Spillover and Severance

Performing the divided self.

Detail from Frida Kahlo’s Las dos Fridas (The Two Fridas), 1939, oil on canvas, 67-11/16 x 67-11/16″ (Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City)

I.

Throughout my adult life, I have noticed that whenever I walk into a store strangers often seem to believe that I work there. This happens to me in supermarkets, hotels, restaurants, medical offices, office supply and art stores, and most often in drug stores. I used to think this was due to the nondescript, office-like way I usually dress (long sleeve shirts and black pants), but that explanation is insufficient. The other day when I had literally walked into a Walgreens pharmacy wearing a winter coat, hat and scarf, still shivering and clearly just recovering from the bitter cold outside, less than a minute after being inside a random guy approached me to ask me where he could find the deodorants. The fact that I was covered in three layers of winter clothes did not seem, apparently, unusual to him. It is incredible to me to see that even displaying the most obvious signs of outsider-ness a random customer would still think that I am “in charge”. What is it about me that creates such impression? While at times funny and other times annoying, this kind of role confusion experience is mainly an enigma to me: an interesting inversion of impostor syndrome where, in contrast to me pretending to show competence in a situation where I doubt of my abilities, people project unwarranted competence onto me.

I reflected about this phenomenon last week when I happened to be in conversation with a well-known museum director (whose name I will keep private). As we were discussing topics around museum visitorship, she happened to mention having the same problem that I have in stores. “When I am at a shoe store a woman will come to me with a pair of shoes in hand and say, “do you have this in size 7”? She is an important and experienced museum leader, but with a personality where she can perfectly blend in a crowd anonymously should it be needed. Like most museum professionals, she goes to see tons of exhibitions at major museums which she knows like the palm of her hand. She mentioned to me that she often helps clueless visitors get around those museums and often tells them where to go (“you are at the Whitney, and you see a group of confused visitors in the elevator wondering where to go. I tell them ‘you are here to see the Edges of Ailey show; I will press the 5^th floor for you”.)

I identified deeply with that museum director because that is exactly what instinctively I do myself when I am at museums, especially in those where I have worked in the past, like MoMA and the Guggenheim—helping people find the right gallery or push the right elevator button, even though it is not my job to do so. Working in a museum makes one develop an engrained instinct for customer service, one where you are always attentive to people around you and are at the ready to help them, and it continues even years after you have been off the job. I also thought of my father, a businessman who was so accustomed to speaking to clients that some of his genuflections and formal and polite form of speaking would still carry on even while we were at home ( it was part of his personality, but sometimes I felt that he always spoke as if everyone was his client).

This is in fact a phenomenon recognized by role theory in sociology, often referred to as “role spillover” (used by my go-to sociologist Erving Goffman, but also Ralph Linton and Robert Merton): it refers to how people who use a specific pattern of language at work for extended periods of time automatically (and unconsciously) start using the same patterns in other contexts —which is why, for example, when you speak to a Kindergarten teacher they typically use “teacher voice” in regular circumstances, or people who do nursing often appear naturally inclined to help others outside of their working hours.

Thinking of this later made me wonder whether that automatic disposition in me built over decades of service to the public is what some people still instinctively detect in me at Walgreens, regardless of the layers of clothes I might have was nothing but an effect of role spillover: just like the Kindergarten teacher who does not realize that she is using her teacher voice, I also perhaps do not realize that I am “wearing” my museum educator demeanor in public.

I also suspect that I am particularly sensitive to the topic of identity boundaries because for the good part of my adult life I had to negotiate with balancing my artistic identity and my day-job working at a museum. In 1960, R. D. Laing in The Divided Self argued that we all contain a “false self” that is socially constructed, which is often at odds with the “true self”, which is our inner, authentic identity. Laing did not use the term “role spillover” (which perhaps emerged in subsequent decades) but I feel I can attest to the fact that my life has been a constant journey of role spillovers between the studio and the museum. Sometimes those spillovers have been uncomfortable (working as an artist in a museum is difficult) and at times they have brought me extraordinary insights (focusing on audiences instead of abstract ideas in the solitude of the studio was critical for my socially engaged art practice). This also means that role spillover cuts both ways: not only do we tend to continue our professional behavior in our personal or private life, but our personal experiences cannot be entirely detached from our work identity.

Another form of divided self is the one negotiated by the immigrant. As a Generation 1.5 individual (an immigrant who came to their new country while still a teenager), I also have to continually negotiate a divided self, and while I am fully integrated in another culture and language I often contend with the occasional spillover— which ensures that I will always seem a bit foreign to Americans and also always seem a bit pocho to my fellow Mexicans. In a different but related way, Frida Kahlo’s famous double self-portrait, Las dos Fridas, is an explicit reflection of the self as a duality, with each side containing a different set of cultural identifiers (the Mexican and the European).

So how do we negotiate our divided self, and is there something to be learned from role spillover?

II.

Over the holidays I watched (an unusual thing for me) the TV series Severance, a psychological thriller about a dystopian future where a corporation called Lumon Industries has created a system by which, as condition to work there, one has to go through a medical process that surgically divides one’s brains so that one does not have to mix work and home. Each Lumon employee thus becomes a different person at work, with no knowledge or awareness of who they are in real life, and after work they have no idea about what they do in their jobs. In the story, the 9-5 self is described as an “innie”, whereas the after-work self is referred to as “outie”. It is a dark comedy about the absurdity of corporate life where the workers labor in disembodied silos completing tasks that make no sense and have no idea what is the larger purpose of their work, which has certain resonance with the bureaucratic environments of Kafkian literature (and even with some Latin American authors of the surrealist-absurd like Felisberto Hernández). It is no coincidence that the series has been called the “Great Resignation Thriller” : during the pandemic, many of us (including myself) went through an introspective process that led us to quit our jobs and reset the structure of our lives to pursue our ( in our view) more authentic selves. The central tension explored in the narrative is the borderline between those two worlds that conform each individual, and the question of who they really are — and if they really can ever have any understanding of their real selves given that one side will always be unknowable to them at any given moment. Interestingly also, the mysterious upper management staff of the likely malevolent Lumen corporation are unsevered, a quality that gives them power over the lowly, severed employees.

The cumulative plot of Severance also helps bring home the simple fact that even while we can work toward consciously containing our multiple selves, and even while we can build professional lives where our personal quirks are kept at bay, severance is ultimately unsustainable and spillover is inevitable.

Given that fact, what the series has made me think about is that perhaps the more useful question for us then is how one can harness spillover for productive, even creative purposes, and how how we can productively channel not just the inherent qualities that we might possess, but also our defects— that is, the side our ourselves that we are more careful to repress, and yet likely the one that might be the most interesting part of each one of us.

III.

Erik Satie, self-portrait, c. 1913

I often think of Erik Satie (whose piece “La Belle Excentrique” gave the title to this newsletter) who, in one of his self-portraits (ostensibly a preparatory design for a bust) he wrote: Projet de buste du M. Erik Satie par lui-même avec une pensée : « Je suis venu au monde très jeune dans un temps très vieux » (“project for a bust of Erik Satie depicted by himself along with a thought: “I have come to this world too young during a time that is too old”).

In my case, where my inadequacy for this world is in direct contrast to Satie’s (I often feel as if I arrived too old to a world that is too young) performance art has always been a salvation because I have always seen it as a medium that allows one to inhabit other selves, not as an actor inhabiting a fiction but as an individual pursuing a real task. Thanks to performance I have been able to be, at different times of my life, a bookseller, a therapist, a teacher, a fortune-teller, an ethnographer, an optometrist, a singing-telegram dispatcher, and an oral historian, among many others.

This might not mean that my future might include one day being a CVS associate. But who can predict what might be contained in the spillover cards of an unsevered life?