“In the morning, a cultured man leafs through an intellectual review at breakfast and reads an important discussion between a structuralist and an existentialist. It is so intelligent that it is impossible to conclude that it is simply stupid —stupid because our two thinkers pretend to be more knowledgeable than they are. In fact they know very little and what they know they only know partially (indeed, how can one know anything in any other way?).

So, after reading with tedious interest this stupid knowledgeable discussion, our homo sapien goes to town to see an exhibition of Picasso or (if you’d rather) Titian. And there he participates fervently, but distractedly: he is enchanted, but as if the whole thing had nothing to do with him. He falls to his knees, but it is as if he didn’t fall. Then he tears himself away from Beauty with regret, but with relief. Once he is back at home, he seizes the latest novel, but it’s as though he weren’t reading. He gets up, goes out for lunch, and, in cultured company, engages in intelligent conversation, not snobbishly, frankly, modestly, but…

That’s enough. You see, don’t you? It’s all a matter of this but which seeps through the rules of the game. [I do not] propose to delve into our culture, to enrich it, but to see whether it fits us, whether it remains down here, on earth, with us or whether it has broken away, soared into the sky, and is making us dizzy. It isn’t culture that interests me so much as our relationship with it…each of us plays at being cleverer and more mature than he is.

This may look like a mere denunciation of snobbery. Snobbery? Yes, that too. But something infinitely more important is at stake. An almost greater alienation than that brought about by machines. The accumulative and ascendant mechanisms of culture are very complicated and they operate outside ourselves…”

A Kind of Testament, 1968, trans. by Alastair Hamilton.

I. Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction famously details the consequences of our capacity to reproduce works of art, or, more broadly, sense experiences, with ever-increasing fidelity. Technology allows the transmission and re-creation of more and more, and Benjamin was one of the first to note a cost, in 1936:

In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus —namely, its authenticity— is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object… One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.

The aura of the work of art withers in the age of mechanical reproduction, and the self is a kind of work of art, too. As with a work of art, a person’s “most sensitive nucleus,” his or her “authenticity,” is interfered with by the reproduction of the self, its transmission and portrayal and multiplication. While “no natural object is [similarly] vulnerable,” selves and works of art, and all that self-aware humans intentionally create, are not natural in the sense meant here: unselfconscious, automatic, invulnerable to attentive or perceptual interference. Selves are negotiated, photonic: affected by detection, observation, relay.

Shortly before World War II, Benjamin saw the coming crisis of authenticity, the diminishing of auras and meanings. He was sensitive to an anxiety that would soon register with artists and philosophers everywhere, and within a decade or so would inform an enormous amount of discourse from the academy to the arcade. In its second half, the twentieth century concerned itself with authenticity.

II. A crucial moment: in 1951, J.D. Salinger publishes The Catcher in the Rye, whose protagonist Holden Caulfield despises, with the timeless fury of youth, everything he considers “phony.” Fools like Polonius have always advised us to be true to our own selves —without explaining which parts of them are “our own,” if any— but it is Caulfield who announces the promotion of authenticity to a moral virtue and the classification of phoniness as a capital crime. At the halfway point of the century, the moral law was established. Salinger is sometimes credited with the popularization of this fetish, this preoccupation with phoniness; sometimes, it is attributed to the existentialist philosophers and their ideas about “bad faith” and so on. But neither philosophers nor novelists much affect the attitudes of the public, and the Tolstoyan view of history is, in this instance, accurate: men like Jean Paul Sartre and Salinger sensed and obeyed the mysterious, unwilled moral injunctions that arose in the 20th century from “History, that is, the unconscious, general herd-life of mankind…”

III. The herd’s obsession with authenticity is an anxious response to the technological reproduction of perceptual experiences, which has improved such that we fear that essences too might be fungible. Just as the primacy of the original artwork is reduced by ten million posters, so the primacy of the original self is reduced by ten million portrayals: by the flickering face on seas of screens, the exhortatory voice filling fleets of commuting cars, the flesh of bodies on billboards along crowded interstates. The multiplexed multiplicity of personality and identity drives us deeper into the self to search for what cannot be reproduced, devalued, commodified, into the world of intentions, subjective states, secrets. We flock to the aura of the artwork and to the Platonic self: an unmediated self of inimitable, irreducible, meaningful purity. We vigilantly test for forgeries and phonies.

We want what the camera cannot show: a person’s fidelity to his innate truth. We want the soul we doubt, the core we have learned isn’t there. We want the antidote to personality, the desperate and neurotic fictions of the performative self. We want the inner, abiding fact: may it abide beyond death.

IV. As the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s pass, authenticity is increasingly a criterion of intense importance; its absence provokes devastating judgements. The zeitgeist, particularly in the counterculture, demands a pure transformation of artless, unconstrained, uncontemplated intent into action. Indeed, the best action is purely thoughtless; spontaneity —which can as easily be considered a liberating delight or an abrogation of contemplative ability— is sanctified, consecrated; improvisation is the technique of the day, especially in music. Criticisms of moral systems like religions, of social mores, of individuals concentrate their fury on the great accusation of the 20th century: hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy emerges as our leading sin as nearly all other sins are being recategorized, legalized, made ordinary. The forces of change —science, technology, urbanization, globalization— chase away our souls, commodify our selves, give us a new crime to fear, and provoke us to persecution. We become a police state of Holden Caulfields, rooting out whatever is contrived or inauthentic, and like any pogrom there are innocent victims: we turn, too, against the deliberate, the thoughtful, the mediated. With phonies must go manners, self-possession, self-creation. For decades, no one will admit that they attend to their appearance; for much of the century, we claimed to none’s credulity that we “just roll out of bed and throw whatever on.” We speak our minds; we do what we feel; our revolution is against self-control. A constellation of judgments attends such words as “artificial”; schools of analysis argue that intentions in art scarcely matter, as though to recover the act of the art from the problematized will of the artist.

From splashed paints on a canvas to junkie saxophonists screaming their rage into the horn to the real awkwardness, real stupidity of reality television, we are finished with trained performances and the demands of propriety; we demand the real, the pure and true, the ejaculations of Freud’s atavistic psychic entities straight out into the world, uncorrupted. (But uncorrupted by what? The rational mind against which we’ve turned, the sober and dispassionate author of civilization, with its rules, schemes and structures, machines and automations? The rational mind whose technologies are now reproducing our selves with such facility that we cannot believe that we’re special? Reason: the factory foreman; the self: sausage being made).

If hypocrisy is a sin, however, it is original and universal. No self-aware creature can escape the first consequence of self-awareness: the ability to consciously influence what were once instinctual processes. As soon as one becomes of oneself and begins to control how one acts, one is calculating, disguising, living twice or more within one identity. One is a hypocrite: one says one thing and does another. One contains multitudes. That the contemporary world criminalizes what all humans share, of course, means only that it is precisely like the ancient world; the moral values of a culture don’t reflect the culture as it is but as it wishes to be, and the sins it prosecutes are those it perceives as threatening infections.

V. But while this fetishized and extended notion of authenticity is an anxiety-induced obsession, it is nevertheless the case that we all know and detest ordinary conversational falsity. Nothing is more unpleasant than interacting with someone who is not truly themselves, someone whose performative identity necessitates unfelt reactions from you. Their act makes demands of an audience; their laughter at their own jokes is really an “Applause” sign. When someone’s personality is a lie, they oblige you to lie back to them, to feign credulity, to simulate the responses they seem to expect.

The excruciating deformation of selves by other selves, the pressures selves put on one another without the awareness of their owners, so to speak, is the focus of much of Witold Gombrowicz’s hilarious and brilliant fiction. In his novels, selves are bloated, hypertrophied things which push against one another, jockey for space in small rooms, wear from friction or expand when flush with trivial successes. The dynamics of these collisions are unintelligible to the characters, as they are to us: some people seem to draw us out, others to push us in; around some we are funny, around others hopelessly awkward; who we are and how we act is constrained, deformed, molded by the accidental and degraded selves of others, themselves thusly shaped, and so on.

…if I am always an artefact, always defined by others and by culture as well as by my own formal necessities, where should I look for my ‘self’? … I have found one answer: I don’t know who I really am, but I suffer when I am deformed. So at least I know what I am not. My ‘self’ is nothing but the will to be myself.

The self is nothing but the resistance to deformation. It is a kind of relation or process, not an inner truth to which one is faithful or not. The principle demand of authenticity, then, is not that we scrupulously compare our behavior or personality to some inner ideal; to be authentic should mean, above all, that we never deform the selves of others. It means permitting others to be who they are, not insisting that we are a certain kind of unedited immediacy which others must accept.

If reproductive technology has eliminated the aura of the work of art, it has also problematized our belief in the inimitable, unmediated self. As film, television, and computers proliferate, culture develops an obsession with authenticity in a silly sense, prosecuting a pointless search for bad faith, phoniness, and eventually even self-composure and self-control. But this is no different from interrogating works of art to find their real aura: the point is that there is no aura anymore. And there is no soul-like self underneath expressions of personality, only our laudable, instinctive discomfort when we’re forced to be something we’re not.

I am a terrible descriptive writer in part because I am not perceptive about the world visually; in addition to being self-absorbed and inattentive, I have never acquired several important vocabularies which help one take note of what one sees. Like many men, I suppose, I’ve neglected color, and still round all blues to blue, from Cornflower to Pantone 292. I have no idea what the plants I see are, how large they’ll grow to be, whether they flower, how often flowers flower, what grasses are capable of, how many generations of men a given tree has endured.

I cannot describe a room, cannot express the spatial relation between an untidy sofa and a chair opposite it on which a man sits, reading a novel he expects relatively little of: a good story, a very mild hint of having seen into a cross-section of life which reveals, in its cutaway clarity, the mechanisms at work in us, in our loves, our capitulations. I cannot describe his pants —I know little about materials or textures, and might write the lovely word houndstooth, and think of my dogs’ teeth and how they might be made into fabric, and I might get lost thinking about the dead men in old offices sorting out textile matters, issues of standards and weights and threads and transportation…

…before I realize that, first, it is not houndstooth at all but corduroy, a material so common that my error is appalling despite being trivial, and second, that houndstooth was originally and perhaps remains typically a pattern made from wools, not cotton, so that Degas’ A Cotton Office in New Orleans was quite the wrong image to have come to mind.

But now I am lost: the particulars of a pair of pants are beyond my creative capacity because they are beyond my perceptive capacity: when I meet you, I am so worried about whether you can tell that I am a fraud that I never notice your pants at all! I remember my awkward turns of phrase, the awful habit I have of making every sentence part of a sitcom duet, but not the color of your eyes. It’s hideous to know that this is how it is for everyone (but it is to this fact that my attention is drawn, rather than to the details from whose configuration this fact is made evident). My memories are of the wrong things, the wrong details; I blame culture and technology for my mind, but I know I am exactly as I’ve chosen to be; as Simone Weil said:

We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say ‘I am suffering’ than ‘this landscape is ugly.’

I say this to myself twenty times every day; does this mean that I am suffering? I don’t feel that I am; I feel that my suffering stopped long ago, and now I merely grapple with the form of the psyche it sculpted, the effect that form has on what I see, record, recall. And it is better to admit that ‘I’m paying attention to the wrong things’ than to claim that ‘the world has grown meaningless’ or that ‘my phone keeps me from noticing sunsets.’ It is not my phone and it is not Facebook that kept me from the sunset yesterday. It was the everydayness of life that Walker Percy’s Binx Bolling claims is what keeps us from “the search.” But this search seems strange to undertake when there is nowhere undiscovered, no meaning not mediated, no knowledge not within a larger system of knowledge, no boundary past which we do not spill in great crowds, no text immune to annotation, no event which is not subsumed by its live-posted trails of reactions in the cultural agar.

And this idea seems more important and interesting to me than the construction of a character’s pants or even the details of how s/he sees light, hears city sounds, flees love, which is why I cannot surpass the dull didacticism of those who write to express ideas. I love ideas because I fantasize about a skeleton key enlightenment, an idea whose profundity and breadth will transform all that is flat and dead in my life, recast my weaknesses and failures as strengths and victories. I want to be redeemed simply by reading a sentence.

I love such ideas like people love money: in spite of myself, automatically, distractedly. I know that they’re a kind of intoxication; I know that they’re not reality, not the components of vital human experience, not the texture of life or the phenomenology of mind or the beating of the heart; they are competitive meta-maneuvers, dogs circling one another, mechanisms for partializing reality and believing that you stand above it.

We should of course “let facts create” us, and our writing, too, but to be open to my self or my work becoming any happenstance creation requires more courage than I have. I am attached to my self, which I am also eager to transfigure or escape. I think and write with what I imagine is a self-enhancing end in mind too often, but there is no end to inquiries and responses, to the invented universe of ideas: they continue in all directions, along all axes of scale. They subordinate entire civilizations; they concern infinitesimal quanta; they zoom between quarks and quasars; they are quaint and they are contrarian. One can reach the end of a description and think: “Just so.” But an idea demands to be applied ever more-broadly, across vectors of human activity. Ideas are like machines: submit your data to them, receive binary signals in response, operate your device on unprocessed reality and receive nifty schema, and on and on and on.

In a crowd of strangers, one feels somehow identifiable as even stranger: as the one for whom any eye contact is an occasion for momentary panic, as the one who isn’t sure where to stand, as the one who cannot piece together what everyone else inexplicably knows: which lines lead to which bathrooms and bars, whether the left or right hand should be extended for a stamp, how much things cost and when one pays.

Out at night, one hears a sea of monologues. Stupidly loud music means everyone must shout, so only shouters speak: men drone on and on about themselves, drunkenly strain to direct conversations to those subjects they feel most clever discussing; it is painful for them to listen, to attend to anyone, to note or record what others say, so they don’t; instead, they run their shabby little routines; they are like bad artificial intelligences, like useless automated phone systems, like malfunctioning robots. Every verbal input yields but one output: “I’m sorry, I don’t understand [others]. Would you like to hear about (1) what I own or refuse to own, (2) putatively funny stories about me from my past, or (3) my imbecilic, demography-oriented opinions about current events?”

It is an embarrassment: they perform badly, and one is obliged to pretend that one believes them: not merely their inaccurate regurgitation of misunderstood facts —their college dorm-room vision of reality, with its random substitutions of names and dates and theories and its lazy, untroubled arrogance— but them, these false, enacted personalities! Willing one’s smile hurts; eyes darting here and there, hoping to hide their focus and reactions, eventually tire and burn. And what can one do with one’s hands that will not indicate boredom or disdain?

Going out means: sitting in the front row of a small theater while desperate, derivative, arrogant, insecure, incompetent, dull, mean, needy performers beg for attention, affection, release. Going out means: enforced dishonesty, involuntary performance, conscripted deceit. This is, in part, what Gombrowicz means when he says that we are helplessly distorted by the ass-like and shit-related stupidity of others:

An awful barful of drunks on a Friday night is an orgy of asses trying to shape one another, and weekend charisma reflects the power of the pupa to mould the faces of others with a fleshy, enveloping inevitability. One prepares for it uselessly: there is no way to remain oneself amidst such smushy, amorphous pressures.

What would honesty in such circumstances look like? It is not possible to say: “Stop, stop; please stop all this artifice; I cannot absolve you or admire you.” It is not possible because their performance, like yours, has been compelled: compelled by some other ass, by the great shared shame of all who shit, perhaps, or by the drive to control and redact and present our personalities as though we have shaped them, as though we authored our personalities, or worse: are our personalities, when we are not, not at all. It is not possible because, nightmarishly, we do not know when we are performing until after the performance ends.

What are we, and what do we want from one another? Out at night isn’t the time to ask these or any questions, only to loudly but casually allude to the fact that we have this many followers, or only eat such-and-such, or get phone calls from so-and-so, or can drink this much, or once did something-or-other, etc. etc. etc. Endless proclamations of self-aggrandizing opinions! All mouths, no ears! Shoals of deaf monologists! Asses mashing asses! What hell it is! What dementia! What simultaneity of noise-as-language and emptiness-as-meaning! Good god, why does anyone subject themselves to others? Is silence the only honesty?

Three quotes today; first:

“…you could save your dignity to some degree by distancing yourselves from Art, which sticks it to you… To begin with, part company forever with the word: art, and that other word: artist. Stop wallowing in these words and repeating them with such endless monotony. Isn’t everyone a bit of an artist? Isn’t it true that mankind creates art not only on paper or on canvas, but also in every moment of everyday life -when a young girl pins a flower in her hair, or when in the course of conversation a little joke escapes your lips, when we melt with emotion at the beauty of twilight’s light and shadow, what is all this if not the practicing of art? Why then this idiotic division into “artists” and the rest of mankind? Wouldn’t it be more wholesome if you simply said: “perhaps I busy myself with art a little more than others do,” rather than to proudly declare yourselves artists?

Stop pampering art, stop -for God’s sake!- this whole system of puffing it up and magnifying it; and, instead of intoxicating yourselves with legends, let facts create you. 

“Let facts create you.” Imagine it! Second:

“But what goes on in the world of art beats all for stupidity and degradation -and to such a degree that someone who has some sense of decency and balance can’t help but lower his brow in burning shame when confronted with this childish and pretentious orgy. Oh, those inspired songs to which no one listens! Oh, the connoisseurs’ clever talk and their enthusiasm at concerts and poetry readings, oh, the initiations, the valorizations, discussions, and oh, the faces of those who recite or listen to poetry and collectively celebrate the mystery of beauty! By what painful paradox does everything you say or do transform itself, under these circumstances, into the ridiculous? When, over time, a society lapses into fits of stupidity, one can definitely say that its ideas are not in keeping with reality, that it simply stuffs itself with bogus ideas. And, without a doubt, your artistic concepts have also reached the peak of naivete…”

Society: stuffing itself with bogus ideas; media and analysis: the buffet of bogus ideas from which we take repeated helpings. We have paid for all-we-can-eat stupidity; we will not be denied seconds and thirds!

Finally, and note that this is from Ferdydurke, written in 1938, before our buffet began to serve heaping portions of lamentations about how technology is collapsing our attention spans, reducing us to twitchy, distractible, inattentive monkeys:

“Quiet, sush, something mysterious is happening, here before us is a fifty-year-old author, on his knees at the altar of art, creating, thinking about his masterpiece, about its harmony, precision, and beauty, about its spirit and how to overcome its difficulties, and there is the expert, thoroughly studying the author’s material, whereupon the masterpiece goes out into the world and to the reader, and what was conceived in utter and absolute agony is now received piecemeal between a telephone call and a hamburger. Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment -there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants it, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog.”

Emphasis mine; I would like to suggest the bolded words as an epitaph for someone noble, quixotic, doomed like all of us to drown in tedious minutiae.

“Certainly art is the perfecting of form. But you seem to think —and here is another of your cardinal mistakes— that art consists of creating works perfect in their form; you reduce this all-encompassing, omni-human process of creating form to the turning out of poems and symphonies; and you’ve never been able to truly experience nor explain to others what an enormous role form plays in our lives. Even in the field of psychology you haven’t been able to secure form its proper place. You still seem to think that emotions, instincts, ideas govern our behavior, while you’re inclined to consider form to be a superficial appendage and a simple gewgaw. When a widow who walks behind her husband’s casket cries and wails to the point of splitting her sides, you surmise she’s wailing because she’s overcome by her loss. Or when some engineer, doctor, or lawyer murders his wife, children, or friend, you think that he let himself be seized by bloodthirsty instincts. Or when a politicians says something stupid, you think that he’s stupid because he talking nothing but nonsense. But in Reality matters stand as follows: a human being does not express himself forthrightly and in keeping with his nature but always in some well-defined form, and this form, this style, this manner of being is not of our making but is thrust upon us from outside —and this is why the same individual can present himself on the outside as wise or stupid, as bloodthirtsy or angelic, as mature or immature —depending upon the style he happens to come up with, and in what way he is dependent on others. And just as beetles chase after food all day, so do we tirelessly pursue form, we hassle other people with our style, our manners while riding in a streetcar, while eating or enjoying ourselves, while resting or attending to our business —we always, unceasingly seek form, and we delight in it or suffer by it, and we conform to it or we violate and demolish it, or we let it create us, amen.

Oh, the power of Form! Nations die because of it. It is the cause of wars. It creates something in us that is not of us. If you make light of it you’ll never understand stupidity nor evil nor crime. It governs our slightest impulses. It is at the base of our collective life. For you, however, Form and Style still belong strictly to the realm of the aesthetic —for you, style is on paper only, in the style of your stories.”

-Witold Gombrowicz in chapter 4 of Ferdydurke, “Preface to ‘The Child Runs Deep in Filidor.’”