Authenticity

Is this your homework. We never had homework like that when I were a lad.

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I'm mainly writing about the idea that minorities somehow live a more authentic life than caucasions.

It strikes me that the problematic word here is not "authentic", which stands out so glaringly as to monopolize the reader's attention, but "idea". I grant that this whole assemblage of words is so preposterous that one is tempted to assume that "idea" is being used in a facetious or ignorant manner.

But what if it were being used with concious irony? Wouldn't that change things?

[...he thinks...]

Naw. It's still a dumb question. But I'd like to nominate "caucasions" as the name for the next subatomic particle that's discovered.

Are you all suggesting that kenchen or Baudrillard think this idea (that non-white lives are more authentic than white lives) is true? There's no evidence for that in kenchen's question, and I would be surprised if that was their argument, from what little I know of Baudrillard and postmodern theories of authenticity.

But: The iconic example of the suburban white kid who co-opts some aspects of urban black culture, does he do so based on a belief that the black culture is more "authentic" than his "soulless" suburban culture? Alan Lomax, tracking down roots music around the world: Is this a quest for greater "authenticity"?

It's a theory, and although it seems like the idea that one life could be more "authentic" than another is ridiculous, ridiculous beliefs govern a lot of human behavior, and it doesn't seem like an invalid line of inquiry.

So other than a silly typo, I don't know why you're all jumping down kenchen's throat.

For many, their first impulse may be to study the origins of such a belief, to isolate the fallacies upon which they rest and to expose them using the full apparatus of intellectual analysis. For others, the first impulse may be to ridicule the ridiculous and expose it to a good cleansing application of laughter. Since neither approach is likely to eradicate a belief that is widespread, it mostly comes down to a matter of style.

P.S. One difficulty with kenchen's question is that he did not indicate very clearly whether he understood that this "idea" was ridiculous. Had he written the very same question, but simply substituted "belief" for "idea", I think his responses might have been of a much different nature. Much can hinge on such subtleties.

And I'm going to suggest that kenchen's use of the word "somehow" strongly suggests that he thinks the idea is ridiculous.

If kenchen returns and reads this far, I invite him to clarify and amplify on his original question. It might help if we knew what thoughts he has on this subject already, so we can respond to them. Our thoughts on 'the idea that minorities somehow live more authentic lives' are fairly clear already; we think it's a ridiculous, baseless idea and we reject it out of hand as untrue.

Perhaps I haven't come across it so often formulated in terms of 'minorities' and 'caucasions', but there are lots of examples of people believing that 'less developed'/rural/isolated/'ethnic' societies have retained an authenticity which the modern western world has exchanged for speed, technology, convenience.

The very idea that "minorities somehow live a more authentic life than caucasions" is a contradiction of what most postmodern theories argue.

Anyway, this reminded me of reading Native Son (senior year in HS, maybe?) and running across the term "slumming it" for the first time. When I found out what it meant it was a very "whoa" moment, as in "People did that in the 1930s too!"

But the question really could have been clearer: he does not specify if he is arguing for or against the idea that minorities somehow live a more authentic life than caucasions. Obv. if he IS using a pomo critique he would be rejecting this, but the statement is still vague. OOps did not mean to talk as if "he" is not here, sorry.

Recommend me books about religious sects, cults, and small denominations
recommend me some aphoristic texts that are free
Chapter Books About Girls In Kindergarten or First Grade
historical fiction
etc.

It is not as if he was asking us to interpret something he couldn't be bothered to read -- he had some examples of what he was looking for (Baudrillard) and wanted more. He was not asking us to do his homework for him.

[tips his hat back with the barrel of his six-shooter and shows his gold front tooth...] Smile when you say that, pardner.

Josh, you're the person on the board most likely to have recommendations for this fellow, I suspect; personally, I would be interested in what theory books you knew about that related to issues of "authenticity" and what you had to say about them. It could be interesting.

Anyway.

I am all smiles for Aimless. In fact, you can hardly spell "Aimless" without the letters in "smiles".

also, i doubt i know anything about the original poster's topic. but maybe i can say a bit, soon, about what i don't know.

not that i'm against them as such, but what does the board come up on google that it gets such frequent requests of this type?

I've tried to google a "help me" type question so that ILB comes up, with no luck.

ILB: Keeping it real.

Anybody read Andrew Potter's _The Authenticity Hoax_?

The odd thing is, kenchen didn't come back to this thread, but he / she did appear elsewhere on ILX - non?

I think this may have to do with how predictable life can be. But what about monks?

Authenticity is meaningless without inauthenticity. The terms only reference each other and have no independent meaning. It's just another bullshit way to add a patina of nuance and sophistication to the crude human practice of dividing things into good and bad. This is what I learned in college about authenticity.

ignoring the slightly odd terms of the original q, I'm not sure I agree w you, Treeship. At least, while I'd agree appeals to aesthetic authenticity shd without fail be treated with suspicion, I do think it has a meaning that is not solely given thru its distinction from and opposition to inauthenticity.

claims to aesthetic authenticity (as with material authenticity) are often v concerned with *provenance*. that is to say, being able to place tone, content, style and effect in a time and place, and weighing influence and imitation against each other.

It's a romantic notion: the importance of an original, of local genius.

so, yeah, I wdnt say it's purely "not inauthentic", and I'm not sure it's entirely bogus either. it's an anxiety strongly felt in the practice of a genre - English ghost stories struggled terribly to escape their Victorian locus classicus. The genre had an environmental niche, which authors attempted to tap without appearing dishonest as to the origin of the story, perhaps feeling their own age was less suitable for ghosts.

put the question another way - an author attempts a perfect imitation of a Victorian ghost story, certainly something more than pastiche, call it a homage. a thousand and one things are likely to give that author away - language, reference points, mode of thought, a nexus of belief and expression shared by all now inaccessible. the piece is not inauthentic (it is a sincere expression) but neither is it authentic (tap its bottom and it sounds hollow). the whole area of pastiche, homage and imitation requires notions of authenticity and inauthenticity, at the same time as it plays with them.

so yeah, as I say, although I distrust the notion of authenticity, and in many ways the romantic philosophy behind it, it has meaning, and by being a fellow traveller for a bit, you can get enjoyment from searching out "more authentic" expressions of things.

(another example - and apologies if it's unfamiliar TS - is Mark Gatiss's fond adaptation of MR James' The Tractate Middoth. He loved the mechanics of tv adaptations of ghost stories, but the requirement for terror or at least significant unease was entirely unfulfilled. it felt ersatz, inauthentic as a ghost story and this failing in its wider aim of homage).

short version:

"authenticity" may be suspect but is too weighty a concept not to examine closely.

"inauthenticity" is often more interesting of course - leads into alternate histories (ie fabricated provenance) and fakery.

+ they need not be opposites.

required reading - Pierre Menard by Borges I guess?

If you had argued for an authenticity outside of a work's success or failure, your argument might be salvageable. All we need to do is come up with aesthetically successful works that are inauthentic and the last part of your argument stops working. You can take those examples and say that they are in fact authentic, or that they're aesthetically unsuccessful, but then you're falling into tit-for-tat, good-or-bad arguing, and then you've exploded the idea of authenticity again, and then you've reaffirmed treeship's deconstruction 101 (and basically "true") idea about authenticity.

nah, it's reductive to reduce the two to statements of approbation/disapprobation. it isn't the only way they're used in practice.

I wd argue for a work's success or failure outside authenticity. in fact I thought that's what I was saying. clearly not well enough! xpost.

yep NV otm.

Stigma aside, I think it's really useful to have authentic/inauthentic as descriptors of whether someone is cynically raiding superficial aspects of a thing, then smoothing out the edges for commercial leverage, in which case you'd expect a lot of inauthentic things to be successful but still awful at least in that respect. Borges and Weird Al aren't interested in fooling you in that way for that purpose.

Applying the idea of authenticity to human productions, such as objets d'art is most often accompanied by economic considerations. An authentic Zuni doll fetches more money than an imitation.

Authenticity in a piece of writing can be tied to the idea of forgery, in which case the economic consideration is paramount, or it can be tied to more nebulous considerations of matching a checklist of hallmarks. That checklist is usually personal to the critic or expert who is appraising the piece, and there will be a fair amount of commonality between lists, but no universal agreement.

Applying the idea of authenticity to human lives is a bit of hogwash perpetrated by the romantics and originates with Rousseau's noble savages. It should be jettisoned as a reactionary mirror image of racism. People can be deluded and confused, but I can't see how an entire person (who, in part may be acting out a fraudulent persona) could be inauthentic.

Donald Trump, Paris Hilton are examples of people who have carved out a public persona collaged from tacky signifiers of wealth, a deliberately inauthentic version of wealth, which is all the more perplexing because they were both grew up genuinely, authentically wealthy without needing to do any of that.

If you want to personify the ultra-enviable lifestyle of the rich and famous in the eyes of the public, you have to personify the public's own tacky dreams of wealth. Elvis is the best model for this, as Trump and Hilton both seem to understand.

Elvis was a hero to most...

my first post was flip but i do think that authenticity is a suspiciously vague term that people tend to redefine to suit their arguments. the goalposts are always being moved. also i think if someone is banging on about "authenticity" chances are they are making a reactionary argument, as the concept has to do with consistency, staying true to some predefined "essence" of something.

It's necessarily vague in the same way what is considered valuable is often vague and contested, but I don't think the way it operates is according to some platonic essence but rather on a perceived integrity. Like velveeta is as different in essence from melted cheddar as parmesan sprinkles, but velveeta's authenticity is called into question when parmesan sprinkles are not because it appears to pass itself off as melted cheddar, and is therefore inferior and deceitful. More people are willing to accept velveeta as its own entity with its own charms since Kraft stopped making the odd comparisons between velveeta and cheddar a selling point.

The idea that there is greater authenticity in poor people's lives is very similar to the idea that 'real life' only happens to people whose lives are unhappy, degraded and oppressed.

totally and it's a regressive opinion because it glorifies suffering. a politics that could release people from suffering would first recognize that suffering is bad.

If you accept a definition of kitsch as 'a denial of shit' then people who are unhappy, degraded, and oppressed are in less of a position to deny it, so it's a legitimate foundation for a certain axis of authenticity. The politics of kitsch doesn't recognize that suffering is bad so much as it valorizes escapism.

yeah i agree with that completely. and i think there are forms of expression that are more honest or serious than others, which can be more mendacious. one of the first threads i contributed to on ilx was the lumineers thread, where i accused them of being "inauthentically inauthentic" as opposed to other bands that incorporate pastiche in a more "authentic" way and could be described as "authentically inauthentic". i kind of tied myself in knots making these fine distinctions though.

generally when i see people talk about authenticity they aren't making these sorts of greenbergian or adornian arguments though. it's more about what types of people have a claim to certain forms of expression, who is and who is not a poseur.

i mean, the whole history of modernism begins with appropriation of elements of non-western art. there's no virtue in rejecting potential influences for the sake of either staying true to a tradition or "originality" yet when people talk about authenticity they are very often arguing for one of these things.

i guess you could date the origins of modernism way before van gogh. ignore that claim. but you get my drift.

i mostly only see it in the context of yelp restaurant reviews!
to yelpers' (yeuuggh) credit, I rarely see "not authentic" lobbed against places that are plainly fusion-y, but against places usually serving bad, watered down versions of things, but yeah they do take the douchey form of "I've eaten ___ in ___ so I know what 'm talking about when I say ____ isn't real _____!"

People whose lives are unhappy, degraded and oppressed are often the ones who most embrace the denial of shit represented by kitsch, ime.

Also, this is I Love Books, so we are rapidly descending into irrelevance to both the OP and the forum topic.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/good-old-wallace/

Is “Good Old Neon” then a sort of vivid, pessimistic prophecy? A vision of a psyche that for some troublingly deep, fundamental, almost a priori reason is both unable and unwilling to grow up and to evolve and to participate in the world as a responsible adult? Could it be that this anxiety is also what’s hiding behind prose fiction’s societal malaise, and behind the troubles Wallace was having while he worked on The Pale King? That plain old unadorned narrative prose has just become more or less culturally impotent and exhausted and unable to extricate itself from the spiral of inauthenticity? Could it be there’s a not-arbitrary reason the David Wallace character at the end of “Good Old Neon” is looking at a picture of his doppelgänger Neal, one that’s embedded in the concatenation of little pictures that constitute the page of a high school yearbook, a text that in combining images and words is basically a proto-graphic novel? As if, for whatever obscurely Hegelian dialectical reasons, the psyche of the society has taken a very clever atavistic twist and is unfolding from itself a kind of reversion to the era of the ideogram, the hieroglyph, the pictograph? And that a reader today just can’t trust or take seriously or have a mature, adult, non-solipsistic relationship with an author who doesn’t know how to build something necessarily visual into the stuff that they make? And could it be that if you’re a writer who is unwilling or unable to mix design and to mix images into the fiber of the material you’re working on, then, reader-writer rhetoric-wise, you will be Talking to a Wall? That you’ll be like WALL-E, sorting through the detritus, left behind on the withered husk of an earth, while your youthful, tech-savvy, image-fluent usurpers will be up in their orbiters, preparing for the mission to Jupiter?

maybe suffering is more authentic bc it's more common for humans to suffer than not suffer. in that sense suffering is more true to the human experience than not suffering, and living a middle class existence in a first world Western country is less authentic (bc it is true for far less ppl) while poverty/deprivation (which is not just super common in 2014, but much more common throughout human history) is more authentic.

If you want to personify the ultra-enviable lifestyle of the rich and famous in the eyes of the public, you have to personify the public's own tacky dreams of wealth. Elvis is the best model for this, as Trump and Hilton both seem to understand.

― epoxy fule (Aimless), Friday, May 9, 2014 6:24 PM (3 days ago)

i don't think elvis is a good example of this. forget which biography i read it in, but graceland was basically filled with kitschy, inexpensive junk that elvis just happened to like.

...which seems v. different from trump who seems to go out of his way to act ostentatiously 'rich' in the most cartoonish possible way, e.g. having solid gold toilet seats or whatever it was.