Características del Área de Estudio

Throughout this investigation I use the term ‘(in)authenticity’ or refer to the ‘(in)authentic’ to discuss both modes of expressing one’s (conscious) existence and situations that may influence these modes of expression. By placing the ‘in’ of inauthenticity in parentheses, I can evoke both the authentic and inauthentic without specifically referring to one or the other. If I were to simply refer to the ‘authenticity’ of any given situation or expression of human existence, one might be tempted to consider the phenomena in question as purely or wholly authentic. Referring to the “authenticity” of an act or situation may indicate the degree of authenticity, however it does not also equally indicate the degree of inauthenticity. By instead referring to the (in)authenticity of an act or situation as a generic term, it enables me to avoid making any misleading value judgements without first analysing the ontological conditions that surround it.

Therefore, if one discusses the (in)authenticity of a situation, one is acknowledging the pervasiveness of inauthenticity in human existence, whilst also maintaining authenticity as a possibility and conceptual counterpoint. Both Heidegger and Sartre were sceptical about any form of sustained or stable authenticity (Golomb, 1995) and rather theorised more concretely about the prevalence of inauthenticity and the (more likely, albeit slim) possibility of one performing anomalistic authentic acts.

Such a use of terminology is also useful for evoking the contradiction and ambiguity surrounding the distinction between what can be considered authentic and inauthentic. Wolfgang Funk (2015) circumnavigates this ambiguity by arguing that authenticity is a ‘black box’. By this he means that although one can observe and identify the potential causes and effects of the authentic, one can never glimpse or comprehend the inner-workings of it. Daniel Schulze (2017) applies this black box model of authenticity to contemporary live art, in which he includes theatre, performance and performance art. Rather than engaging with a primarily existentialist encoding of authenticity, Schulze traces authenticity in theatre to the tension between what could be considered a mimetic imitation or fake, and the “genuine, truthful, immediate, undisguised, unadulterated, certified, guaranteed, binding.” (Knaller, 2012, p. 25) The issue of authenticity that Schulze identifies in theatre and performance is largely concerned with how an audience negotiates “the relationship between reality and its representation.” (Schulze, 2017, p. 43) This project to discover and encounter the real emerges at the forefront of a high percentage of the practice this thesis engages with. I have attempted to peer inside the black box by employing the ontological and phenomenological thought of Heidegger and Sartre.

Throughout this investigation I will be arguing that authenticity should be considered as fundamentally liminal. Such a liminality qualifies authenticity as inhabiting a position “betwixt and between” (Turner, 1967, p. 93) more everyday modes of inauthenticity. Heidegger and Sartre’s work makes recognising inauthentic expressions of one’s mode of Being (and the situations that make it so) relatively unproblematic; however, the definitive identification of authentic Being is far more challenging.

Despite their antithetical relationship, authenticity and inauthenticity are contingent upon one another, which makes the threshold between the two ambiguous. This investigation seeks to employ the concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity as one of the lenses through which one can interpret the relationship between different forms of contemporary participatory performance. Therefore, a lexicon that engenders the fluid continuum of (in)authenticity is an expedient tool for describing and critically exploring this relationship.

The emergence of the concept of authenticity – to indicate more than simply the counter to dishonesty – can be traced back to at least the 16th century (Trilling, 1971), but it was not until the mid and late 19th century

that it is recognised as a “primary virtue” (Flynn, 2013, p. xi) of metaphysical and ethical philosophical thought. During this time, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche both faced the overwhelming ubiquity of dogmatic social, political, cultural and religious institutions (Golomb, 1995). In particular, the ostensibly unshaking moral systems established and maintained by organized religion which (in the case of 19th century Europe) was predominantly the Lutheran and Catholic denominations of the Christian church. These organisations were

manifestations of prominent influence originating externally to the individual (like neoliberal capitalism), that may have affected one’s engagement with one’s own choice, and therefore the authenticity of one’s acts and constitution of one’s authentic self.

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche respectively rejected the rigidity of these objective, presumptive and “morally bankrupt” (Altman, 2003, p. 3) structures, because they were not convinced by a morality that was located externally to the individual (in pre-established organisations). Instead, they suggested a more fluid approach to ethical conduct, which was supposed to empower the individual at could also be regarded as being a subject to generate their own moral procedure. Kierkegaard proposed that one should “become what one is” (1846, p. 55), while Nietzsche responded to this call to arms over forty years later17 by urging his readers to “become what you

are.” (Nietzsche, 1908)

By questioning the significance and dominance of established socio-political and cultural institutions, Kierkegaard refocused the prevailing ethical questions and standpoints of the time. Kierkegaard shifts the central responsibility with regards to how one should live one’s life onto the individual and away from external social, economic and judicial pressures. He examines how the self could be constituted between one’s given situation and one’s commitment to actions or projects. The authentic position proposed by Kierkegaard can be mapped onto one’s situation as a participant in either social media or in a performance encounter. Both modes of participation establish one as either a user or spectator amongst other users and spectators. What discerns the authentic from the inauthentic is whether one steps out from this situation to transcend the established order. For Kierkegaard, transcendence of the order meant casting off the constraints of man-made structures and orthodoxies, and instead “devotion to a single external principle” (Altman, 2003, p. 3): God.

Compared to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche suggests that one should avoid established dogmatic (particularly religious) virtues and rather act on one’s beliefs that arise from rigorous questioning and transcendence of conventional morality. Kierkegaard still clung to faith, however when Nietzsche’s prophet Zarathustra18 proclaimed that “God is dead” (1891, p. 11), he did so with the knowledge that where organised institutional Christian faith did once reside at the heart of western culture, a void would be created. Thus, mankind would need to find its individual subjective truth in the face of a meaningless world. By rejecting the conventional morality

17 Nietzsche wrote Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are in 1888, but it was not published for another twenty years in 1908.

of his time, Nietzsche offers an ethics that proposes that one transcends the ‘herd’ and takes responsibility for shaping one’s own belief and acting upon one’s freedom as an authentic self.

In the contemporary context of social media and neoliberal capitalism, stepping out of the established order is more likely manifest in a persistent critical awareness concerning how and when one operates online. Thus, one is separated from the herd of other online social media users. If one’s engagement with social media is moderated and sporadic then one’s data cannot be commodified as easily as if one is periodically participating on social media and generating content. By disengaging oneself from the immersion of social media, one is less likely to constitute oneself based in a foundation of big data feedback.

This dichotomy and tension between one’s own existence (as free subject) and the existence of others (as equally free subjects) was one of the central ontological properties of Martin Heidegger’s theory of human existence (Dasein), that he set out in Being and Time (1927). This tension was also therefore at the foundation of how one negotiated the world and realised one’s ‘ownness’. This tension is manifest in the constitution of one’s Being as the culmination of one’s actions over the course of a person’s finite life. According to Heidegger, one’s Being is this project. The influences – of those other than oneself who have projects of their own – on one’s own project can (and do) instigate a deviation from one’s own possibility and therefore one’s own project. ‘Falling’ is a mode of Being that Heidegger considers to be an intensified integration and loss of one’s self into the ‘they’ (Das man). This slight augmentation of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s ‘herd’ or ubiquitous set of external dogmatic systems, puts more emphasis on one’s doing as one’s Being and the authentic mantra shifts accordingly. Almost a century after Kierkegaard, Heidegger transforms “be what one is” into be what one does and in turn, do what one is.

In Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre translates and augments the tension – identified by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger – between one’s own existence and the existence of others into a tension between one’s ‘facticity’ and one’s capacity to transcend it. One’s facticity is not only the corporeality of one’s bodily existence, but also the facts of one’s existence such as one’s past actions that are fixed in one’s own memory, but also the memory of others that witnessed them, unchangeable. Sartre’s radical notion of human freedom implies that one can transcend this facticity – which is often reinforced by others, the herd or the ‘they’ – and it is one’s fundamental engagement with one’s freedom, agency and responsibility that is indicative of one’s authenticity.

There have been several writers (over the past thirty years, since Sartre) that have also made significant contributions to the developing concern of authenticity and inauthenticity19 that I want to consider here. Across his works, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) and The Ethics of Authenticity (1991), Charles Taylor suggests that modernity breeds self-absorption. He proposes this inward turn is partially a backlash to the increasing secularisation that characterised modernity. This mode of inwardness is far more focused on introspective reflection and the generation of the self by ontologically domestic and interior means. Such an attitude contrasts with engaging with one’s ontologically intrinsic freedom and generating authentic acts, that are subject to the reflective gaze of both the acting agent and others observing said action.

Taylor proposes that the authentic generation of the self (through authentic acts) is displaced by the conformity of living in a way that frames other people as ‘ready-to-hand’ or ‘present-at-hand’ (Heidegger, 1927) instruments to complete tasks in the most economical manner. He suggests that this is a result of the rise of individualism, interest in socio-political and economic efficiency (or what Taylor terms ‘instrumental reasoning’), and the oppressive institutions and structures (governmental or otherwise) of the ‘industrial-technological’ society that has characterised modernity and postmodernity.

Alternatively, Charles Guignon (2004) defines authenticity within a far more conceptually political frame. He suggests that authentic acts are a public expression of one’s basic “feelings, desires and convictions.” (Guignon, 2016) He proposes that these expressions are fundamental to one being an effective member of a democratic society and crucial to combating any despotic, fascist or dictatorial political alternatives.

Finally, Somogy Varga (2012) suggests that the project of authenticity has been misappropriated; the idea of an overall authentic project is fundamentally at odds with the liminal and transitory definition of the authentic act. What stands in the place of true authenticity is a superficial “quest for self-realization.” (Varga, 2012 p. 5) Varga identifies a trend in self-help literature that claims to reveal an ‘inner-self’ that is allegedly analogous to one’s authentic-self.

These more recent iterations of authenticity draw heavily from canonical and established explanations (like those already established by Heidegger and Sartre) and seek to investigate how authenticity sits in the socio- political, technological, economic and cultural contexts of modernity. These writers provide insightful contextual scenarios, where one can apply a rhetoric of authenticity and inauthenticity, however they are not necessarily adding to the fundamental models of these established by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and augmented by

Heidegger and Sartre in any radical way. This might be because what these more contemporary writers are doing (and to a certain extent what I am also doing) is applying existing conceptual models of authenticity and inauthenticity to present phenomena that demand critical attention. I would argue that although there have been several significant shifts in the ways that people interact with one another since Sartre wrote (developing ideas from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger), there have been none that have had the same impact as the internet, Web 2.0 and social media. Taylor wrote about authenticity before the global interconnectedness of the internet had become ubiquitous. Guignon primarily wrote just as Facebook launched and before social media and social networking had properly taken hold. Only Varga has been engaged with authenticity since social media’s impact could have affected users’ authentic expression of the self. However, he does not especially engage with the internet as a source of (in)authenticity, let alone social media. This could be because social media had not been specifically engaged with critically until writers like Jenkins and Fuchs a few years after Varga made his claims about the misappropriation of authenticity. Therefore, to investigate modes of (in)authentic influence and behaviour in a digitised society, I draw from Heidegger and Sartre because I consider their contributions to be the most conceptually applicable and not explicitly bound to any historical context.