Relación transubjetividad con aspectos de convivencia

How are we to become ourselves together, and what might it look like on a broader social scale when we get closer to it than we are now? Authenticity is a utopian concept, and vice versa. In cultural studies, however, authenticity has more often been an object of critique than utopia. From Bloch and Walter Benjamin (1999) to Richard Dyer (2002) to Frederic Jameson (2005), the pleasures deriving from the numerous non-places of phantasmagoric consumer culture have been sympathetically considered as important features of everyday life, and as potentially transformative sites. On the other hand, “authenticity” has been considered primarily as an essentialization of human being, which generations of scholars, Marxists and postmodernists alike, have been taught to avoid. To posit an essential human nature is unscientific and ideological (Althusser, 2003) or a violent quest for a “centre” (Derrida, 1976).

To be clear, literary and cultural studies’ critiques of various articulations of authenticity, in particular racialized articulations, remain extremely valuable (e.g. Gilroy, 1987; Hall, 1997; Miller, 2010). By wanting to reimagine the concept, I am not

suggesting that John Lomax’s idea, for instance, that black prisoners were more authentic than the rest of the African American population because they were closer to their pre- modern roots (as prisoners!) is worth dusting off.63 As well, the sociological and star studies traditions that have followed from Erving Goffman (1959, 1974), or gender studies stemming from Judith Butler (1999), still ask and explore urgent questions. Our identities are indeed made in the processes of interaction and performance, and celebrity and star culture’s promotion of the Romantic notion of authenticity, for example, is worthy of critical and historically-grounded scrutiny.64 Adorno (1973) too has critiqued authenticity, the existentialist variety, for its undialectical shrinking from the broader social totality, and his remains an indispensable starting point:

No elevation of the concept of Man has any power in the face of his actual degradation into a bundle of functions. The only help lies in changing the conditions which brought the state of affairs to this point—conditions which uninterruptedly reproduce themselves on a larger scale. (p. 69)

Many authenticities, like many utopias, deserve to be dismantled.

However, the work of magazine editor and Philosophy Ph.D. Andrew Potter illuminates some of the pitfalls of wholesale rejections of authenticity (and utopia). Potter’s first bestseller, The Rebel Sell (Heath & Potter, 2004), was co-authored with Joseph Heath, and the book takes aim at Adbusters, Naomi Klein, and the broader “anti- globalization” movement of the late nineties. Heath and Potter see in the idea of

63 _{For a highly critical reading of Alan’s father John Lomax’s racialized understanding of authenticity on}

these grounds, see Miller, 2010.

64 _{I have even tried to contribute to these discussions in my own work on Method acting and country rock}

counterculture (a label for them which encapsulates an epic range of “leftist” cultural practices and political theories) a means of distinguishing oneself from others. Taking their cue from Thorstein Veblen, Potter and Heath explore notions like “ideology” and “repressive tolerance” as nonsensical weapons with which educated Marxists have tried to chastise the working peoples of the world who, according to Potter and Heath, may have very much enjoyed industrial capitalism (the enclosure movement is not mentioned by the authors) and consumer culture.

Potter mobilizes a similar critique in The Authenticity Hoax (2010). Going back further than the sixties this time, back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the eighteenth century, he explores how Western culture’s pervasive and insatiable desire for “real,” “homespun,” and “authentic” goods and experiences is fundamentally misguided and even violent. Again drawing on Veblen, Potter claims that authenticity and its pursuit is a sham, a means of distinguishing oneself from other consumers. The free market is a benevolent force that authenticity-seekers have tried to pretend to avoid, all the while looking to the market for the solution to their ailments (whether the solution be jeans, rock music, or anti-globalization magazines). According to Potter, our problem is not the alienating social system we live in but our very desire to escape from it through the mirage known as “authenticity.”

Heath and Potter point to important shortcomings in certain strands of leftist thought (in particular the notion that oppression is so totalizing that any movement for reform must be looked at with suspicion), and they demonstrate a keen, critical eye in their readings of the logical contradictions within the more rarefied and “highbrow” strata of Western consumer culture. Yet, both The Rebel Sell and The Authenticity Hoax tend to

flatten important categories and to avoid what are crucial distinctions (not to mention the authors’ superficial readings of Marx and critical theory). Authenticity is only considered as a relational signifier:

Absent from our lives is any sense of the world as a place of intrinsic value, within which each of us can lead a purposeful existence. And so we seek the authentic in a multitude of ways, looking for a connection to something deeper in the jeans we buy, the food we eat, the vacations we take, the music we listen to, and the politicians we elect. In each case, we are trying to find at least one sliver of the world, one fragment of experience, that is innocent, spontaneous, genuine, and creative, and not tainted by commercialization, calculation, and self-interest (Potter, 2010, p. 264).

Potter is only willing to see authenticity within the structures and systems of distinction that mark consumer culture. But, with respect to the difficult task of collaboratively discussing the potentialities of Becoming, are blue jeans and “getaway” vacations the best we can come up with? Although it is true that many communes in the sixties did not last, and that “authenticity” has been evoked by many ressentiment-filled angry young people and corporations alike (Frank, 1997), there are richer traditions of utopianism (e.g. Bloch, 1986; Adorno, 1984; Levitas, 1990), and richer engagements with authenticity (e.g. Heidegger, 1977; Kierkegaard, 1987; Marx, 1961), that go entirely ignored by Potter. We now turn to one particular body of thought that has dared to think our social being beyond the present.

6.4 Multitude, Species-Being, and the Conjunction of