Bocconi in Two Acts: The Academic & The Social

Opening  

Each morning the Bocconian and the actor alike stare dead faced at a mirror. Swiftly yet gently swinging make-up scimitars up down left right across diagonally cheek-to-cheek parallelly and in all directions. Slumber’s crusty shell is rigorously removed, primer and foundation are collated on virgin skin, concealer is followed by blush and highlighter, eyeshadow eyeliner and mascara, modifications to prominent brows and color injections to citrus lips. Each morning, the Bocconian and the actor alike shed their character and put on their persona – a costume more suited to the playlike interactions starting eight thirty ante meridiem sharp.  

The dramaturgical allegory is an outdated tool of social psychology. Perhaps even an exhausted one. It is unscientific and anecdotal. Still, more than anything, it is witty and consistently offers novel insights on social phenomena. The dramaturgical allegory distinguishes between expressions Given (explicit) and expressions Given Off (implicit), it focuses on each individual’s attempt to define a situation by playing a role, it brings into mind the dilemma of expression versus action, and it highlights the different regions of play, front and back, and the players we might find in each one: performers, audience, and co-performers.   

Our dear university is headquartered in a city notorious for swanky dress-up games, exclusivity rituals, tacit gloating, in-your-face gloating, alien competition, status signaling, and a plethora of other strange rituals characteristic of the adolescent animals inhabiting the Porta Ticinese to Porta Romana territory. Everyone carries an image that must be fiercely upheld against an audience of ten thousand hungover Simon Cowells. 

Everyone is always and everywhere more or less consciously playing a role… it is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves. 

The Academic Act  

The Bocconi play requires that all acts performed be expressed with equal - if not more - vividness. Naturally this primordial law has infiltrated our classrooms, creeping through the ears up the nose canals and clawing at the cerebrum of unsuspecting students. The law-become-condition eventually develops into a terminal illness. The dilemma of expression versus action. In Sartre’s perfect words, the attentive pupil, who wishes to be attentive, his eyes riveted on the teacher, his ears open wide, so exhausts himself by playing the attentive role that he ends up no longer hearing a thing.  

Who is more truly an attentive pupil? The one who appears to be paying attention and is believed to be paying attention by his colleagues – who incessantly fornicating in interaction birth the classroom reality – or the pupil who sits dully in the back scratching his genitals and occasionally glancing at the teacher. And why should any of this matter since it has no import on the holy number that will be etched into eternity - through official documents and all - for all posterity to see while classroom posture and eye behavior will disintegrate from memory and existence alike after two Moscow mules.

Perhaps we would all learn a thing or two more if we crowded on the back row – two or three people on each person’s lap to make it work numerically – scratching our genitals and taking notes in shortened shorthand, only a word or two per lecture highlighting the most astute observations made by our teachers:

lecture one: make profit

lecture two: socialism evil!

lecture three: supply = demand à price

Like that we could erase our co-performers from the direct field of vision and truly focus on the sacrosanct apostilles of management inc.  

The classroom would be better off as a back region or backstage than as the stage where a performance takes place. Out back the very fact that an important effect isn’t striven for sets a more honest tone for the interaction, leading all to act as if they were on familiar terms on all matters. The goal is to foster so much familiarity that there is no one left to play too and we can all just go about our business.  

The Social Act 

The neanderthal urge to draw gazes be marveled and court lovers was reworked by devious renaissance men some four hundred years ago only for ignorant posterity to pick up their half-eaten morsels under the guise of ‘romanticism’ – capturing minds and souls, instilling itself as ‘the proper way to go about things’. Now men women friends lovers rivals… carefully deal in falsehoods and grand gestures by day and slumber in glass tents of indignity and untested love by night.  

Despite the precarious situation we find ourselves in – petty bickerings become bloody feuds, Medusa’s vipers all yelling at one another having forgotten they are one, unsolicited pursuits and harassment commonplace in most nightclubs, not knowing who likes who or who thinks what – we insist that people need to be impressed! it is better to be feared than loved! and love… what about it?… love stems from the chase!  in the end our capacity to self-love is shoved off a ship with an anchor tied around its leg never to be seen again. 

This self-deception sprouts when performer and audience are compressed into one individual. Actors – having incorporated the standards they attempt to maintain in the presence of others so deeply – are now required by their unforgiving conscience to uphold those social standards even when the spotlight looks away. The upheld standards are Orwellian omnipresent omnipotent over here and there, and intimacy is nowhere to be found she escaped when she had the chance.   

Intimacy is a two-sided coin with awe on one side and shame on the other. Intimacy requires familiarity and comfort. Intimacy begs of people to drop the act and let both (awe and shame) surface for they’ve been hiding far too long and you can’t have one without the other. Intimacy says hey, hey listen up, don’t forget that to stay in your room away from the place where the party is given, or away from where the practitioner attends his client, is to stay away from where reality is being performed. The world, in truth, is a wedding.  

All in All 

Do we prefer to come off a certain way and never be known, or to risk it all and be known once and for all? Many people err on the side of concealment and deception to infuse in others an air of mystery. To which I say that often, the real secret behind a mystery, is that there is no mystery.

Make yourself known once and for all. Shed the persona, wear your character.