“Everybody’s Just Working the Marks, Brother”: A Kayfabe Reading of Social Identity, Performativity and Performative Identityt

67 “EVERYBODY’S JUST WORKING THE MARKS, BROTHER”: A KAYFABE READING OF SOCIAL IDENTITY, PERFORMATIVITY AND PERFORMATIVE IDENTITY Russell Gilbert DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2022.64.5 Abstract: In 2011, mathematician and economist Eric R. Weinstein argued that kayfabe is “[a] sophisticated ‘scientific concept’ with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding.” Kayfabe, much like the professional wrestling industry, is an autonomous phenomenon. Defining it solely as a method of deception is denying its own autonomy as a social and cultural nonpareil. Kayfabe plays an integral role in the processes of societal interaction. Its identity, as well as its usefulness in academic discourse, relies upon the notion that all human interaction cannot exist without it. Kayfabe in many ways performatively embodies the questions of ontology, the nature of existence, the limits of reality and its perception and understanding. Humans create their own realities and truths based upon what they see, experience and believe. Nobody can declare with absolute certainty that the reality they experience is the same as the person next to them. It does not mean that either reality is not valid, nor that the truths which are born from those realities are without substance: it simply means that reality is kayfabe. Expanding upon concepts of human understanding and experience found in Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980) and drawing upon notions of fictional worlds and representation elaborated in Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe (1993) this article will interrogate existing ontological concepts through the lens of kayfabe, utilising case studies from the world of professional wrestling, to recontextualise how fictions can create new realities and enable a greater understanding of social identity, performativity and performative realities. It will argue that by constantly engaging in kayfabe, humanity is able to imagine things into existence and, subsequently, collectively imagine new realities. Keywords: kayfabe, professional wrestling, truth, reality, identity, existence, ontology, metaphor, mimesis, Kendall Walton, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Russell Gilbert 68 Introduction On and off stage, professional wrestling has created its own reality. More often than not, organisers of professional wrestling events promote the interactions they present to the audience as “real,” no matter how elaborate or exaggerated they may appear in their performance. Of course, what constitutes “real” and “reality” is the subject of much theoretical debate and it is important to emphasise that I do not intend to debate the etymology of the term “real” beyond the parameters of existing studies or outside of the contemporary context of social acceptance and common sense. It is also not the purpose of this article to prioritise one theory of reality. Instead, I intend to make a proposition regarding engagements with the concepts of truth and reality in performance and in their public presentation. I will assess these ideas through the lens of what professional wrestling calls kayfabe, a complex ideology of staged reality, and will draw upon existing theoretical positions and analysis of case studies from professional wrestling and the political sphere. Implicitly, kayfabe becomes a means of recontextualising how we engage with each other and the world. I will use terms such as “real” and “true” in a variety of contexts. Unless stated otherwise, I use them in their most widely accepted sense. These notions are in common use when it comes to kayfabe, and as such, the concepts of “real” and “true” are sociological phenomena. However, that would be for another article. I will be focusing on kayfabe. Kayfabe In 2011, mathematician and economist Eric R Weinstein wrote a brief article about kayfabe, a term popularised in the world of professional wrestling. He argued that kayfabe is “[a] sophisticated ‘scientific concept’ with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding.”1 As a critical term, however, kayfabe is hard to accurately define. Freelance journalist John Lister suggests that it derives from the expression “keep cavey,” from the Latin verb “caveo,” which means “look out” or “beware.”2 Merriam-Webster describes kayfabe as a “carny-derived term for the extreme strain of method acting peculiar to [professional wrestling],”3 whereas the 1 Eric R. Weinstein, “Kayfabe,” Edge.org, 2011, https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783. 2 John Lister, “The Clandestine Jargon of Professional Wrestling,” Johnlisterwriting.com, 2008, https://web.archive.org/web/20081015060222/http://www.johnlisterwriting.com/verbatim.html. 3 Michael Brick, “Jingo Unchained,” Harper’s Magazine, 2013. Quoted in “Kayfabe: It’s Illusive and Elusive,” Merriam-webster.com, https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordsat-play/word-origin-kayfabe. “Everybody’s Just Working the Marks, Brother” 69 Oxford English Dictionary describes its etymology as “of uncertain origin” and notes that [kayfabe] is often said to have originated in the U.S. travelling carnivals and appears to have been coined with morphological and semantic opacity in mind. It has been interpreted as an alteration (following the conventions of back slang) of the command ‘Be Fake.’4 The use of carny or pig-latin argot by professional wrestlers was prolific in the North American wrestling industry for decades. Much like its British counterpart, Cockney rhyming slang or the Romani-derived polari, the purpose of carny was to facilitate clandestine communication. It enabled those in the same fraternity, in this instance professional wrestling, to engage openly in conversation while at the same time ensuring that no outsiders were able to understand. Kayfabe, and its covert method of communication, became professional wrestling’s omerta: a code of silence and honour that was to be maintained at all costs. Kayfabe has become symbolic of what is perceived as the lies, deception and fakery that are long associated with the professional wrestling industry. In doing so, it has achieved an almost negative connotation in its description. Academic articles have described kayfabe as a “[a] noble lie”5 and “the illusion that everything is utterly sincere and authentic when it is all just an act.”6 Even academic specialists in professional wrestling such as Eero Laine and Broderick Chow define it as “the performance of staged and ‘faked’ events as actual and spontaneous.”7 Sebastian Herrmann, however, offers an alternative view: “By denying a world outside of its signification […] kayfabe constitutes a particular way of thinking about what makes a performance real.” He then adds: “[u]ltimately, wrestling’s insistence on a performance that has no boundaries in turn also dramatizes the way in which other, presumably more unequivocally ‘real’ performances, assert their own realness.”8 Herein lies an interesting dilemma: the notion of a concept embedded in deception actually conveying an element of truth. It is not a new dilemma by any 4 OED, 3rd ed., “kayfabe, n.,” Oed.com, 2016, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/39393514. 5 David S. Moon, “Kayfabe, Smartdom and Marking Out: Can Pro-Wrestling Help Us Understand Donald Trump?” Political Studies Review 20, no. 1 (2020): 47-61. 6 Moon, “Kayfabe, Smartdom and Marking Out” 51. 7 Broderick Chow and Eero Laine, “Audience Affirmation and the Labour of Professional Wrestling,” Performance Research 19, no. 2 (2014): 44-53. 8 Sebastian Herrmann, “Wrestling with the Real: Politics, Journalism, History in ‘Frost/ Nixon,’ and the Complex Realism of Kayfabe,” American Studies 61, no. 1 (2016): 18. Russell Gilbert 70 means. Pavel Drábek discusses the concept of performative models9 and how, whether in real life or in fiction, realities are created through broader social consensus of propositional performative acts. However, kayfabe as a concept comes into conflict with Drábek’s notion of heterotelic models, as in the case of kayfabe the alternative purpose is often not given by free choice and consensus but rather by prohibition and compulsion. In this regard, kayfabe more closely resembles what Judith Butler refers to as “phantasmatic identification.”10 Kayfabe, much like all human interaction, can be regarded as a performance that makes ambivalent or indeterminate propositions. However, whether it is something that is deliberately and intentionally performed, as Chow, Laine and Moon suggest, is another matter entirely. In discussing reality, we are, in actuality, referring to a hegemonic reality. Reality is a constructed concept. Humanity creates reality, both individually and as a society. Truth is determined by our experience of reality and our environment. In that regard, one over-riding concept of unanimous truth cannot be determined. Aspects can be agreed upon – we all die, for instance – however how that manifests itself and what happens beyond that point is not, and cannot, be known with absolute certainty. Truth and reality always have exceptions. Performative Reality Richard Schechner, in relation to performative reality, observed that “a spectator need not intervene in the theatre to prevent murder as he might feel compelled to in ordinary life – this is because the violence on stage is a performance. That does not make is ‘less real’ but ‘different’ real.”11 It is in considering this notion of ‘different real’ that professional wrestling can provide unique case studies for analysis, particularly when it comes to matters such as empirical knowledge and the presentation of the self. In my previous article,12 I looked at how masked wrestler The Great Sasuke was appointed to local Government office in his native Japan whilst remaining in his performed persona, and I examined the subsequent consternation amongst his 9 Pavel Drábek, “Heterotelic Models as Performatives: From Speech Acts to Propositionality,” Litteraria Pragensia 30, no. 60 (2020): 100-17. 10 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) 93-119. 11 Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (Routledge: London, 1997) 11. 12 Russell Gilbert, “Between Professional Wrestling and the Public Arena: Construction of the Public Persona,” Litteraria Pragensia 30, no. 60 (2020): 118-33. “Everybody’s Just Working the Marks, Brother” 71 political peers due to, amongst other things, their inability to see what they described as his “real” face because of his refusal to remove his mask for official Parliamentary engagements. Sasuke replied that the mask was his “real face.”13 In making this statement Sasuke was both engaging with, and destabilising, existing cultural norms. He was adhering to the established kayfabe of professional wrestling whilst simultaneously challenging the accepted social kayfabe. In doing so he was creating a new, albeit temporary, reality. Perhaps no modern politician engaged with kayfabe as effectively as former United States President Donald Trump. Trump’s presidency was prolific in its use of kayfabe, although this is not in of itself unique to either Trump or politics, and the erosion of fact-based truth has been the subject of numerous books, such as Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth14 and William Davies’ Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World.15 In the months prior to and ensuing his successful presidential campaign in 2016 a great number of articles, blogs and social media posts were published linking the new President Elect to the world of professional wrestling. Articles in The Chicago Tribune and Huffington Post respectively described Trump as a “wrestling villain”16 and “heel-in-chief,”17 “heel” being North American wrestling parlance for antagonist. Popular websites, such as psychologytoday.com and theconversation.com, published articles highlighting the correlation between the tactics Trump and his team used throughout his political tenure and classic professional wrestling tropes. Salon.com called him the “pro-wrestling inspired politician”18 and The New York Times even went so far as to ask: “Is Everything Wrestling?”19 13 Philip Brasor, “The Great Sasuke Faces up to Political Reality,” The Japan Times, 4 May 2003, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2003/05/04/national/media-national/the-great-sasukefaces-up-to-political-reality/. 14 Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth (London: Harper Collins, 2018). 15 William Davies, Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2018). 16 David Von Drehle, “Donald Trump’s Pro Wrestling Presidency,” Chicago Tribune, 2017, https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-donald-trump-wrestlingpresidency-20170828-story.htm. 17 Marissa Alexa McCool, “Heel-In-Chief: Donald Trump and the Psychology of Pro Wrestling,” Huffington Post, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/heel-in-chief-donaldtrump-and-the-psychology-of-pro_b_58df1a80e4b0d804fbbb7317. 18 Chauncey Devega, “Peter Thiel Pulls Back the Curtain: Donald Trump is a Pro-wrestling Villain Turned President,” Salon.com, 2017, https://www.salon.com/2017/01/15/peter-thielpulls-back-the-curtain-donald-trump-is-a-pro-wrestling-villain-turned-president. 19 Jeremy Gordon, “Is Everything Wrestling?” New York Times, 2016, https://www. nytimes.com/2016/05/27/magazine/is-everything-wrestling.html. Russell Gilbert 72 These comparisons had good foundation. Donald Trump has links with the professional wrestling industry dating back more than three decades. In 1988 and 1989 the global leaders in professional wrestling, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE, then known as the World Wrestling Federation), held their annual extravaganza “WrestleMania” at what they announced as the “Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino” in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Discarding kayfabe, both events were actually held at the adjacent Boardwalk Hall with Trump sponsoring the proceedings and occupying a ringside seat in the crowd at both shows. In 2007, Trump would appear at “WrestleMania” once again, this time in a more active role opposing World Wrestling Entertainment owner and promoter, Vince McMahon (himself an established media persona at the time as the despised megalomaniac “Mr McMahon”). The event was billed as a “Battle of the Billionaires,”20 and both men chose a wrestler to represent them in a match. The billionaire who loses would have their head shaved in the middle of the ring by the winner. Needless to say, McMahon lost. During the match, Trump attacked his fellow billionaire and pummelled him with punches, much to the delight of the live audience who hated McMahon. In 2009, Trump announced that he had bought “Monday Night Raw,” WWE’s flagship television show of more than twenty-five years, from his hated rival Mr McMahon although, as is the case with almost everything else in professional wrestling it was a pre-arranged storyline intended to generate television ratings, pay-per-view purchases and publicity. In 2017 Trump appointed Linda McMahon, Chief Executive Officer of WWE and real-life wife of Vince McMahon as “Administrator of Small Business Administration”21 in his cabinet, a position she held for two years. Entrepreneur and one time adviser to Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, gave an interview to the New York Times in 2017 where he stated: “[…] what I wonder is, whether maybe pro wrestling is one of the most real things we have in our society and what’s really disturbing is that the other stuff is much more fake.”22 He continued: “whatever the superficialities of Mr. Trump might be, he was more authentic than the other politicians […] he was sort of real.”23 “Sort of real,” much 20 Brett Hoffman, “Billion Dollar Handshake”, Wwe.com, 2007, https://www.wwe.com/ shows/raw/archive/02152007/articles/billiondollarhandshake. 21 Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman, “Linda McMahon, Small Business Administrator, Resigns from Cabinet,” New York Times, 2019, https://www. nytimes.com/2019/03/29/us/politics/linda-mcmahon-small-business-trump.html. 22 Maureen Dowd, “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself,” New York Times, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/fashion/peter-thiel-donald-trump-silicon-valleytechnology-gawker.html. 23 Dowd, “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself.” “Everybody’s Just Working the Marks, Brother” 73 like Schechner’s “different real,” is an interesting turn of phrase in this context due to its ambiguity. After all, “sort of real” denotes not really real. However, in a postmodern society the not-really-real oftentimes supplements the accepted reality which preceded it. Kayfabe has infiltrated itself into the fabric of society. Donald Trump employed it to great effect throughout his tenure as President both on social media platforms and in public. His reality, as contradictory or unreal as it may appear to a sober eye, became its own actuality. Many millions of people seemingly accepted the false reality as truth and perpetuated it as such. It is important to note that I am hesitant to use the term “believed” as it regards either side. It is open to debate whether Trump truly believes what he says when he cites things such as election fraud, or indeed whether those who parrot his claims believe them either, however identifying and defining genuine belief is not the most important element for consideration here. The statements are ambivalent and most likely intentionally so. Professional wrestling would call this ambivalence kayfabe, and kayfabe, the performance of a truth and its presentation, no matter how exaggerated or unbelievable it may appear on the surface, is the over-riding concept that I wish to interrogate. “Sort of Real” What is the “sort of real” in performance? Campbell Edinborough analyses the concept of reality from a performance perspective in his book Theatrical Reality: Space, Embodiment and Empathy in Performance.24 He effectively critiques how reality is both promoted and received in contrasting theatrical settings, be it through shared experience, alienation or identification. “[T]he paradoxical reality of theatrical space,” Edinborough says, “challenges accepted structures of reality through its presentation.”25 He goes on to note that “[t]heatrical reality becomes a tool that facilitates the mode of observation necessary for a critical engagement with the structures of social engagement.”26 Edinborough’s theory applies beyond the performance space and captures the essence of kayfabe. Kayfabe is a paradoxical reality. It is a manifestation of Baudrillard’s hyperreality theory,27 where fiction and reality consolidate to the point where there is no clear distinction 24 Campbell Edinborough, Theatrical Reality: Space, Embodiment and Empathy in Performance (Chicago: Intellect, 2016). 25 Edinborough, Theatrical Reality 90. 26 Edinborough, Theatrical Reality 91. 27 Jim Stark, “Cambridge Analytica, Wrestling Kayfabe and Baudrillard’s Hyperreality,” Medium.com, 2018, https://medium.com/punditfight/cambridge-analytica-wrestlingkayfabe-and-baudrillards-hyperreality-1c0365d971f. Russell Gilbert 74 between the two. If one maintains and promotes a façade, for instance, does this not therefore make the façade a form of reality? If so, does it then cease to be a façade? In actualising new realities, kayfabe requires an element of authenticity, no matter how small, in order to exist and flourish. It is in considering this statement that we come to our next brief case study. Mark Calaway began his professional wrestling career in 1987 and spent the next three years learning and perfecting his craft by wrestling in different territories across the United States as well as touring South Africa and Japan. In late 1990, he landed a job with the World Wrestling Federation and was rebranded as the intimidating “Undertaker,” a persona he steadfastly maintained in a variety of manifestations for the next thirty years. After spending over half of his life ardently perpetuating kayfabe in his work and in public, Calaway admits that The Undertaker persona consumed his identity. In an interview with the Hindustan Times in 2020 he declared: “I’m only now starting to look under the hood and see who Mark Calaway is.”28 He went on to acknowledge that, during his career, “[w]hen I ordered a drink at a bar or a delivery boy came to the motel room with pizza, he wouldn’t get this person (Mark Calaway). He’d get somebody staring at him with cold, dead eyes. […] That’s one of the reasons why (The Undertaker) was so successful, because I never turned it off.”29 Asked whether appearing in public as himself was difficult, Calaway’s answer was simple: “It’s definitely been difficult. Very difficult. You have no idea.”30 Kayfabe had become his reality. In transgressing one kayfabe, Mark Calaway is building, and engaging with another. Herein lies the beauty of kayfabe. It is a constant. It is forever changing and adapting to the societies it inhabits. Kayfabe can mutate and change shape (in a metaphorical sense) but can never truly die (or cease to exist). It is so embedded into cultural engagement that it would be impossible. There is no avoiding kayfabe. It is inherent. We are all metaphorical performers in a social and cultural kayfabe, and it is out of our control. If we are aware of our engagement with it, we can mediate how it is enacted, or how it is received, but we cannot escape it. It is always all around us. Eric Weinstein perhaps puts it best when he states that “[k]ayfabe […] seems to have discovered the limits of how much disbelief the 28 Aditya Iyer, “For 30 Yrs, He’s Lived Life as the WWE Star The Undertaker. Meet Mark Calaway,” Hindustan Times, 2020, https://www.hindustantimes.com/other-sports/for30-yrs-he-s-lived-life-as-the-wwe-star-the-undertaker-meet-mark-calaway/storyNN30juoY32TChODtd6tEnM.html. 29 Iyer, “For 30 Yrs, He’s Lived Life as the WWE Star The Undertaker.” 30 Iyer, “For 30 Yrs, He’s Lived Life as the WWE Star The Undertaker.” “Everybody’s Just Working the Marks, Brother” 75 human mind is capable of successfully suspending before fantasy and reality become fully conflated.”31 Aesthetic philosophy, and Kendall Walton, reject the notion of “suspension of disbelief,” however, arguing instead that “[s]ome kinds of realism consist in correspondence between work [or kayfabe] worlds and the actual world. The more ‘similar’ the world of a work is to the real world, the more realistic it may be said to be […]. We might ask either how much of what is fictional in the work is also true, or how much of what is true is fictional.”32 Sociologist Robert Pfaller argues that truth ‘‘is first and foremost something practical, a position; it is that which one believes.”33 If one adopts an empirical perspective regarding truth, this statement has rigour. However, discussing the psychology of sport, Jim Taylor is quite definite in his assertion that “[p]erception is not reality. Just because you think something is reality doesn’t make it reality.”34 Yet, if something is experienced as real by the individual, such as Mark Calaway living the persona of The Undertaker or The Great Sasuke insisting that his mask is his real face, then does that not make it a social reality the likes of which Pavel Drábek was referencing? If it does, then should that reality not be accepted as such? Humans form their own realities and truths based upon what they see, experience and believe. Nobody can state with absolute certainty that the reality they experience is the same as the person next to them. It does not mean that either reality is not valid, nor that the truths, which are born from those realities, are without substance, although it does mean that humanity is able to imagine things into existence and, subsequently, collectively imagine new realities. Similarly, reality television, despite its name, is kayfabe. Are the individuals who participate in it real? Yes, in so much as they exist and are therefore real people. However, the persona presented by the individual is both real and unreal. Humans act differently in different situations.35 How one behaves when interacting with their partner, for instance, likely differs greatly to how they behave when interacting with a stranger. It is not to say that certain fundamental attributes do not remain, they do, rather that the interaction is shaped by the 31 Weinstein, “Kayfabe.” 32 Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) 328. 33 Robert Pfaller, On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions without Owners (London: Verso, 2014) 9. 34 Jim Taylor, “Perception Is Not Reality,” Psychology Today, 2019, https://www. psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/201908/perception-is-not-reality. 35 Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett, The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991). Russell Gilbert 82 Herrmann, Sebastian. “Wrestling with the Real: Politics, Journalism, History in ‘Frost/Nixon,’ and the Complex Realism of Kayfabe.” American Studies 61, no. 1 (2016): 11-31. 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Taylor, Jim. “Perception Is Not Reality.” Psychology Today, August 2019. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/201908/perceptionis-not-reality. Von Drehle, David. “Donald Trump’s Pro Wrestling Presidency.” Chicago Tribune, 28 August 2017. https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ctdonald-trump-wrestling-presidency-20170828-story.html. Walton, Kendall. “Fearing Fictions.” The Journal of Philosophy 75, no. 1 (1978): 5-27. Walton, Kendall. Mimesis as Make Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Weinstein, Eric R. “Kayfabe.” Edge.org (2011). https://www.edge.org/responsedetail/11783.