OnlySubs: A Treatise on Kayfabe

Kayfabe is an interesting concept. It’s easiest to explain by saying that it’s the phenomenon in what Americans refer to as professional wrestling, a dramatic spectacle involving wrestling techniques but that’s completely scripted (indeed, it’s like a testosterone-driven soap opera). In that arena, both the performers and a significant percentage of the audience know what’s happening is a scripted performance, but they dutifully play their parts in pretending it’s real for the sake of the spectacle. There’s something more to kayfabe, though, that makes it uniquely palatable and important in the postmodern era of hyperreality we find ourselves in, and that’s that in kayfabe, you’re always playing two parts at once, playing to two audiences (or two sides of the same audience) at the same time. These are the one that knows it’s fake and those who don’t (or who are suspending disbelief for the sake of the show). This phenomenon generalizes to politics, wherein much of the audience isn’t in on the joke. In this episode of my contributors-only podcast, James Lindsay OnlySubs, I give a short treatise on political kayfabe and why it is so vital to understand, if not utilize, in the present postmodern political environment. Join me and check it out, brother!