unmasking, exposing, disclosing
Unmasking refers to a mode of exposure that is employed to condemn ways of life deemed deceitful, fraudulent, repressive and defunct. Its champions hail from many quarters. They include revolutionaries, artists, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists. Unmasking appears in a variety of versions, some more far-reaching than others. Unmasking may be a synonym for debunking, muckraking and satirical attack with fairly modest objectives. Unmasking may be part of a therapy to emancipate society and self from domination. It may be a rhetorical weapon in ideological mass movements of an especially violent kind, notably Jacobinism and Bolshevism. My research examines the history and theory of unmasking since the French Revolution. It identifies the violent role that unmasking played in the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, the theories of unmasking associated with Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, the use of unmasking rhetoric by conspiracy theorists, and the appropriation of unmasking by sociologists such as Karl Mannheim, Peter Berger and Pierre Bourdieu.
Unmasking is a part of a longer tradition in the West ("exposure") that includes satire, debunking and muckraking. The research distinguishes among these modes of exposure. It also posits an alternative to unmasking: disclosure. . My claim is that disclosure is more attuned to the full keyboard of social action, and less demeaning of its players, than unmasking is. Disclosure attempts to grasp what actions are like for those who enact them, a technique that the Cambridge sociologist, W. G. Runciman, calls “tertiary understanding.”
References:
Unmasking is a part of a longer tradition in the West ("exposure") that includes satire, debunking and muckraking. The research distinguishes among these modes of exposure. It also posits an alternative to unmasking: disclosure. . My claim is that disclosure is more attuned to the full keyboard of social action, and less demeaning of its players, than unmasking is. Disclosure attempts to grasp what actions are like for those who enact them, a technique that the Cambridge sociologist, W. G. Runciman, calls “tertiary understanding.”
References:
- "The Problem of 'Unmasking' in Ideology and Utopia," Sociologica: Italian Journal of Sociology On-LIne 1/2013, pp. 1-32, http://www.sociologica.mulino.it/journal/article/index/Article/Journal:ARTICLE:649/Item/Journal:ARTICLE:649
- "The Undoing of Humanism: Peter L. Berger's Sociology of Unmasking," Society, 50 (4) 2013, pp. 379-390.
- "Unmasking and Disclosure: Contrasting Modes for Understanding Religious and Other Beliefs" (with Daniel Gordon), Journal of Sociology, 48 (4) 2012, pp. 380-396.