CRACK CAPITALISM

people forced into certain roles. We forget that there is a deeper
conflict, the conflict that creates the theatre, that forces people
to don their character masks. This is the struggle to impose
abstraction upon the daily doing of active subjects, the struggle
to subordinate concrete or creative doing to abstract labour (and
therefore capital). This is not a struggle that was completed at the
dawn of capitalism, but is a daily repeated struggle. The theatre
is not a construction of the eighteenth or nineteenth century,
but a construction of today, and a very fragile one. Behind the
struggle on the stage, there is a prior one: the struggle not to go
up on the stage, not to submit our doing to abstract labour, the
desire of the actors even on the stage to throw off their masks:
the struggle not of an identity but against identification. The
revolution is a battle not between the characters on the stage,
but between the actors and their character masks.
In other words, there cannot be a complete identity between
people and the structural position that they occupy in society,
it cannot be that people are entirely subsumed within their
character mask. The very idea of the one-dimensional man means
that there is someone who is not one-dimensional, someone
who can criticise one-dimensionality. The question, as always,
is: where is that critic, who is that critic? Is it the privileged
intellectual (as Adorno or Horkheimer would have it)! or is it
the 'substratum of the outcasts and the outsiders' (as Marcuse
argues)?2 The simplest answer is surely that we ourselves are the
critics of our own one-dimensionality.
We are not as one-dimensional as we seem: behind our onedimensionality
stands a polyphonic, polymorphous critic. Behind
(or in-against-and-beyond) the personification of abstract labour
stands the doer, the daring dancing doer. Beneath the surface
of domination is the seething of rebellion. Pushing against
and beyond identity is the endless restlessness of anti-identity.
Inside the savage-converted-into-Iabourer dances the savagein-rebellion.3
The possibility of radical change depends not on people
assuming their character masks (the proletariat assuming its
revolutionary role), but on the contrary, on the ec-static distance
between people and the masks they wear, on the fact that people
exist not only in, but also against and beyond their social roles.
213