"Personation" and the Division of Labor

"Person" is as strange as it is a familiar name for what each and everybody is at the end of the day, underlying whatever else he or she may be.

Though remarking it has by now become something of a cliché, it remains remarkable that we have taken this name from the Latin persona, a word that meant "mask" in its original application. No one thread connects all the acts of translation by which persona passes from one language to another and from one to another sort of use (from the theatrical to the grammatical to the legal to the theological to the psychological).¹ Sometimes the extension of the meaning of the word is accomplished by means of the suppression of the etymological sense, as in the landmark episode in which Boethius redefines person as an "individual substance of a rational nature."² Sometimes it is accomplished by means of a radical restoration of that sense, as in Hobbes, for whom the word in its original, theatrical sense perfectly properly names the sort of representation that is happening in the relationship between the sovereign and his subjects. In the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the common law marriage of the psycho-theological and the juridical-theatrical ways of universalizing "person" is officially recognized (not only does everyone have a right to legal personhood, a uniform thing, but everyone has what amounts to a right to the "free and full development of his or her personality").³ Ours is the age of this double magnification of the figure.

In this essay, I will look into how "persons," in the current, magnified sense, are put to work. If everyone, at the end of the day, is a "person," what does this mean for the division of labor? How does the "person" one is—what one is at the end of the day understood in this way—relate to the position one has in the division of labor? I will be especially interested in the relationship between the "person" and the position in the division of labor of what I will be calling the "mimetic writer." Though that name is problematic, I use it here in order to summon the figure that Socrates bans from the just city in Book III of the Republic, whose crime is the untruthful "imitation" of the voices of others.

According to Socrates, it is fine to imitate model examples of what one truly is, but it is bad to pretend to be something one is not. The very first principle of the division of labor in Socrates's city is that no one is suited for more than one job; in truth, each and every one is simple, good for one and only one kind of work. In Book III, Socrates bans the mimetic writer on the basis of this principle, which he establishes in Book II. If no one is truly more than one thing, then the mimetic writer, whose business it is to imitate many types of characters, is expert only in a kind of fraud, a travesty of true specialization. Later in the Republic—in Book X—Socrates extends the ban to all mimetic art. There, however, the case is made no longer specifically in terms of the division of labor but rather in terms of the ins and outs of imitation in general. I will speak of the "mimetic writer" rather than the "mimetic artist" in order to stay within striking distance of the specific terms of Socrates's discussion of the division of labor in Books II and III.

My argument will be that, among its many effects, the extension of the sense of "person" such that the word becomes synonymous with "human being" protects the mimetic writer from Socrates's attack without, however, requiring that any alterations be made to the logic of the division of labor according to which Socrates had excluded him or her. This false resolution of the problem that Socrates identified helps to neutralize literary resistance to the power that keeps this logic in place. This doesn't mean that we should stop...