A Call For Not Being Yourself: Alter Egos and Intentional Fakeness as a Mode of Resistance

Zelda Zonk strolled leisurely through Central Park on a warm spring afternoon, sheltering from the sun with a pair of cat-eye Ray Bans. She paused, taking a deep exhale of relief. She cherished these brief moments of freedom: feeling blissfully unknown, liberatingly unimportant. Comfortingly average. 

She caught a glimpse of herself reflected in a muddy duck pond. A rare moment of owning her blurry, imperfect image, before it’s cut sharply into a kaleidoscope of mirages, then glued back together with precision yet again, in order to recreate herself… but a different her. The one that the world wants, and can handle, to see. 

It’s moments like this that gave Zelda the strength to endure the obscene spectacle of seeing herself first torn apart, then deliberately reconstructed, carefully oscillating, to find just the right ratio between a holy icon and a cheap whore. Palatable enough to be the housewife's new best friend, yet provocative enough to also be her husband’s most fuckable illicit lover. 

She felt guilty about her fantasies of escaping, leaving it all, and herself, behind.  Wasn’t being known, recognized all she ever wanted? In the end, they all love her, don’t they? That’s simply the price to pay.

Zelda Zonk was Marylin Monroe.

***

Somewhere in the air, there is a warm, fuzzy, illusory feeling that capitalism is changing. Companies have Mission Statements. Values. Diversity policies. Then, we have “movements” - all of the movements, lovingly adorned with appropriate hashtags. We’re canceling all the disgusting perpetrators, who’ve been drunk on power for far too long. They’re finally getting what they deserve. We’re embracing all body types, sexual orientations and proliferations of identities, and most importantly – we’re finally owning our truth and taking care of ourselves like we deserve, too: #selfcare.

The premise, and promise of late capitalism could not be more simple: all you need to do to be loved is to be yourself. 

There is one caveat though. Naturally, while you're perfect just as you are, you have an unmissable opportunity to become a just ever so slightly better version of you, a little bit more you - by becoming a consumer, of something – anything really.

A basic example of this is perhaps the most loved and most hated device on the planet – the mobile phone. 

As explored by researchers Park and Kaye (2018): “smartphone users assert that their phone has become an indispensable part of their self ,and thus influences their identity and sense of being”. Among three types of self-extension, Park and Kaye (2018)  distinguish the “ontological self-extension”: how users derive ontological security or insecurity from their phones, “chang[ing] who they are” (Ross & Bayer, 2021).

As this example shows, capital has tricked us to invest a splinter of our being into a product, with a promise of more authenticity, connection and freedom, to then threaten our ontological safety when we dare to contemplate opting out.

But what does opting out mean? Stepping out of the Symbolic completely and attempting to bypass the Big Other directly is likely to cause unintended consequences, such as losing touch with one’s self completely through psychosis. 

How can one then explore some way of “opting out” in a creative way? I believe the figure of a creative Alter Ego is one that can help facilitate this exploration. Ultimately, as I will argue, being yourself in late capitalism is highly undesirable.

The Emergence of an Alter-ego

I stumbled on the idea of creating my “creative alter ego” unexpectedly. After a decade of being a praised “high performer” while working on numerous, insignificant technology products, I suddenly woke up from my docile slumber with a terror-inducing question: is this really all there is? 

I recalled the deeply original, creative teen I used to be, before further higher education became geared towards achieving practical – meaning financial – outcomes in the so-called “real world”. She was fierce, ever-questioning, rebellious and infinitely creative: altering her clothes, covering her teenage room walls with murals, painting, knitting, and most importantly, believing that a different world is possible. I began wanting to excavate that forgotten, abandoned creative rebel within: I wanted to paint again, ask inconvenient questions, start a riot or two - and importantly, to start putting my creative work out there. 

But as much as the prospect of this change was tempting, it was also impossible to imagine. As Žižek once remarked, the era of clear hierarchy in the workplace and a figure of the “tyrannical boss” had its advantages. Today, the boss was also my “friend”, liking all my Instagram stories and implicitly expecting “realness” and “honesty” – and effectively docility – eradicating boundaries between “professional” and “private” self along the way. This meant I couldn’t take creative risks and share my work, without a threat of being unmasked by the system, before I was ready for my official creative coming-out. 

Then, a sudden idea took hold: what if rather than asking what I can and cannot do, I could perhaps ask a different question: If I cannot do these things, who could? This idea gave a spark to an emergence of my creative alter ego, which I intuitively named “Tamar”. 

Unlike Ewa,  Tamar had no responsibilities or corporate ties to worry about - she was able to roam free, question, provoke, making mistakes and time-wasting along the way – guilt-free. When Ewa questioned the purpose and utility of making art, Tamar was all-in, enjoying the flow state of being immersed in the creative process. To put it simply: Tamar was free to fuck-shit-up.

This intriguing encounter with the stranger within brought about all kinds of questions: am I setting myself on a fast track to madness, psychosis, split personality disorder, and so on? 

However, a quick research into the role of the alter-egos in artists’ creative lives revealed a very different story. 

First, there is Rimbaud's quizzical (and grammatically incorrect) “Je est un autre” (“I is another”). (Zenith, R, 2021)

Then, there’s Portugal’s most known poet, Fernando Pessoa, who utilized several different personalities in his writing. Described as his “heteronymous identities”, Pessoa’s alter egos ranged from an uneducated poet who lived in the Portuguese countryside, to a bisexual naval engineer from London. The alter egos not only had distinctive writing styles and complex origin stories - they also maintained correspondence with each other through literary reviews and other magazines that Pessoa wrote for.

The quirky figure of Zelda Zonk offered Norma Jeane Baker the space to grow intellectually and philosophically, while her public self, Marylin Monroe, was expected to dumb herself down as an objectified and commodified sex symbol.  

Finally, of the most known surrealists, Max Ernst resorted to taking creative refuge in the figure of “LopLop, the Father of Birds”. This is perhaps one of the stories that reassured me the most. If Max Ernst could maintain a bizarre, birdlike not-self alongside his Max-self, surely there was a safe way to enter into a playful dialog with my emerging not-self – without risking an immediate self-annihilation as a subject.

That’s when I decided: Tamar was here to stay.

The problem with contemporary authenticity

Considering the pervasive late capitalism injunction to “be yourself”, we are obliged to be suspicious towards it. Who is this call for authenticity and realness really serving?

A definitive you, an “authentic self” is attractive to capital as a positive entity that can be mined, intercepted and exploited, or more gently lured towards docility by the invisible hand of the market. 

A not-you (alter ego), in contrast, is a negative agent to be tarried with. An alter ego is quantum, not Newtonian. An elusive shapeshifter, here and not here at once. Part Schroedinger’s cat, part Lewis Caroll’s Cheshire Cat. Subversive. Transgressive. What the hell are they gonna do next? You cannot know, because they don't know it themselves. 

As they tease, mock and play, they weaponize ontological insecurity, seeing it as an invitation to destabilize existing categories.

Alter-ego as a process is a process of creatively changing oneself by intentionally stepping out of, working against, deluding, and playing cat-and-mouse game with one’s fetishized and commodified “authentic self”.

A daring troublemaker, breakdancing at the pulsating tip of the wave function collapse.

In this way, the negative nature of alter-ego as a process is closely related to emancipation. As soon as emancipation can be precisely contained within a particular, it loses its emancipatory properties.

Intentional Fakeness as Resistance

The alternative path to intentionally developing one’s creative self is not through attempting to erase the inauthentic, but to engage, curiously and creatively with our inescapable constitutive “fakeness”, and the possibility to explore potentialities lying within it.

While our “real, authentic self” is prone to being ever-more perfectly digitally simulated with AI, “deepfakes” and other emerging technologies, in contrast, our elusive, “intentional fakeness” playfully resists being replicated.

Baudrilliard examined the relationship between “the original '' and the replica, observing the unsettling consequences of the attempts of “saving” the original. Baudrilliard explains this using the example of caves hosting precious prehistoric paintings, which became forbidden to visit in order to preserve their authenticity:

“An exact replica was constructed 500m away, so that everyone can see them (you glance through a peephole at the real grotto and then visit the reconstructed whole). It is possible that the very memory of the original caves will fade in the mind of the future generations, but from now on there is no longer any difference: the duplication is sufficient to render both artificial”. (Baudrillard, 1983)

The emergence of replica renders both the original and the simulated versions inauthentic. With a proliferation of ever-more realistic virtual replicas of our image, voice etc, striving for more authenticity and realness is a losing game. 

In contrast, challenging oneself to act in unexpected, contradictory ways, deliberately “breaking decorum” through intentional, creative fakeness, can destabilize these capitalist attempts to intercept our “real self”. In short, in the face of the technological race to close the gap between an original and the replica, a possible mode of resistance could involve a counter-intuitive plunge even deeper into fakeness: “becoming faker than a deepfake”. 

Un-targetability of the alter-ego

As many may already realize, the process of serving most effective and relevant advertising to a digital audience is called targeting. The fact that our planet’s extractable resources are finite and ever depleting means that late capitalism is facing a structural necessity to shift to different, virtual resource - data. The success and effectiveness of data harvesting by leading technology companies such as Meta, relies on an important factor: user’s honesty. In other words, the users are encouraged to represent themselves online as their authentic and true self. Sharing their real preferences, opinions and image online, they voluntarily produce a seemingly limitless amount of precious, extractable digital resources. 

In a dystopian drama “Don’t Worry Darling” (2022), a leader of a Stepford-like virtual reality community delivers a passionate speech: 

“Why the hell are we here? (...) To mine that pure, unbridled potential. That gem of limitless and unimaginable value.”

This is what user data signifies to the gatekeepers of the virtual world. 

In this context, intentional creative fakeness can serve as a locus of resistance. The alter ego’s elusive nature makes it untargetable, unable to point at, but yet, unsettlingly present.

Alter-Ego Integration Process

As increasing impossibility of facing our murky “capitalism realism” leads to resurgence of interest in psychedelics and altered states of consciousness, the alter-ego process can be considered as belonging to a similar category. Consequently, one of the most important topics to mention about this state is the alter-ego process integration. 

As per running joke among psychonauts (meaning intentional users of mind-altering substances): “everybody wants to do ayahuasca, but nobody wants to do the dishes!” This phrase is meant to illustrate how after illuminating, transcendent, and ontologically destabilizing experiences, participants struggle to return to their “everyday life” while incorporating their altered-state-derived insights to introduce lasting change into their everyday way of being. I expect that the alter-ego process can also pose this challenge. 

So, how can we resolve it?

Since our alter-ego is real and not real at once, a fuzzy unstable entity, it resists external exploitation. And yet, it can be creatively exploited by us, as a way to reconnect with the unknown, a stranger within oneself.

In practical terms, I have worked with an alter ego process through:

• Asking myself (and my not-self) the question “what would Tamar do?” 

• Choosing specific times and physical and digital spaces where I would fully embody and enact “being Tamar”. 

The alter ego is a vivid trickster, an invitation to tag along on the new journey - its character reminiscent of the Tarot’s initial major arcana figures of The Fool and The Magician. It provides us with a “consensual nonconsent” to be exploited, joyfully revealing subversive tricks they’ve been hiding up their sleeve all along.

In my case, while the container spaces of playing with “Tamar, the Trickster” were initially airtight and clearly divided, through creative and consensual exploitation of the not-me, I began to notice the Tamar’s take on life seeping into my everyday way of being.

I believe the process of integration has been already aptly described by Richard Zenith, who  analyzed Fernando Pessoa’s engagement with his heteronymous identities as follows: 

“Pessoa staked his very identity on the heteronymous system. In so doing, he not only acknowledged the unsteady nature of who he was; he embraced and embodied, through language, that unsteadiness. He was able to give verbal substance and contours to his sense of self without falsifying its inherent uncertainty, since the heteronyms—like particles in a quantum field—existed in dynamic tension with one another. Running sometimes in parallel though more often than not in different directions, they complemented and contradicted and competed with each other. Through their contrasting poetries and occasionally heated prose exchanges, the heteronyms were in continual dialogue—with one another and with their maker.”

To paraphrase, and crystallize the approach outlined above: the work with an artistic alter ego involves embracing and embodying the unsteadiness of who we are. Allowing contradictory, competitive, and yet complementary particles of the self exist “in dynamic tension with one another”. We can observe that in his analysis, Zenith is also indirectly pointing at the role of the unconscious - more often than not, our being involves running simultaneously in opposite directions, through the continuous dialogue between our conscious and unconscious desires. 

To conclude, I believe that the alter-ego process can serve as an inventive, useful, transformative tool for unconstrained creativity as well as resistance. Rather than submitting our “authentic self”  to exploitation, the not-self offers a liberating sandbox for creative experimentation. Since we are the ones who called the alter ego into existence, we can freely utilize it, exploit it, and test its ontological limits while limiting potential harm to oneself. Ultimately, there’s some hope that this process will lead to integrating the learnings from our experiments back into our everyday way of being. However, I also speculate that once called upon existence, one’s alter-ego can never be fully re-absorbed and annihilated by the “primary host self”. The remaining, elusive, unsteady and uncertain space may consequently host “the untargetable, negative kernel of emancipation”. A resilient, rebellious, and creatively contradictory fuzzy question mark, that persists while resisting identification and commodification.