Clique society casts people into fixed theatrical roles defined by their group membership.

Evidence

Each society demands of its members a certain amount of acting, the ability to present, represent, and act what one actually is. When society disintegrates into cliques such demands are no longer made of the individual but of members of cliques. Behavior then is controlled by silent demands and not by individual capacities, exactly as an actor’s performance must fit into the ensemble of all other roles in the play. The salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain consisted of such an ensemble of cliques, each of which presented an extreme behavior pattern. The role of the inverts was to show their abnormality, of the Jews to represent black magic (“necromancy”), of the artists to manifest another form of supranatural and superhuman contact, of the aristocrats to show that they were not like ordinary (“bourgeois”) people. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 267

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘acting’ as the core social demand and shows how clique-disintegration shifts pressure from individual performance to fixed group-typed roles.
• XREF: This role-casting mechanism feeds directly into the representational theory of the ‘Other’ that the Islamophobia readings build on.