words, he tries to “improve” Marx’s text, but that is not advisable when you deal with such a controversial text, in which literal meaning counts. Similar problems arise in the Martin Nicolaus translation of the Grundrisse. One might well ask, if all reference to character masks is deleted by Ben Fowkes, why does David Fernbach translate the concept literally in Capital, Volume II? Either the translations are just arbitrary, or one translator is inaccurate and the other accurate. I take the latter view.

I have to think of a way to overcome that problem of originality, and any suggestions are welcome. I think your criticism, insofar as it is valid, boils down simply to the suggestion that I should publish an article on the topic in a refereed journal first, so that I can then cite from my own article. I intend to do so. 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.

Let me now respond to your concerns, point by point.

• You refer to “errors and inaccuracies” without stating what they are. I regard this as libelous and unscholarly.
• You “see a pattern” in what I write, but do not state what it is, and that is both unhelpful and a slur on my reputation. Please desist from such scurrilous maneouvres.
• Whether you have expertise is not the issue, the issue is whether you have legitimate criticisms and can prove their validity, and whether you are prepared to help improve articles or whether you are just pontificating from the sidelines to add lustre to your academic reputation.
• If you have concerns about any of my other contributions to wikipedia, please note these on the discussion page of the relevant article, and do not discuss them here. I just note here that most of the articles that I wrote, or worked on, have been there for a long time, with little or no correction or addition. Evidently people were satisfied by what they found, and if this is so, I consider I am not doing so badly with my contributions.
• Try to be specific, and adduce facts, evidence and logic, if you have criticisms of my work. Generalities and mere insinuations are not acceptable.
• When I say on my user page "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", I am making a personal statement in a short description about myself. It has no direct bearing on my wikipedia contributions, and thus your indictment is misplaced. I am well aware that in wikipedia you are not supposed to include original work, and I do not claim that I have done anything original, but I am also aware that merely writing a summary of the work of others you are performing a creative act anyway. An article is a “synthesis” anyway, it is just that this synthesis should honor wikipedia protocols; if it doesn’t, the article can be changed or removed. I have worked on wikipedia articles on and off for many years, and only two articles have been deleted, one fairly and another unfairly (because a different concept was substituted for the concept I wrote a piece about). Most of the articles are much as they were.
• I have provided reliable third-party sources for this article on character masks, although the referencing could still be improved. Your allegation is therefore false. my article in fact provides more references than average. But “whether the sources are in English or German” is precisely the issue, because as soon as I, as author, translate from one language to the other in the article text I provide, I can be accused of engaging in original research.
• Your claim that “The overwhelming majority of the material here is unsourced or provides sources that do not support the specific interpretation presented” is false or biased, and you provide no evidence in support for this opinion. I am happy to correct or reference specific sentences, but general accusations without supporting evidence and argument will be ignored.
• I do not “collapse character into person” and if you think that I do, you have failed to read the article properly. In fact I start the article specifically by distinguishing the concept of character mask from related concepts such as mimesis, role, person, etc.
• You keep asserting that “A person is not a character; a character is a representation.” But nowhere in the article do I claim that “a person” is the same as “a character” and therefore this comment is irrelevant. You fail to specify what you mean when you say that “a character is a representation”, which is unhelpful, but anyway that is not at issue. The point is that, as I explain, a character mask is a representation, but the natural human character which people have and which partly defines their basic personal identity is not a representation. The very idea that people can represent themselves and their character or characteristics, in ways other than they really are, becomes meaningless, if it is asserted that any character is “only a representation”. The very aim of this article is to explain the concept of character mask, where one character is masked by another. There are no doubt people who argue that the concept of character mask is not a valid concept in a social scientific or psychological sense. I do not deny that this may be the case. Nevertheless Marx and Marxists do use the concept, and other views or criticisms related to it can be stated in the section on criticisms.
• You say patronisingly “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.” but you do not seem to have read the article at all, because I very explicitly consider in the article whether reference is made to the concept of character masks in reference works, and in fact I acknowledge in a footnote that I have borrowed selectively from Haug’s German article on the topic, although I go beyond it, in an English context.
• 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.
• You argue that “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.” Now, leaving aside that you evidently do not know what you are talking about here and what the debates are about – I would have to go into a whole discussion about this, which I will not do now - you are advancing your own interpretation of what Marx means without offering any evidence and argument for it. You appear not to understand what the controversies surrounding the concept of “character mask” are about at all, even although I very specifically mention that in the article, which you appear not to have read at all! Briefly, Louis Althusser was originally a Stalinist but he was clever enough to realize the arid Stalinist dogma would not wash among the new generation, and so he thought he would “soup up” Marxist philosophy with a few concepts stolen from the latest bourgeois fads, such as structuralism. It was a hit, because Marxists could finally pretend to academic sophistication, they had a whole new language in which to contest theories with other theories, all at a strictly theoretical level. They could just earn money from talking theory to each other, and anything so mundane as empirical experience was just irrelevant impressionism. Perhaps you do not agree with such a precis, but the point is that you seem blissfully unaware that your own interpretation of Marx is only an interpretation – and an interpretation which isn’t even accurate as a matter of fact, being strongly influenced by the Althusserian misreading of Marx.
• You say that “With regard to using "character" as a synonym for "personality": the problem arises from the varied genealogical trajectories of the Greek word ethos.” That is your interpretation for which you provide no argument or evidence, you are just posing falsely as authority again. Let me just note here that nowhere in the article have I suggested that character is the same as personality. This was not even true in Victorian England. For example, in the mid-19th century, “persons of good character” were invited in England to apply for emigration to New Zealand. I am well aware that “moral character” is something different from Marx’s use of character, and I provide a link to the concept of “moral character”. I have never suggested in the article that the two should be conflated.
• You state that “all of the articles that you offer are unreferenced.” This is simply false and I cannot take that seriously.
• According to you, “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".” Yeah, as far as you know, but again, you HAVEN’T READ MY ARTICLE ON CHARACTER MASKS, IN WHICH I DISCUSS THIS POINT. Nowhere have I simply conflated personality with character. I have merely noted that if a person adopts a character mask which personifies a function or role, 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.
• You say that “Your use of "character" to describe "identity" confuses the concept unnecessarily. An actor is not a character.” But your own utterance is confused, not mine. The whole point in the argument about character masks is that conflicts can arise between identity, role and function, which happens to be a central preoccupation of (post-)modern discourses in society. Again, you appear not to understand anything about what is at issue. 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 do not make “swipes against postmodernism". In my article, I only summarize very briefly what the relevant postmodernist concerns are. If you want to “recommend a better historical grounding in these ideas”, bear in mind that my historical grounding is enormously better than yours, not only because I have worked for world class historians as translator, editor and research assistant, but also because I bothered to study the relevant literature. My aim in this article however is not original research but to provide a succinct summary of a concept and give an indication of the controversies related to it, no more.
• You say: “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.” As regards your first sentence, I am obviously well aware of that, although I think you do not understand the meaning of essence as an epistemological category and confuse it with an ontological category. With your kind of talk, everybody gets more confused, and that is not the aim of my article. When Marx refers to the “essence” of a phenomenon, he does not mean some mysterious metaphysical entity which cannot be observed and cannot be proved. He means only: understanding the true significance of something in the appropriate context, and understanding the practical implications of it. When you can perform the relevant cognitive operations, then you understand the essence, and you can prove that experimentally by being able to change or replicate the phenomenon in some way. The “essence of a concept” is simply the gist of the concept, the necessary and sufficient conditions which distinguish the concept from other concepts. Marx never claimed to support metaphysical doctrines of essentialism, and he merits the label “essentialist” only insofar as he believed that the essence of phenomena frequently has to be discovered through scientific inquiry, since it will not spontaneously hand itself over on a plate. Since in my article I do not impute to Marx any particular essentialist doctrine, I do not feel compelled to reference any such claim either. It lacks any direct relevance to what I wrote in the article.
• You say: “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".” As regards your first sentence, this is just assertion without proof. It is true that the concept of the mask can be used metaphorically and I have indicated this explicitly in the article, which you appear not to have read. The point is that for Marx, the masking is real and occurs on different levels, as I have indicated. As regards your second sentence, this is just nonsense, and I carefully referenced Marx’s claim, in three different places, that the wage contract masks the fundamental economic relationship. How you can miss this, I am not sure.
• You say: “We will agree, I suspect, that the social relations of the captialist mode of production structure our activity regardless of our conscious intent.” I do not know what you mean by captialist. But I do not agree with you about anything much except partly about the originality concern you stated. This particular pleading by you shows that you have not understood the significance of the issue at all. The point is, that human beings are intentional actors who are simultaneously caught up in relationships which they never intended themselves. As I explain in the article, they are – according to Marx – both makers and made by history, they create social relations, but must conform to other social relations which they did not make. As regards the latter relations, these form a “structure” as Marx says, and it exists as a structure, precisely because ordinarily, whatever intentionality people may have, those relations do not change. Althusser understood this idea, except that he drives it to excess, so that human intentionality disappears altogether. Why does Althusser do this? He does it because he wants to demolish false ideas about teleology, humanism and historicism. But effectively he throws the baby out with the bathwater. The German and Austrian Marxist discussions about the concept of character masks, by Haug, Ottomeyer etc. aim precisely to redress the balance by paying proper attention to human intentionality, to how the relations of production and exchange are mediated and implemented by roles, and to what the human consequences of all this are. When you say that “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.” this sounds very erudite and sophisticated, but it is really vague waffle. That is NOT what I am attempting to do in my article, I am trying to explain plainly how, in Marx’s theory, the macro and the micro level are linked through roles, functions and masks, showing what is distinctive in this approach and how it differs from symbolic interactionism in the simplest manner possible.
• My article does not collapse “a careful series of distinctions between social relations, social identity, personality, and consciousness”, as you so pretentiously claim, but even if it did, you provide not a shred of evidence for it. As I mentioned before, I do not aim to offer a dissertation here, merely a brief introduction to the concept and the relevant issues with it.
• You say: “To write that Marx "unmasks" the capitalist system is, precisely, a metaphor, not an actual description of his theoretical process.” Well, it could be understood as a metaphor, but even if it is so understood, then it is still true that it is an analogic description of a real process. For Marx, the masks are real, and the unmasking is also a real process. It is just that these processes occur, as I mentioned explicitly, at many different levels. By revealing the essence of a phenomena, Marx does indeed aim to “take off its masks”, and he refers numerous times to this idea. If you had bothered to study the relevant literature, which you evidently haven’t, then you would know this to be true.
• You say: “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.” But that is just where you reveal your vulgarity as a thinker, running together all manner of different things. The point is that a “mask” is something quite different from a “curtain” or “heart surgery”. If you do not understand this, read my article again, read the references I provide, and have a good think about it.
• You say: “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.” It sound very profound, erudite and learned when you say it like that, now that you have discovered that there is a German article about the concept, but in reality I make no such assumption at all, and there is also no evidence in my article that I do make such an assumption. 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.
• You say: “Your arguments above about "raising oneself above social relations to understand them" etc., is mimicking Althusser's distinction between theory and ideology.” This claim is simply false. It is Marx who says that "My standpoint, from which the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he remains, socially speaking, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.” My article states a criticism of Althusser’s fashionable misrepresentation of Marx. I accept almost nothing from Althusser because he is demonstrably wrong about almost everything: wrong about Marx, wrong scientifically and wrong politically. I do not discuss the difference between theory and ideology explicitly in my article because that is not the purpose of the article. I only inserted a link to “false consciousness”, provided some comment in a note, and referred to “ideological consciousness” in Marx’s sense. I do not, and do not intend, “to collapse the distinct concepts of Charaktermasken and ideology into one another.”
• 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?
• Certainly, I could write a dissertation making “more careful distinctions and more precise in its philosophical approach (production, expression, representation, etc.) than the argument presented here.” But my aim here is to provide an accessible article for the ordinary reader; I provide references so that those who want to study it more can do so. I have tried to help them on their way, and I can do no more in wikipedia.
• You say: “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.” No, you are right, I do not mean that seriously… but not because I was joking, but because I never claimed or argued that. I said something quite different. What I said is that there are “faulty translations, which are themselves influenced by the dominant Marxist ideology in academia.” This relates to a point I made specifically in footnote 28, elaborating on what I say in the main text. My footnote states that Ben Fowkes was influenced by Althusserianism in his translation, and Fowkes explicitly states himself, that he deliberately chose to refer to “bearers” (thereby wiping out all reference to character masks). The question is: why did he do that? Well, he did it for theoretical reasons, he had a theoretical interpretation of what Marx says and he translated according to that theoretical interpretation. That interpretation itself was based on the influential interpretation by Althusser, according to which people are just bearers of social relations. The whole point is that they are not just bearers but also make these social relations, they create them. Once you understand that in its full significance, the Stalinist interpretation of Marx is completely shattered, and with it, the Althusserian attempt to spruce up the Stalinist interpretation with a suitable smattering of concepts stolen from the latest bourgeois fashions.
• You say: “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.” But I have never argued this. My argument relates specifically to a dominant interpretation which influenced the translation of Marx’s most famous text, which had very big consequences for how it was understood by Marxists and others. There were people like Althusser and Gerald A. Cohen who have been very influential in English-speaking Marxist scholarship, in the sense that they have defined basic concepts, and these definitions have become mainfare among Marxists scholars. The way in which concepts were defined, implicitly articulated the dominant Marxist ideology: an ideology which either destroyed the active human subject as a maker of history, or else became totally contradictory when it actually had to explain any real event. Everything was fine when Marxists could just earn money talking abstract theory with each other. But eventually people want to see some pay-off, they want to see them tackling some really issue and explain a real situation or event. And they simply cannot do it convincingly. They cannot do it, because their whole mode of thinking, and their deformed concepts, far removed from real life, are completely at odds with what you need for that purpose. They are caught in what Castoriadis calls a “labyrinth”, and this labyrinth exists because the false conceptualizations have the effect that the essentials of an explanation are masked to themselves. I cannot discuss that in a wikipedia article, I can only alert readers to the possibility. User:Jurriaan 19:00 24 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)

It looks like you really pleasured yourself, watching yourself in your mirror defecating, but your self-reflective anal activity has nothing to do with me, my concerns, or with the article I seek to improve. Anyway my advice is, that you had better watch out, because somebody could come around and cut off your head, and stick it right up your ass, just so you return to where you come from. I don't really have the time just now to offer a detailed reply to your "emissions", if I may call them that, I have work to do. So I don't think I will go into detailed reply, it serves no purpose. It's not constructive, just a waste of energy. You had made about three sensible points in what you said before, which are worth considering and doing something about, in a way completely consistent with wiki protocol, all the rest is just your freaky sales talk about how fantastic you are as an academic authority, how brilliant your intellect is, etc. although the proof is nil comma nil and more to the contrary really - you just get paid to teach shit like Negri to unsuspecting students (pity the poor buggers). The tinny sales talk just fails to persuade, sorry. I will just make do with the 3 relevant wiki points you had previously stated, and produce a better product when I have more time to do it. For that, I cannot rely on academics because they fuck up every good idea and then fill their pockets with the money they screwed out of the people who do the work.

User:Jurriaan 4:17 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)

Okay, I'll fix the article to conform better to wikipedia protocol and formats, I do not however yet know exactly when I can do this amidst other concerns; I may have to take up your suggestion, to simply shift the article to my user page. I had forgotten that this is a technical possibility. One of my own posts on a mailing list also seems to be an appendix to somebody's user page in wikipedia.

Among other things, I want to seek advice from a few more people about this article, as well as review some further relevant literature. The good thing about wikipedia is, that it does offer a lot of options to solve problems, which is to the credit of the inventors. Matters can really be sorted out, and one has to be motivated - as you emphasize - to ensure that they are.

I make no claims whatever to be "proletarian" or "revolutionary", however construed, and your interpretations about paranoia and micro-fascism are your own, they have nothing to do with me. I have nothing to do with Uncle Joe and diamat, except that I studied the history of all that in considerable detail once, since I had to deal with people who believed that stuff; one has to know what one is dealing with. Such terms are neither part of the article nor of the discussion about it, they're just in your head only. I make no threats, only offer advice. I do not rant, but provide reasons for my modus operandi or dissent. They may not always be the best reasons that could be given - nobody's perfect - but I do not intend to be arbitrary. I meet friendliness with like friendliness, force with like force.

If you think that the articles which I originated are in a poor state, then, as I previously mentioned, please report the nature and specifics of your criticisms on the talk page of the article concerned. I have never claimed that the articles could not be improved, and if people can improve them, they're welcome. Of course, anyone can lodge a complaint about the work of anyone else, but one cannot do anything with it, if it's just a nasty comment aiming to discredit the constructive intentions of someone else in adding an article in the first place.

Let me just note that in your discussion missives you have yourself failed to adhere to wikipedia protocol. I initially aimed to respond to it in an acceptably neutral manner, patiently explaining my reasons. But to my indication that I found your discussion increasingly offensive, you respond by going ballistic, lacing your overkill with all kinds of irrelevancies and personal intellectual concerns which at not at issue with this article. In so doing, you reveal your own character behind the mask. I don't think I need to say more about it, except to reiterate that the fault in your discourse is rather obviously that you want to impose additional standards on other wikipedians which you demonstrably do not honor yourself - without offering good reasons why others should do so, beyond the allure of your status.

How Proteus and Dionysos figure in this - and this is a musing about your mask - I am not sure, except that a myth is a myth - a story which conveys a human meaning by combining many different elements which are not rationally explicable. What we require here is a good rational approach, along the lines that if something doesn't work and succeed, we should not persist in it and try something else.

I am very aware (and you have inadvertently made me more precisely aware, for which I am grateful) now that I also made a serious mistake, in posting the article when I did, I should have simply left it until such time as I could revise it sufficiently to prepare a version suitable for wikipedia, fully consistent with wikipedia protocols. That was after all your primary and relevant concern, leaving aside the intellectual overkill of that point with your authority issues. It is sort of like going off half-cocked.

Wikipedia offers the opportunity to "start" an article as a pilot, with the possibility that others can add to it or edit it. With some types of articles, this can work very well, particularly if the topic just isn't very controversial. But if we're dealing with a more complex concept about which there are real controversies (and I have dealt mainly with concepts for which there wasn't an entry, or a particularly bad entry), this approach is most likely simply not advisable; in that case, it's best first to make the whole article in Word or another similar programme, and post it only when one is really sure it conforms to all the requirements. Soberly considered and without fuss, that's all there is to it.

Judgements about where to draw the line exactly may be influenced by cultural factors no doubt, and you certainly have revealed your predelections. But the main idea is that whatever the errors are, the article should be presented not only in good faith but also be fully consistent with protocol, which is really saying that the errors should be within certain bounds. What I ended up doing in this case, was to post an article before it was really finished, and then I added more things into it, and I conclude from the exercise it just isn't really a good idea. In your terms, it might do as an interesting blog entry, but not as an encylopedia article. I have made the case that an encyclopedia article is warranted, and I think I can win that case, be it with a better article. However I think you should not confuse your academic standards with wikipedia standards. You are not at your rostrum here, but in wikiland, let's be very aware of that.

To conclude, I think you have raised legitimate concerns about my originality and too sloppy referencing of claims; the whole structure of the article should in fact be different. You are correct to draw attention to this. I have checked some of the better formatted articles you have worked on, and I get the picture. I do need to take better care about all that. One aspect is that I do not have all the material physically available where I am now and often worked from memory, from research queries in the distant past which perhaps yielded results that can still be useful to people etc. (you get an education, and want to return something for what you received). For example, a book I consulted once, more than 25 years ago, I had to order especially, second-hand, for the purpose of my text. That sort of thing is technically not good enough as an approach, it is not very desirable, but not so easy to overcome practically. As regards your personal status concerns, flourishes and exasperated vitriol, I will say no more than I have said.

User:Jurriaan 17:00 25 August 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.136.223.40 (talk)

Just to elucidate a point: it could be argued that if an actor acts out a role by impersonating a character, he is not necessarily “masking” anything, but merely accentuates characteristics which he already has. In other words, he is merely utilizing, extending or elaborating parts of the behavioural repertoire he already has, with a specific purpose or intention. The argument might be, that the actor as an individual is always acting in one way or another, and that if he acts in a theatrical role (or a business role), he is merely acting in a different way. It raises the question how we tell the difference between the behaviour of the acting individual in ordinary life, and the act he performs in his theatrical (or business) role – and indeed whether there is any difference. How exactly do we draw the distinction between “acting out a role” and “being yourself”? It is true that the distinction may be difficult to draw, and that is exactly why there are interminable disputes about how “authentic” behaviour should be understood, and how it can be distinguished from a role. Whatever the case, however, it is always assumed that the nature of the role can be distinguished independently from the individual, is not unique to the individual, and can in principle be acted out by anyone who has the qualities enabling him to do so. The characteristics expressed by the role are therefore not unique to the individual, and therefore do not define the unique personal character of the individual. At best we might say, that the individual can act out a given role in a rather unique way, which may be either desirable in a given context (because it makes the acting all the more convincing) or a hindrance (if the requirement is, that the role is acted out in a specific way, rather than in an idiosyncratic way). If the role exists independently of the individual, and if the individual must act in a certain way to personify it and perform it, this does not automatically mean that the individual must “mask” himself, and this is acknowledged in the article. After all, performing a role or function may be part of the normal behavioural repertoire of the individual, and indeed he may feel that he expresses his true character in it. The “ideal job or profession” is one in which the individual can be “fully himself in it”. What this means is that the individual’s own character and the character expressed by the role are identical, in which case he does not need to “perform an act” in order to fulfil it, he can fulfill it just being himself. As a corollary, we might then say that the function or role is “made for the individual”, and indeed somebody might say “this job is made for you”, because the Mertonian “role set” involved matches exactly with the personal character of the individual. But the critical concept of the “character mask” refers precisely to the fact that the social role or function, which is structured by the economic relationships, exists quite independently of the individual, and is not “made for him” specifically, is imposed on the individual whether he likes that or not. He may have a choice about accepting the role or function, and may have some freedom in how he acts it out, but as against that, he necessarily has to act out what the role requires, whether he likes that or not; and if he refuses the role, then he is driven into another role, and in this sense cannot escape from social roles, and what they require, altogether. He has to choose something, but whatever he chooses, he is caught in a situation which imposes requirements on him whether he likes that or not. It could be maddening and indeed whole theories of insanity are built out of this idea. Insofar as the performance of a role is therefore in truth involuntary, and not a matter of choice, and insofar as it imposes requirements to which the individual must adjust whether he likes to or not - whatever illusions may exist about this - then the “masking” of personal character in order to personify another character is inevitable. The simple reason is, that the individual cannot, or not fully, “be himself” and “act out the role or function” at the same time. To personify the function or role, he necessarily has to repress, delete or hide some of his personal characteristics, and express characteristics which are alien to him. And that is exactly the starting point of Marx’s theory of character masks. User:Jurriaan 26 August 2010 14:05 (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)