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IV THE INDIVIDUAL PERSONA By "individual" I mean the individual organism as mere observable configuration—a mere sign—separable from its ground. There is no difficulty in the notion that the individual as an observable physiologi­ cal organism is an entity. All the physiological processes subsumed by the category "individual organism" have at least one attribute in common; they all cease when the heart ceases to beat. (This does not mean, of course, chemical processes, but only those processes by which the individual organism is self­propelling.) An "entity," then, is no more than such a conjunctive category, one which subsumes a set all members of which are interpreted to have some attribute or a set of attributes in common. But is the behavioral individual an entity? Culture has metamorphosed the individualorganism into a category of higher value called various things like "self," or "soul," or "ego"—a more modern but equally delusive term. Currently, the most common word seems to be "personality," the root of which is "per­ sona," a word that originally meant "mask." Masks are of three sorts: one presents conventionalized signs of behavioral attributes of the individual wearing the mask; a second presents conventionalized signs of behavioral attributes which the masker never otherwise exhibits; a third presents both kinds of signs. (A possible fourth kind, that which conceals the facial signs of the masker, is best subsumed under the second.) The attribute of "mask" to be useful here is that a mask is a selection of signs of behavioral attributes or, more precisely, physical configurations which cultural convention interprets as signs of be­ havioral attributes. Moreover, the selected signs are conventionally coherent. (The coherence may be polarized, as in a mask whichpre­ sents on one side signs of "goodness," and the other signs of "evil.") "Personality," then, is a metaphor which ascribes to the behavioral EXPLANATION ANDPOWER individual a structural coherence and asserts that the behavioral indi­ vidual is an entity. What has happened is that the physical organism, a conjunctive category, has been interpreted as a sign of the behavioral individual, a disjunctive category; and the conjunctivity of the one has masked the disjunctivity of the other. Thus, "personality" asserts that all of the behavioral patterns of the behavioral individual have attri­ butes in common, if only participation in the alleged structural coher­ ence of the personality. Nevertheless, an analysis of the metaphor also shows that the interpretation of the behavioral individual as an entity is selective and that the ascription of coherence can be maintained only by ignoring behavioral attributes which cannot be subsumed by that coherence. In actual fact the behavioral individual, no matter what term iden­ tifies him, performs a set of behaviors the members of which have nothing in common except that they are performances, each of which is under the control of a different cultural redundancy. The members of the set are properly subsumed by the categories of those redundancies, not by the category of "personality." The soul, or self, or spirit, or personality, or ego, then, is not a conjunctive but a disjunctive cate­ gory, one which is created by culturally conventionalized interpreta­ tion. "Personality" is a creation of verbal behavior at a fairly high level of explanatory regress. Yet the word is so powerful a conjunctive redundancy, no matter how misleading, that it is virtually unusable. Instead, I shall use "persona"; and I define it thus: the persona is the selective, deceptive, and coherent semiotic interpretation of the be­ havioral individual, either by the individual himself or by someone else. The persona, then, is a semiotic construct. To be more precise, it is a semiotic transformation of the perceptual data of an individual human organism, analogically organized into behavioral patterns. This defini­ tion gives us a hint as to why it emerges, both from the encounter of the individual with himself and from his encounters with others. As we have seen, all interpretation is at least two leveled. As a form of explanation, interpretation is hierarchically structured, the upper level (a series of semiotic matrices) controlling the interpretation of the lower level (recurrent semiotic patterns). From this, two incoherent functions of the persona emerge. First, it stabilizes behavior. But in this it is no different from any interpretation. That is, the problem, so mysterious, of how it is that an individual "thinks" of "himself" as continuing through a series of unrelated situations, is precisely the 246 [18.225.209.95] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 13:03 GMT...

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