“(This is the text from a talk I gave at the Impakt Festival in Utrecht in October; it synthesizes some earlier posts from this blog and elsewhere.)”
“Why can’t we get rid of the idea of authenticity?”
“The authentic dream”
“I want to start with this passage from the introduction of Sarah Banet-Weiser’s 2012 book Authentic™. I think it gets at some of why “the quest for authenticity” is so effective as an ideology, even while being a bit of a conceptual contradiction:”
““Even if we discard as false a simple opposition between the authentic and the inauthentic, we still must reckon with the power of authenticity—of the self, of experience, of relationships. It is a symbolic construct that, even in a cynical age, continues to have cultural value in how we understand our moral frameworks and ourselves, and more generally how we make decisions about how to live our lives. We want to believe—indeed, I argue we need to believe—that there are spaces in our lives driven by genuine affect and emotions, something outside of mere consumer culture, something above the reductiveness of profit margins, the crassness of capital exchange.””
“We know that there must be a place that facilitates our human flourishing and permits us to lead rich, self-fulfilling lives.”
“Beyond “the simple opposition between the authentic and the inauthentic” is the fundamental desire to experience “genuine affect and emotions.””
“But this hasn’t gotten us very far: Restating the authenticity ideal as acting on the basis of “genuine feelings” merely raises the question, What makes feelings genuine?”
“It feels like Banet-Weiser’s phrasing simply re-enacts the ideology of authenticity in the process of critiquing it: that there is a real, static, correct way of understanding “authenticity” that can be distilled and separated out from the corrupted uses, just as there are “genuine” emotions that are unmixed, or pure spaces where desire is uncorrupted by conflicting or competing aims.”
““Authenticity” is often conflated with a static sort of “truth,” but invoking it is actually a destabilizing maneuver.”
“Authenticity calls into question the inherent genuineness of any affect and any emotion in any situation and undermines any talk of real desires for realness, any authentic way of being authentic uncorrupted by the ruses of authenticity.”
“It warrants a skeptical, conspiratorial attitude toward the world, toward other people, and especially toward oneself, construing the “genuine” as hiding, as forever outside the realm of lived experience.”
“authenticity doesn’t shore up truth; it exacerbates our doubts about it.”
“Authenticity seems to stand for the truth behind the curtain, but it is really just the curtain”
“Authenticity simplifies”
“The idea of authenticity expresses something that never was — uncomplicated, self-evident feelings, identities, experiences — as something that is understood as always already having been lost, in order to promise that we are on the cusp of reclaiming it.”
“Seeking authenticity is always aspirational.”
“Like “golden ages” generally, authenticity can only be identified retrospectively: In the past I was “genuinely myself,” but now all I have are elusive memories of that fleeting experience — and maybe the brands and products that help me articulate that feeling of loss and make it seem recuperable.”
“Authenticity takes the complex cross-currents of my relations, desires, and behavior at any given moment and simplifies them, orients them: The complexities I am experiencing are “inauthentic” and can be jettisoned in my pursuit of my real self, which I will know by its self-evidence.”
“The tenacity of “authenticity” as an ideological talisman — as a motive force and a post hoc explanation for what I’ve done, as an all-purpose aspiration and excuse — stems from how it posits what it purports to merely describe.”
“It seems to denote “genuineness,” like it were simply a rhetorical equals sign, a blunt tautology.”
“It offers a promise of “truer” alternatives to the messy facts of what is. But these alternatives are fictions, not inner truths on the cusp of revelation. They are speculations seeking substantiation at the expense of what is.”
“Authenticity as escape”
“In the hands of humanist philosophers like Charles Taylor or social critics like Marshall Berman, a commitment to “authenticity” refers to the effort to foster a society that makes individuality’s emergence possible.”
“For them, “authenticity” means coming to terms with an inherited set of assumptions about what constitutes a meaningful life, limits and horizons we don’t choose but grow to work within and preserve.”
“Currently, the point of seeking authenticity is no longer to build or sustain a society that makes individuality possible but to escape from the supposed constraints society places on the self, mainly through imaginative association of oneself with things.”
“authenticity is employed to let us to think that we are unique, different, but not so different that we are perceived as alien or threatening. Authenticity allows us to think of ourselves as singular, but with that singularity remaining somehow deeply sympathetic.”
“From this point of view, feeling compromised by the demands of the social, or consumed by conflicting, irresolvable desires of one’s own are marks of inauthenticity rather than an accurate appraisal of one’s condition.”
“we can focus instead on a purely personal crisis: a self that really is pure but that we have lost touch with somehow.”
“It simplifies an otherwise irreducible complexity, giving us an evocative vocabulary with which to talk about how we fit into society while not engendering in us any feelings of responsibility for it.”
“Authenticity versus society”
“Authenticity in marketing discourse presupposes the unique individual we all were supposed to be, according to 18th century thinkers like Rousseau and Herder, and pits it against society, which is no longer seen as the source and grounds of individuality”
“Authenticity” becomes commercialized nostalgia for a way of life that never was, in which we experienced no ambivalence.”
“But even as it obsessively conjures a nostalgic vision of a world outside it, “authenticity” is always internal to the culture of consumerism.”
“It reconfigures an old Romantic ideal of choosing your own life, of uncovering one’s originality as life’s purpose, into the terms of consumer society, where you choose your own clothing brands or your favorite foods.”
“We consume authenticity in lieu of the integrity it is always fomenting and promising.”
“You really can consume your way into being real! Your brand really can be authentic!”
“Authenticity as real subsumption”
“That is to say, “authenticity” is not something off which brands are parasitically leeching. It a wholly ersatz experience they are making.”
“It’s not that old forms of authenticity still exist and capitalism figures out a way to exploit them — a process Marx called “formal subsumption” with respect to labor processes.”
“Rather, authenticity as we know it issues from consumer culture in a process of “real subsumption”: It is fully integrated with consumerism’s workings and integral to its perpetuation.”
“We can’t conceive of authenticity independent of the function it serves in consumer society.”
“If “authenticity” evokes “spaces in our lives driven by genuine affect and emotions,” it is because under consumerism such spaces have become tangible, concrete commercial properties — new spaces of experiential possibility internal to consumerism.”
“When something is “authentic” it is not “outside of mere consumer culture”; it is instead the apotheosis of that culture.”
“Authentic goods, authentic selves”
““Authentic” things, then, are not those goods that evade branding or commercialism. Rather, only brands, only things for sale, can be “authentic.””
“Because authenticity is tautological (it is what it is), it must be routed through “authentic goods” that make it tangible for an audience who can then validate the proposed equation.”
“This collapses the experience of a lived relation to others who make it possible for you to recognize your life as real and meaningful into a gesture, something that can be bought and displayed.”
“Authenticity as Scarcity”
“As marketing consultants James Gilmore and Joseph Pine emphasize in their treatises on authenticity, authenticity is fundamentally a means for imposing a perceived scarcity on otherwise satiated consumers.”
“What “authenticity” appears to render scarce is the sense of self, with “authentic” goods as the means of reconstituting the plentitude.”
“Authentic goods position their target consumers as continuous with the products’ impossible promise of mass-produced uniqueness, while seducing them with the possibility of easy, individualistic solutions.”
“Because seeking authenticity is fundamentally incoherent, a quasi-mystical attempt to discover something intrinsic to the self, it forestalls any critique on the basis of logic, or empirical results, or cause and effect.”
“In pursuing authenticity, we become complicit in consumer desire, and its mystifications of our social condition.”
“Authenticity as ambivalence management”
“The protocols of authenticity take the complicated ways in which selves are bound up with the inevitable disappointments of social life — its conflicts and rivalries, the struggles for recognition and distinction — and simplifies them into a real/fake dichotomy.”
“In that way, authenticity forms an intelligible structure for what Lauren Berlant calls “the management of ambivalence.””
“Authenticity offers a kind of compensation for a way of life — consumerism — that structurally forbids personal satisfaction. You always have to want more; consumer demand must be continually stoked. Authenticity rationalizes and personalizes that process.”
“Our consumerist dissatisfaction becomes an integral matter of personal growth.”
“Authenticity as legibility”
“What authentic goods permit is not the restitution of the self but ongoing self-consumption. They don’t heal the subject; they allow one to contemplate oneself as an object, or a medium, a whiteboard on which I can scrawl my preferred beliefs about myself.”
“In other words, goods are “authentic” when they evoke a self-conscious subjectivity, when they permit you to revel momentarily in the fact that you are you.”
“We can see ourselves as getting progressively more legible.”
“They let us consume as an ephemeral but definite thing the promise that we have a real self in the first place.”
“I may “need to believe” my “real feelings” are anti-commercial or anticapitalist, but that belief resolves nothing. The tensions we inhabit remain. Meanwhile, the stronger I insist on having my opposition to the “crassness of capital exchange” acknowledged, the more I am under consumerist ideology’s sway. The feelings feel real because they are commercialized, because they circulate within the channels carved out by capital flows and networks.”
“Intimate publics”
“Part of how consumer society reproduces itself is to commercialize prominent forms of social recognition.”
“Brands seem authentic when they let us feel as though we belong without blending in.”
“We are able to feel “normal” because of the visibility of brands we associate ourselves with.”
““Authenticity” functions by harmonizing the desire to belong with the desire to be unique. The slippery incoherence of it is what allows us to find comfort in it.”
“As a kind of intimate public, the trappings of authenticity, in Berlant’s words, “offer the simplicity of the feeling of rich continuity with a vaguely defined set of like others.” It typifies the “constantly emplotted desire of a complex person to rework the details of her history to become a vague or simpler version of herself.””
“Again, authenticity works as an ideology because it simplifies identity and manages our ambivalence about it.”
“Authenticity as domination”
“The most effective “authentic” goods evoke a mainstream while seeming to stand distinctly apart from it. This is why they are often products of cultural appropriation.”
“The authenticity we consume is often someone else’s exclusion commodified.”
“The goods that read as authentic are the ones that allow consumers to flaunt how they can present their consumer choices as decontextualized.”
“But they also make a “real self” contingent on the distance it can sustain between itself and the social milieu that is both a necessary audience and a threatening subsuming mass.”
“Given the tension between self-expression and the audience required to make that expression meaningful, authenticity often appears to be measured in terms of freedom from the constraints others place on you. This makes it seem a zero-sum game. The more “convenient” you make you life, in terms of avoiding interpersonal contact, the more “authentic” it can seem to feel. But this same strategy isolates people from the social interconnectedness that makes authenticity seem worth the trouble.”
“We perceive someone else’s apparent authenticity, their apparent belonging to a community, as our own inauthenticity. But this doesn’t mean it is a generous judgment. It is an assertion of domination to judge someone else as authentic, because to be “authentic” (instead of struggling to become authentic) is to be a product.”
“Feeling inauthentic yourself authorizes you to vicariously consume others’ experience as a commodity.”
“Authenticity is a curse we assign to other people that traps them in their identity while we are free to shop around for ours, claiming tokens of theirs as our own.”
“In this process, being authentic and seeking authenticity are framed as mutually exclusive conditions.”
“Being authentic makes you an object that spontaneously and inadvertently displays its essence.”
“Being inauthentic, though still seeking authenticity, makes you a subject, albeit a devious and strategic one.”
“Harmonizing that sort of agency with the ability to be “genuine” calls for disavowal.”
“Authenticity turns out to be “the reward for suspending disbelief,” as sociologist Sarah Thornton has argued. It’s a self-imposed gullibility. That means it is quite far from “recovering the unique self within.””
“It also permits us to suspend disbelief in consumerist magic more generally; it suggests we have the capability to be infinitely malleable.”
“Authenticity marketing lets us indulge the fantasy that what we buy can truly change our essential nature, even as we persist in believing we are merely expressing it.”
“Berlant sees an intimate public as achieving something similar: it “produces an orientation toward agency that is focused on ongoing adaptation, adjustment, improvisation, and developing wiles for surviving, thriving, and transcending the world as it presents itself.””
“Authenticity as neoliberal”
“That sort of flexibility suits a neoliberal structuring of society, in which, to cope with a fully marketized society saturated with competition at every level, we become malleable selves perpetually trying to expand our human capital and make our identity productive.”
“The search for authenticity finds expression as self-neoliberalization.”
“Insofar as authenticity organizes an intimate public, it prepares us to find fleeting solace in constant self-revision, offering a sense of underlying stability to ongoing flexibility.”
“The validity of your “true self” is confirmed in being employable, in being put to use.”
“In managing our ambivalence with authenticity, we commit ourselves to the process of endlessly managing our personal brand, valorizing authentic goods, performing emotional labor, circulating tokens of “realness,” building out quasi-professional networks, generating new circuits of value.”
“Self-realization becomes alienated at its core, as personal creativity becomes indistinguishable from an ongoing job interview.”
“This is why Frédéric Lordon suggests that the artist — “the very emblem of free will and the unreserved commitment of the self” — has become the “avatar” of the ideal employee in neoliberal society.”
“Neoliberalism’s fusion with authenticity has found its full flowering in social media, where enormous quantities of labor are volunteered and harnessed, and self-presentation is foregrounded as entrepreneurial human capital development.”
“Social media, which specialize in collapsing the generic and the particular, friends and strangers, is at once a perfect space for organizing an intimate public around authenticity and for organizing labor around an ongoing project of self-branding.”
“We manage our ambivalence one social media post at a time, and let the decontextualized response they receive from no one in particular, serve the managerial role of impelling or redirecting our efforts.”
“Know Your Product/No, You’re Product”
“It’s common to critique social media by pointing out that users believe they are consumers but are in fact are the product, a packaged and labeled audience being sold to marketers, the real “users” of ad-supported social media.”
“Or worse, users are both the product and the labor making the product, all for the benefit of the social-media companies — the owners of the current means of identity production.”
“The assumption in that critique is that we don’t want to be a product and instead want only the agency and autonomous expression that social media seem to promise.”
“Naive users think they are signing up for a personalized public sphere and then, undeterred by the evident oxymoron, find themselves in a hall of mirrors in which all they can see — and all they end up wanting to see — is themselves.”
“But this analysis doesn’t seem adequate to explaining the pleasure users derive from social media, even as they become reifying and exploitive.”
“What the ideology of authenticity ultimately allows is for users to enjoy becoming the product.”
“The services that social media supply (holding a “graph” of one’s social connections; amassing and archiving personal data; making the promise of an on-demand audience for oneself plausible; permitting a variety of pre-formatted modes of self-expression; offering algorithmically constituted recommendations of what you should read, who you should know, how you should spend your time, and so on) help constitute the self as something “authentic” that a user can consume.”
“On social media we are not on a hopeless quest to integrate our identity but are instead dividing by it into a self that can watch over itself, seeing its authenticity unfold in how social-media interfaces change to accommodate us.”
“We get to be a commodity and consume it at the same time. We are like a hot dog putting ketchup on itself.”
“Authentic surveillance”
“This self-commodification does not diminish the user’s self-conception but rather makes the self conceivable, legible.”
“The self presented to us by algorithmic processing of our data becomes the most authentic possible self, one from whose construction we have been excluded. It appears as the “real us” because we can absolve ourselves from strategizing its representation.”
“This puts digital surveillance in the service of authenticity, as it gathers the data behind our backs and makes sure we don’t “corrupt” it with our conscious intentionality.”
“Surveillance will let us chart the path to “being natural” without immediately feeling unnatural about it.”
“Our data gets processed and what we really want to know, or how we really want to be, is presented to us encapsulated in product form.”
“Only as a product can we recognize ourselves as “genuinely” real, given the amount of attention and effort collectively directed at enchanting and foregrounding products within a consumer-capitalist culture.”
“We are ideologically trained, repeatedly, every day, to love consumer goods; naturally we would want to become a consumer good ourselves, to appear deserving of love — from ourselves as well as from other people (who, on social media, offer quantifiable tokens of that deserved love in the form of likes and so on).”
“The self, as a product, loses its enchantment for us and needs to be revitalized to the extent that it becomes familiar, known, understood.”
“We love ourselves only as a novelty, a mystery, not as a staple product. We want to be able to apprehend ourselves as a new, desirable thing that we can consume and enjoy.”
“On social media, we can imagine someone buying into the idea of us, and that helps us buy into ourselves. But inevitably our desire for ourselves needs to be renewed, and we will need to be repackaged.”
“Authentic purging”
“It is untenable to feel authentic only when you’re surprising yourself.”
“Social media try to make this contradiction seem to cohere. They offer ways in which to always consume ourselves anew as new. Algorithmic recommendations in particular cater to this hope of seeing a stranger in the personal data we’ve generated, an alien person we can claim as a real self.”
“Everything you have consumed, expressed, and expelled online gets purified and re-presented as new desires, a new you.”
“By processing our personal data into things like Facebook’s Newsfeed, algorithms can present us with a carefully repackaged self. We then get the thrill of unboxing ourselves and seeing what surprise awaits within.”
“The self presented back to us can serve as a simplified guide to how to be ourselves. That version of selfhood that has been pre-approved, pre-certified, but is also indefinite in its outlines, consisting mainly of things like product recommendations and crude assumptions about what sort of information you are presumed to want to know. It is a set of generic conventions for the genre of you.”
“You can become a more authentic you in relation to this algorithmic prediction of yourself, know exactly what the network expects you to know, while taking a secret pride in the ways in which you exceed it.”
“It defines a negative space that doesn’t have to be part of your human capital, your “authentic self,” or your identity.”
“When our social media profiles can be authentic in lieu of us, authenticity becomes a matter of quantified attention, network prominence, not self-consistency.”
“The content expressed doesn’t need to be original or spontaneous or true, it just is a pretense for measuring the circulation, which becomes the “authentic” expression of one’s situatedness within a network.”
“Authenticity ceases to be a performed absence of performance and becomes a matter of efficient performance and broad circulation. This feeds a loop that reinforces the centrality of networks, the requirement of being constantly connected.”
“Discovering the truth about oneself is not about clarifying the permanent picture of one’s sense of self (as if it were an eternal, underlying thing waiting to be unearthed and communicated).”
“Instead, it is about clearing a space and simplifying subjectivity in the present moment. It is about finding relief from the burden of selfhood, particularly when the self is regarded as “human capital.””
“Social media offers a repository for that capital, and for its authentication, and takes responsibility for how it is put to use. It takes authenticity out of our hands.”
“The “truth” about oneself is final only while it circulates, but when it ceases to be productive it can be forgotten. The most authentic self is the slate wiped clean.”