Capitalism and the Chains of Kayfabe
“I know I’m being exploited, but hey that’s a privilege these days”
Under global all-encompassing Capitalism have we not become One as Descartes conceived us? And as Heidegger found us? The Spirit in self-guiding missiles? The isolated thing-for-yourself in the fallout-shelter? The apocalyptic dasein riders of the compulsion of things? The dominant ideology today is an end of the “end of history” which grounds a nuclear freestyle rational ethics of: kayfabe.
Kayfabe is not just a particular ideology, but the dominant mode of social expression and relations under contemporary global Capital (capitalist/imperialist realism, and so on). “Kayfabe” (also called “work” or “worker”) is a staged form of behaviour that captures a piece of the "real" - a capture in the benefit of surplus. An invisible hand job given to oneself for the benefit of the Whole. An increasing ideological tendency where subjects are incentivised to put “over” capitalism as something more Real than non-capitalism; for example, “I know I’m being exploited, but hey that’s a privilege these days”.
Kayfabe allows a subject to feel like they are not duped as they are simply performing in the fleeting moment for the Other, but deep-down they “really know” the truth is on their side. An ideological legitimisation mechanic of performative reflexivity. A mechanic anchored in a self-important opposition to the duped (and presupposed) Other. Kayfabe is in essence a staged behaviour that is cultivated to maximise drama and stimulate desire – all for the aim of profit.
As a Notion kayfabe emerged from the pure-business world of professional wrestling (a murky etymology). A pre-Internet era, where the secrets of wrestling were kept under wraps much more easily. However, kayfabe in wrestling did not really die when it got “exposed”. In fact, it thrived despite the widespread awareness and recorded evidence that wrestlers were performers working combat for maximum drama and profit. Consequently, kayfabe’s unveiling only opened up an increased space to cultivate reflexive fantasies for justification and trickery.
For classic kayfabe: one moment of the capitalist substance represents the subject for another moment of the substance. While under the evolved and later kayfabe, this disruption dissolves as the subject changes its place and becomes exchangeable. One kayfabe subject who represents something (as actor) is replaced with one whom (as spectator) signifies something external. This reversal of neo-kayfabe results in the actual self of the kayfabe subject coinciding with what he impersonates, a staged character; just as the spectator is completely at home in the drama performed before him and sees himself playing in it.
Wrestling (just like capitalism itself) has persisted despite the fact now that all the consumers/fans are “smart” to the façade. This ideological minimal distance is an internal (not external) barrier that does not stop the business of surplus-extraction from operating orderly. Kayfabe is a perpetual feedback loop, a vicious circle in the form of the liar’s paradox, a double bind that offers only increasing reflexivity and hyperreality.
The late-stage capitalism discourse of postmodernism has led to the accelerating proliferation of kayfabe as a reflexive false consciousness. And the result is? Well now: “We all know that we are performing even as consumers, and what actually matters is how and why we perform”. An “open secret” that there is no ground for Real value, and one just “has to” go on with the diminishing façade (of violence and rivalries) to engage positively in this “work”.
A laboured commitment to kayfabe is to see the Real as an exchange that extracts surplus value from “marks”; a mark is a subject who freely buys into the symbolic exchange by enunciating that this exchange is a form of exploitation because that would betray their own inner libidinal capture (think carnival games and casino patrons). Hence, the challenges no longer break the spell of kayfabe but in fact tend to reinforce it. Since, even critical attacks from Marxists’ and critical theorists are already reflexively buffered against as nothing but mutated justifications of political-economic legitimisation.
Under capitalism there is a productive double-bind kayfabe for spectator and worker; a coincidence of the self (the actor) and his character means that the split between these two, a split that now moves to inhabit that character itself, as a split-subject. Thus, for kayfabe, it is not the subject-actor that represents a forged character for the spectator, but it is a subject-as-actor who appears as that gap through which the character itself, a gap that relates to itself via “representing itself”.
One must subsume their work (capitalist) identity under a worked (kayfabe) identity as a structural irrationalism in opposition to a non-kayfabe other. A positive negation of the other, an ideology anchored to the whims of capitalist chaos. A cheap position that claims its truth from wallowing in the trauma of language, a trauma resulting from the disconnect between signifier and signified because one cannot but act in kayfabe if one wants to not hold steadfast to a truth procedure of the Real (just as the “rational”, “sceptic” can engage in society easily).
The present society is one where the ideologists proclaim to see past the end of the “end of ideology”. This false consciousness of kayfabe has become the general consciousness; a consciousness where one wants to dissolve their class and oppose the “false consciousness” (as with Marx’s proletariat). A repeated form of kayfabe disposition rests on world-historical learning processes of bitterness that can be summoned to fruition. They have naturalised the marks of the inhuman formality of exchange, of endless wars, and the self-denial of transcendental consciousnesses.
Those in kayfabe feel they are truth Sayers by clinging to their being via a structuring fantasy of the trauma as being something fundamental to the reality; a truth found in its own negation, naturally. Aspects of reality become part of story, a blurring of the lines of reality even further. Think how the best wrestlers (or performers like Andy Kaufman) famously: “never broke kayfabe” even in front of fans in their downtime. If they were a heel (a villain) they remained a heel in public. Think someone like Mitch McConnel or Nancy Pelosi, both are known as ruthless political actors who never break kayfabe even when knowingly contradicting themselves, and this split-subjectivity is their form.
The performativity of kayfabe guarantees an extended reproduction of itself as a lie more true than the true. A slippery and deceptive immoral dogma of cleverness that entangles this “realist” subject. Kayfabe persists as an enlightened false consciousness, a hard, gritty, shadowy cleverness that divides courage from itself; it sees the positive to be fraudulent, and thus it prefers a coping mechanism over courage.
Only through courage can a future unfold without kayfabe; a future that would be more than the expanded reproduction of the worst of the past. Kayfabe is without courage, as it nourishes itself only from the now faint currents of recollection; it relishes in its itself via a spontaneous ability to bring life to an “order” against the worst in an anarchic order-less order.
More precisely, the pastime of kayfabe has no object, because what concerns it is not the activity or object it is occupied with, but rather the occupation of kayfabe with itself. Kayfabe seeks to be occupied because it liberates us from the emptiness of aloofness. An idealism that disappears in favour of whatever fills it. Kayfabe is a reply to Western hegemonic Liberal idealism that goes beyond theoretical repudiation; it does not speak against this idealism; it lives against it.
The paradox of fetishistic disavowal is alive and well in kayfabe. It captures in high-definition the clarity of Lacan’s les non-dupes errent (those in the know err). Since, those who refuse to let themselves get caught in the symbolic fiction and believe only what they see in immediacy: are those who error the most. Kayfabe misses the efficiency of this symbolic fiction structuring their (experience of) reality of opposition.
In kayfabe subjects’ see themselves as occupying some “real promise”. When the “I” of kayfabe speaks, it perceives oneself as the agent completely negating the regulated the symbolic structure grounding speech. A line of thought to kayfabe extends back to the famous ancient cynic: Diogenes. He was a critical product of Athenian social life, but he was negatively determined by this whole mode of Athenian thought he protested, and negatively reinforced in his critique.
Kayfabe now reduces the world to a cynical carnival of the frozen hellscape of negative dialectics. In kayfabe subjects mobilise the body of Diogenes against the cunning of Oedipus; they privilege the master-cynic of the Dialectic of Enlightenment who pays the price of self-denial in order to survive in his struggles with the mythic powers of fate. As a result, in kayfabe the "big Other speaks through me” because the split-subject speaks from a real located “secretly” in the Real – its negative underside of potentiality.
Remember how Diogenes Laërtius famously justified his kayfabe vulgarity against his hometown by saying: "I am a citizen of the world!" (vol. VI, p. 63). Under kayfabe it provides a bold answer to reason's becoming homeless in the social world. It offers a real of reason separated from the empirical idea communities. A lived Real. Just as Diogenes’ critique was not a contingent critique of social conditions but simply the lived result of social necessity; a civil society allows a product of the grotesque as its “allowed” rebellion, its negative underside.
Kayfabe is a “realist” reading that avoids the torture of language by choosing the torture of the senses. The path of kayfabe always chooses the despair of not wanting to be “duped” by the symbolic, by denying how the symbolic is constitutive to reality as such. Therefore, “the non-duped make an error”, and as a result deception is necessary and constitutive of the symbolic order.
The act of a kayfabe requires forgery, since they act deceptively in an understanding of the symbolic order; hence why they can replicate and undermine it. Thus, in kayfabe the subject is, in fact, duped by taking the appearance of the symbolic to be more real than their critic. They fail to see the play in the signifier of their ground. They prefer a performative therapeutic intent over a play of self-deception. A mode of rebelling via forgery against a symbolic, a symbolic that even their critic does not believe in.
Kayfabe sees itself as a forgery that can circulate as equivalent in the societal commons, but from within-itself it can undermine societal norms to highlight its failure. In its forgery (like in scepticism and cynicism) one assumes a firm point in the symbolic structure one is acting against. A firm (presupposed) point sustaining the true mediated position being forged that is made real by bluffing against it. Since, bluffing (as forgery) and perplexity (being in the present without certainty) belong together and produce a provocative wake-up effect in the act of kayfabe.
Consequently, kayfabe builds in a certain way on a bluff realism and demonstrates a technique of deception, exposure, and self-exposure. Kayfabe offers a realism that betrays the method of modern consciousness with all its notorious meaning swindles. As it contains a bluff theory in perpetual action. At least, kayfabe is correct in that it recognises that without a theory of bluff, seduction, and deception, modern structures of consciousness cannot be explained at all properly. Therefore, kayfabe is a dogmatic “bluff” because it believes it embodies the real negation of the (hollow) symbolic – a negation of nothing.
The les non-dupes errent (unconscious bluff) of kayfabe is captured purely by the clinical Rodney Dangerfield joke: “Last week I told my psychiatrist, I keep thinking about suicide. He told me from now on I have to pay in advance.” The comedian’s joke here is premised on the fact that psychiatry only works with a bluff from the patient to be negated; the patient wants only to hear what they unconsciously speak reflected back to them in the speech of the other. While the psychiatrist succeeds only by bluffing to sustain transference as the “one supposed to know”. Therefore, kayfabe is a "labour that entertains" and is based on an "embodying of reason" as the “right” reason.
Where Oedipus embodies "self-repression", the eventually unhappy consciousness of the modern labourer of kayfabe comes to represent the ancient Athenian Diogenes’s "self-embodiment in resistance". An enlightened affirmation of a laughing, excreting, and masturbating body; a performative body that actually undercuts the modern notion of a stable identity, and attacks the armoured, self-preserving, and rationalising ego of capitalist culture. Kayfabe unconsciously dissolves its strict separations of inside and outside, private and public, self and other.
Kayfabe is not the exception, but rather the average social character of global capitalism. It is not just fundamentally asocial but fully integrated into global capital (as the perverse structural underside of the social). Psychologically kayfabe defines a borderline melancholic subject able to channel the flow of depressive symptoms into functioning societal rhythm. Consequently, kayfabe ideology is a phase of understanding data as conspiracy proliferation, a limiting of a conspiratorial way-of-life as Real resistance.
Kayfabe is already so secretly consolidated that it wants to know only experiential reason. A position grounded on its own posited mysterious data. A position of ground that is unable to call upon the aid of proofs, as its proofs cannot be justified until a more opportune time. Therefore, there is no history of kayfabe that makes you old. The unkindnesses of yesterday compels you to nothing in the kayfabe present.
Consequently, kayfabe is a time of science. It is a time of scepticism in understanding, an understanding casting spells of the dark amongst spells of lightness; it is the dynamic of optimism through justifying the desolation of hopelessness. This class-that-is-not-a-class is a sacrificial tribute, it signifies the gain of humanity through its desire for loss.
The unassimilable element that skews the logic which generates it is kayfabe - a particular with universal potentially. The part which is no part. A homeopathic creature of kayfabe, a symptom of sickness but without promise of cure. Like any symbolic gesture, it is resonant of more than itself by proclaiming a more general emancipation in its own qualitative leap from weakness to power.
The kayfabe is the consumer offered everything before them as choice of play, and they have to play first to attain these potentialities. Kayfabe’s process requires a subject's alienation and (re)appropriation of material content as the self-movement of the emergence of the material-less subjectivity, an emergence via its re-appropriation of the alienated matter through a progressive act. A short-circuit to ecstasy in the now as end. An end is now a long but direct route to mediocrity.
In kayfabe one paralyses the radical asymmetry of class struggle; thus, the aim is not simply to negate (in whatever way) its duped enemy, but to negate (abolish) itself as a class subject. Therefore, the most impotent moral revolutionaries begin with phases of kayfabe, these "amoralists" openly declare guilty to what outrages the others via their useless actions of performative rebellion (i.e., just as Diogenes masturbated publicly in protest).