Authenticity
Even as some moderns, such as the philosopher Heidegger, sought to raise up the notion of authenticity, and others, most notably advertisers, sought to foist upon consumers the notion that authenticity could be purchased, various pranksters mocked the very notion. How in an age of mass production could anything be authentic? And why should anyone care? In Warhol Land, where popular images were indistinguishable from art except that the artist was calling attention to the image by copying it, framing it, repackaging it, and marketing it, the notion of troubling one’s self over authenticity seemed like a stale joke, to say nothing of bad faith and hypocrisy. In his pose as bored artist of sorts, Warhol was a truth teller.
Warhol recognized the primacy of the media-based economy and how its appetite for images to tout its wares, whether they were brands of Scotch, washing machines, aspirin, or airlines, was insatiable. Why not enjoy the image spewing impulse? Many of the images were clever, some were shrewd, and a few were haunting. If most of them were merely tawdry, that too offered a modest thrill. Daily life in mass society was what it was, the stuff of ads for constipation, feminine hygiene, and deodorants. Epiphanies did not descend every five minutes. Blandly amiable and wily, Warhol preached acceptance. Every desire lay within shelf reach: no need to strain. Mystery was an unhappy cabal foisted on good folk by pretentious hierophants. Warhol stood squarely in the American tradition of commonsense. Mingled with ever hip showmanship, his was an unbeatable combination, a deadpan yet titillating circus.
Before, during, and after Warhol’s lifetime, modern times evinced a powerful amount of emotional devastation, not only in terms of war, mass starvation, and ideological murders but in mental anguish, the feeling that there was no haven in a world that seemed increasingly inhuman. Highlighting, as it did, the vital desperation of human freedom, the existential outlook that emanated from France after WWII attempted to answer this inhumanity. Whether in Beckett or Camus, the burden of being human rested on human beings. Pleas to God were just that—pleas. The meaninglessness of suffering was an occasion for courage, both in facing up to the meaninglessness and moving through and beyond it.
At the same time, though the likes of Sartre (to remain in France) spat on American capitalism, it too provided an answer, however unwise, to inhumanity—hamburgers and cars whose abundance and predictability seemed to assuage the human ache. Although Sartre had nothing but contempt for the cheerful shallowness of consumerism, the appetite for goods was undeniable and less destructive than creating a better world through genocide. The hideous impulse on the part of ideologues to lift “the people” out of their ignorance had no traction in a mass democracy. As a cosseted intellectual snob, Sartre could not bear the mindless spectacle of producing and consuming—for him, better Stalin than Chevrolet.
The search for authenticity, the seeking of a middle path between godless, existential solitude and consumerist enthusiasm was bound to be an ironic endeavor. No one who chopped cotton or killed and butchered an animal or worked at a forge or made potions out of herbs ever worried about authenticity. More likely, when those people worried, the issue was survival. The very notion of authenticity would have brought a rueful if not sardonic smile to often hard-pressed lives. Modern times, however, thinned out the genuineness of human enterprise. More and more people did more and more arcane, specialized tasks. They toiled on assembly lines repeating the same motions and sat in cubicles scrutinizing the same pieces of paper. They were units in a process. There were no windows for them to idly look out of. The miracle of capitalized Being (to reference Heidegger) did not dawn each day for them.
For many, this predicament was unbearable and the responses could be extreme. One answer to the inauthentic life was the cult of blood and soil. The Nazis were the most infamous devotees of this outlook but they were hardly alone. In opposing “rootless cosmopolitanism,” the Nazis propagandized a vision of exclusive and unshakable authenticity. Horrible as theirs was, the lure of such a vision to a nation depleted by a world war made ghastly sense: blood demanded blood and purity demanded the destruction of the “impure” or “sub-human.” Marching in the service of death and prey to mass psychosis, the Germans were violently alive.
Other aspects of authenticity were mercifully different. In the United States the growth of hipness and the continued growth of evangelical religion both stemmed, in part, from a desire for authenticity in a mass world of wearying sameness. White hipsters took their cues from African Americans who had no choice as to the authenticity of their experience: no one wanted to be a slave and no one wanted to be despised. The authenticity that developed within African American culture was, at once, life-affirming and grim—many thousands gone. White hipsters adapted African American attitudes for their own purposes. However wrongheaded, if not bizarre (Norman Mailer’s notion, for instance, of “the white Negro”), such an appropriation made sense. The inauthentic nature of mainstream, I-Like-Ike America was, for some, unbearable, while the music, lingo, and folkways of African Americans possessed both grace and power. As James Baldwin bluntly put it, “White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live.” Perhaps Warhol, encased in ironic armor and tasteful tastelessness, would have nodded in something like agreement. One way to opt out of the situation was to seem to go along with it.
The hunger for authenticity invites mockery, but one vision that lingers is of J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield poking around in the crevices of the modern world’s sad psyche while inveighing about phonies. Holden had no plan and that was his beauty. He suffered the pain of absence. His vision at the end of The Catcher in the Rye of Phoebe on the carousel was authentic. Given the ordeal that has constituted modern times, it had to be raining that fictional day.
Wonderful weaving of Warhol, Holden, Baldwin, philosophy, slavery, and consumerism. Apt description of the exciting nightmare! Brava.