.6. Impostor costume - The collective changing of identity

The face that you see staring back at you from the mirror every morning is not really you. Everything about that person that you look at has been designed by someone, something, and responds to things outside of your immediate control. What is your name but someone else's name being reused, your life but someone else's recapitulated? You live where you live cause others have lived there before you. Your looks are someone else's fashion, your creeds the dusty regurgitation of stale ideas that have bored people for generations. When someone hands you a list of possibilities to choose your life from, a list that is based upon WHO you are, there can be no unique, interesting outcome.

The fact that we all have our OWN names, numbers addresses and personalities is exactly what excludes us from being individuals. People become the sum product of their experiences and with each passing moment this accumulation further solidifies the image of 'self' that everyone has. People become roles that they are then forced to play out by the circumstances they are woven into and by their personal understanding of the self as being one with this image; an image which assumes the mantle of identity.

The reality of people's lives is indivisible from the momentum of their identities and all of our thoughts and actions are influenced by this. We live lives that are self-perpetuating reproductions of themselves which get set adrift and are quickly lost in the same endless convoluted ocean of other reproductions that reality is drowning in. Release from the confines of being THAT individual, being 'who you are' is integral to realising the true potential of what one can be.

'What you want to be/do' has to replace 'What you are' as the definition of identity so that the past will no longer be blinders keeping us running in the same direction. The general state of confusion, frustration and alienationthat most people live in is both the direct product of and the very cause of the contradictions between 'the self' as it is and 'the self' as we would like it to be.

When we talk about the changing of identities we talk about finding freedom by breaking from other people's conceptions as well as our self-conceptions of what we can do. Burning the effigies of ourselves is the only to destroy the predetermination that undermines this discourse of our lives and our involvement in the world.

-The Black Mask Sub-Committee of Violence and passion