Time to Clear the Label

The following essay includes no nudity, violence or coarse language. Reader discretion is advised anyway. And if it helps to lend a little gravitas, you can imagine the writer smoking.

There’s a peculiar hollowing sensation that comes when someone names you before they’ve met you, a kind of ontological short-circuit, as if the circuitry that animates whatever constitutes you — that shifting, anxious, late-night soliloquy of fears and hopes and private compulsions — gets bridged and fused into something much smaller, something that fits easily on a census form.

(Will fulfil a lifelong census-form ambition, BTW, if I ever come across a Dickinsonian box that reads “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” to check.)

But back to the matter at hand. It happens early, long before one has the vocabulary for it: you’re a girl, a boy, the smart kid, the shy one, the loud one, the “racialized minority” kid, the “differently abled” child, the one who “comes from that kind of family.” The self, still under construction, is issued a set of pre-owned descriptors, like clothes that don’t quite fit but that you’re expected to wear indefinitely.

(Extra points if Thomas Carlyle’s reflections in his 1836 novel Sartor Resartus — “the tailor re-tailored” — with respect to how clothing represents both a physical covering and a symbolic representation of a person’s identity and social standing is knocking around in the back of your top hat or straw bonnet.)

But back to the matter at hand. Again. In his 1997 novel Dora Bruder, French writer Patrick Modiano captures the disembodied estrangement of which I speak perfectly: “You were placed in bizarre categories you had never heard of and which bore no relation to who you really were.”

Anyone who has felt a label settle onto them like an unwanted coat knows that particular chill: a quiet violation, a kind of forced conscription into somebody else’s idea of what you must be.

Just another brick in the wall.

The modern world has professionalized this impulse. Bureaucracies, market researchers, political parties, even dating apps — all require that the messy granularity of personhood be emulsified into a handful of recognizable types. Race, gender, age, class, sexual preference, level of education, profession: each a box that promises clarity while erasing almost everything interesting, contradictory, or alive about a person. Labels are efficiency devices, yes, but coarse psychic sandpaper.

Creative types have always resisted this.

Ben Shahn, the late American artist with a face like a perpetual why, disliked being called a “Jewish artist,” not because he rejected his Jewishness but because he understood the psychic sleight-of-hand involved in collapsing the spectrum of a human life into a single adjective. “If it were left to artists to choose their own labels,” he wrote, “most would choose none.”

There’s something quietly heroic in that: a refusal to let an externally imposed category overwrite the interior complexity from which the art actually emerges.

Polish writer, clinical psychologist and public intellectual (whatever that is — see, I’m affixing labels here) Olga Tokarczuk goes further, making the insistence explicit throughout her novels: gender roles and nation-states, she argues, share a common architecture of unreality. Both are “clear, but false divisions,” elegant and tidy and almost totally useless for understanding how human beings actually live.

Tokarczuk’s novels teem with travellers, mythical shape-shifters, border-crossers of one sort or another, characters defined mainly by their resistance to definition. And perhaps that’s why she became a hate figure for Poland’s nationalist right: her work insists that the supposedly sacred boundaries — ethnic, sexual, patriotic — are no more than cultural mood lighting, flattering only to those who designed the switchboard.

We could extend the list. James Baldwin, whose very life was a protest against being forced to wear a set of labels — Black, gay, American ex-pat — each of which carried a different social script he declined to recite. Or Virginia Woolf, who understood the feminine label of her time as something like a padded cell: comfortable enough to lull, restrictive enough to suffocate. Or Franz Kafka, the patron saint of label-induced existential dread, whose clerks and defendants and acolytes are all deformed by their encounters with impersonal categories so vast and meaninglessly precise that they crush the spirit simply through their comprehensiveness.

But the point isn’t merely that labels are reductive. It’s that they perform an act of psychic triangulation: they locate you within a social grid before you’ve had a chance to choose a direction. A label presupposes knowledge where there is none. It preempts intimacy. It trains us to approach one another not as individuals but as summaries.

To slightly mangle a famous quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but only slightly, there are no second acts in American labels. Sorry Heraclitus, but 2,500 years after your famous dictum, it turns out that labels, not character, are destiny.

Under-appreciated American folksinger and Unitarian Universalist Malvina Reynolds, on the other hand, pretty much nailed the power of putting people into …

Little boxes on the hillside

Little boxes made of ticky-tacky

Little boxes on the hillside

Little boxes all the same

There's a green one and a pink one

And a blue one and a yellow one

And they're all made out of ticky-tacky

And they all look just the same.

There’s a strange paradox at work here. As individuals, we’re often exhausted by our interior multiplicity — by the way our identities don’t cohere neatly but instead wobble between roles, moods, contexts. Labels can feel like life rafts, promises that someone else has done the spiritual math for us. Yet the raft is always tethered to someone else’s shore. An identity that is externally, eternally and immutably bestowed is always rented, never owned.

David Foster Wallace (let’s put him to bed as “a brilliant writer, inveterate headband wearer and tragic suicide”) had a genius for diagnosing the psychological weather systems that swirl beneath contemporary North American culture, those invisible crosswinds of fear, irony and yearning that shape how we see ourselves and others.

Based on what I imagine I know about him, which is in fact the square root of minus 1, Wallace would argue that labels proliferate because they simplify an otherwise unmanageable task: how to navigate a planet full of minds we can’t access.

But he would also show, with typical moral insistence, that this simplification comes with a cost. When we approach a person through the funnel of a category — and especially when we cling to that category for comfort or certainty — we perform a subtle violence. We deny them the full range of possible interpretations they might otherwise earn through the long, patient work of being known.

Which is where the real damage occurs: not in the moment the label is applied but in the way it becomes a lens through which every future gesture is interpreted. Once someone is “that kind of person,” everything they say or do is absorbed into the pre-existing narrative, like a living creature caught in amber.

(No, not amber exactly. More like what Salman Rushdie has described as “the dull patina and muffling wax of the everyday, which makes us see reality as monochromatic and hear it as monotonous.” This makes us deaf, Rushdie says, to “the rainbow music of how things really are.”)

But back to  … well, you know. The antidote to this ticky-tacky anaesthetic from which we almost never come round, if there is one, might be a kind of radical curiosity. A willingness to suspend judgment long enough for the other person’s own self-definition to emerge, even if it arrives in fragments or contradictions. A recognition that the core of who someone is often reveals itself only under conditions of genuine attention — conditions that labels, by their nature, preclude.

What artists like Shahn and such writers as Tokarczuk, Baldwin and Woolf remind us is that the deepest human experiences resist categorization precisely because they constitute the parts of us that remain dynamic, changing, elastic. Labels are boundaries. But we are migratory creatures by temperament, always slipping across whatever borders the world tries to pin us inside.

In his 1983 mockumentary Zelig, Woody Allen satirizes the extremes to which this protean capacity we all possess can be taken. Remember the grainy black-and-white vintage newsreel conceit and the seamless integration into the plot of such figures from the 1920s as Fitzgerald, Charlie Chaplin, Babe Ruth and Josephine Baker?

Out of an apparent desire simply to fit in with those around him a century ago, the nondescript Leonard Zelig (played by Allen) transforms himself into a rich Bostonian Republican, a left-winger who hangs out with the kitchen staff, a gangster, a Black jazz musician, a baseball player, a psychiatrist, a Hassidic rabbi, a fat man, a Chinese man, a Greek, a Frenchman, a boxer, a kilted Scot, an opera singer, a Native American, a surgeon performing an appendectomy, an Irishman, a Mexican guitarist, a Nazi bearing a countenance of portentous import at a rally with Adolf Hitler and … and we’re not done yet, but you get the idea.

When his shape-shifting is discovered, Zelig is celebrated as a “chameleon man,” a spoon in a world of forks.

At its core, the film is a warning that inauthenticity and a desire simply to be liked by those around us can easily put one on the road to fascism or any other ism. “Many people have their integrity, but many others lack this quality and become who they’re with. If they’re with people who advocate a certain opinion, they agree,” Allen said during a New York Times interview after the film was released.

The easy thing to do, the path of least resistance, involves climbing into a box and stamping it with a sobriquet, be it middle-aged Fox News devotee or sandal-wearing San Francisco bohemian.

( I’ll take “Absence of Moral Fibre” for $500, Alex.)

But anyone who simply goes with the flow is guilty of what Jean-Paul Sartre called “mauvaise foi” or bad faith — a form of self-deception wherein an individual denies his or her freedom and the responsibility that comes with it by pretending to be a fixed object rather than a free consciousness.

This is a form of lying to oneself by consciously choosing to believe that one has no other option than to act in a certain way — based on the sort of person one believes oneself to be — even when choices do exist. And for Sartre, this is an inauthentic way of living that prevents a person from realizing their full potential. It’s that much worse when we unthinkingly conform to the labels placed on us by society.

Sartre was confused about a lot of things, but he was surely right about that one. We know both from surprising experience with others, and direct access to our own sentience, that human beings are not one-trick ponies — nor are we meant to be. As “the Bard of Democracy” used to sing:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself.

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

So the work — ethical, imaginative, emotional — may be simply this: to let each other be unbounded for a while. To practice the uncomfortable but ultimately liberating art of seeing another person without first deciding what they are.

To meet the self before the category.

And who knows who that may be? We can barely fathom our own thoughts and choices, let alone the daimons and demons that inform the lives of the people around us. So far as the inner lives of others are concerned, we are chained in the allegorical darkness of Plato’s cave, condemned to live in a world of shadowy inferences.

“Perhaps that’s what I am,” Samuel Beckett wrote in his great 1953 novel The Unnameable, “the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition.”

And on the evidence available to us all, so is everybody else.

“What a piece of work is a man,” Hamlet told his smirking childhood friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Shakespeare’s revolutionary cultivation and examination of the ever-vacillating self.

The faithless pair wrote off the sweet prince as simply deranged … and how did that work out for everyone?

Emily Dickinson’s question stands.

Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!