‘Today, there is little premium placed on being authentic,’ writes the American philosopher Gordon Marino in his moving meditation The Existentialist’s Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age
(2018). In our world of ‘selfies, social media branding, and managing
your profile on LinkedIn and Facebook … [i]t is not who you are but who
you seem to be!’ In interviews for my own sociological book
on everyday suffering and our troubled quest for self-mastery, I too
found little premium placed on ‘being authentic’. And yet,
organisational consultants inform us, in the pages of the Harvard Business Review,
that ‘the term “authenticity” has become a buzzword among
organisational leaders’. In fact, authenticity is ‘now ubiquitous in
business, on personal blogs and even in style magazines’, according to
another writer. ‘Everyone wants to be authentic.’
So, which is it? Is authenticity fading away as a personal ethic or
is it something everyone wants to be? In fact, both are true – because
the meaning of authenticity is changing.
Authenticity, which in its modern sense dates back to the Romantics
of the late 18th century, has never had a single meaning. In much of our
everyday usage, the term means something more or less analogous to the
way that we speak of an object being authentic – as the genuine article,
not a copy or a fake. We think of people as authentic when they’re
being themselves, consistent with their own personality and without
pretence or pretending. And when they’re being reliable and trustworthy,
generally resistant to the whims of the moment or the emotional
approval of the crowd. In other words, when they show themselves to be
stable and consistent over time and in different circumstances.
But, as an ethical ideal – as a standard of what it is good to be,
both in the way that we relate to ourselves and others – authenticity
means more than self-consistency or a lack of pretentiousness. It also
concerns features of the inner life that define us. While there is no
one ‘essence’ of authenticity, as Marino observes, the ideal has often
been expressed as a commitment to being true to yourself, and ordering
your soul and living your life so as to give faithful expression to your
individuality, cherished projects and deepest convictions.
The meanings of authenticity that concern the inner life are now fading away
Authenticity in this ethical sense also had a critical edge, standing
against and challenging the utilitarian practices and conformist
tendencies of the conventional social and economic order. Society erects
barriers that the authentic person must break through. Finding your
true self means self-reflection, engaging in candid self-appraisal and
seeking ‘genuine self-knowledge’, in the words
of the American philosopher Charles Guignon. It means making your own
those truths that matter crucially to you, as the Canadian philosopher
Charles Taylor stresses, the truths that it’s right and necessary to be true to. In this understanding, the inward turn
is not an end in itself. It’s a means to personal wholeness and access
to shared horizons of meaning that transcend the self and contribute to a
richer, more human world.
The meanings of authenticity that concern the inner life are now
fading away. They are not, as Marino suggests, and as I too have argued,
consistent with how life is generally lived today. But there is an
alternative meaning – an authenticity that is harmonious with our times.
Here is a mode of authenticity that we might say ‘everyone wants to
be’, because here is the mode that everyone is expected to be.
In his book The Society of Singularities (2017), the German social theorist Andreas Reckwitz argues that a larger ‘authenticity revolution’ has swept the world during the past 40 years.
The register of values has shifted, he shows, away from anything
standardised and regular and toward objects, images, services and events
that are regarded as being unique and singular. Think of artisan bread
and craft beer, off-the-beaten-path travel destinations and local
diversity, online profiles and Spotify playlists, self-tracking and
lifelogging, products with ‘stories’ and spaces with ‘atmospheres’. The
list is endless, especially among the educated middle classes. Enormous
energy is now directed to making things appear ‘authentic’ – that is,
particular and distinctive, standing apart from the typical, the
ordinary, the mass-produced. Uniqueness has a social status and value of
its own.
The high status accorded to the singular, Reckwitz argues, includes people. Each person is enjoined to stand out
from the crowd, to achieve something special and extraordinary.
Authenticity has become an obligation. Reckwitz captures this conundrum
with the paradoxical concept of ‘performative authenticity’.
Authenticity, in this sense, is the way to be because to be
‘somebody’ is to develop your unique self, your differentness from
others and your noninterchangeable life. Being merely average or well
adjusted, or without a cultivated portfolio of special competencies and
attractive qualities, is a mark of failure – a mark of inauthenticity –
regardless of your inner life and relation to self.
Performative authenticity is tied to economic success and social
prestige, which means – and this is a further paradoxical feature – that
your specialness and self-realisation have to be performed. In order
for people to distinguish themselves, they must seek attention and
visibility, and positively affect others with their
self-representations, personal characteristics and quality of life. In
doing so, they have to take great care that their performance isn’t
perceived as staged. To be ‘authentic’ – genuine – they have to give the
impression that they’re just being themselves. The effort has to appear
effortless, otherwise it will backfire.
Performative authenticity shares with older, inner conceptions of
authenticity the notion that each of us has our own unique way of being
in the world. But the concepts otherwise diverge. The inner ideal aims
at a way of being that is unfeigned and without illusions. It resists
the cultivation of an affirming audience, because being a ‘whole’
person, with a noninstrumental relation to self and others, is often at
odds with the demands of society. The benefit is a richer, examined
life, but there is always the risk of paying a price for living
authentically in terms of lesser social acclaim and outward success.
Authenticity thus understood, it’s safe to say, was never a ‘buzzword
among organisational leaders’.
In the performative mode, by contrast, this tension between self and
society disappears. Self-elaboration still requires self-examination,
but not necessarily of any inner or even aesthetic kind (‘life as a work
of art’). Something more like an inventory is needed, and some schools
of psychology and popular self-help actually recommend that the way to
know yourself isn’t through personal reflection, but by convening a
focus group of those familiar with your personality, desires and talents
– ‘likes’ and other social media feedback serve this purpose. Useful
personal traits are cultivated in interaction with the appropriation of
unusual or unusually combined objects, experiences, styles and
identities – a rare breed of dog, special cooking techniques, the
obscure knowledge of sneaker brands, an offbeat musical style, a novel
sexual orientation, and so on. Together, they’re put to work as the
basis for composing and curating your unique difference. This difference
has no meaning or standing of its own; it only achieves value, only
counts as authentic, when it’s socially recognised as such – as
original, interesting, complex – and brings esteem and tangible success.
The performative mode is a further flight into atomism and away from stable sources of meaning
Performing your difference isn’t necessarily a zero-sum game. Markets
and digital technologies have greatly expanded the infrastructure of
possibilities. It is, however, a competition for scarce attention that
requires continuous assessment and feedback, and offers little respite.
Like fashions, there’s pressure toward the new and the novel, and what
was unique one day might be commonplace the next. Even if you pull off a
good performance, there’s a need to be flexible, to be ready to
reinvent your difference. There’s always the danger of becoming
inconspicuous.
Given the sharp dissimilarities, we can see how authenticity might be
both in decline (in the inner mode) and in ascendance (in the
performative mode) at the same time. The evidence for the decline of one
might be a sign of the rise of the other. In light of the performative
mode, we can see why Marino sees that authenticity (in the inner mode)
is being lost, as seemingly ‘everyone has become their own unabashed
publicist’. We can see why, as I found in my interviews, people laid
little stress on the need for introspection and faulted themselves, not
for being too caught up in the superficialities of society, but for
failing to meet its imperatives of success. In conceptualising the
practice of the self and its relation to a good life and a good society,
the two modes are nearly mirror opposites.
Marino’s book is called a ‘survival guide’ and what
we need to survive might be usefully thought of as distorted pictures of
authenticity, including corrupted expressions of the inner mode. In his
powerful critique The Ethics of Authenticity (1991), Taylor argues
that our contemporary culture of self-fulfilment and unfettered choice
is built, in part, on ‘trivialised’ and ‘self-centred modes’ of
authenticity. ‘Properly understood,’ however, ‘authenticity is not the
enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self’ – demands of
society, nature, tradition, God or the bonds of solidarity – ‘it
supposes such demands.’ To bracket them off, he continues, ‘would be to
eliminate all candidates for what matters’.
The performative mode is, if anything, a further flight into atomism
and away from stable frameworks and sources of meaning. But the problem
runs deeper, as the demonstration of specialness and optimised
self-development are built into the very standards of success. The
performative fosters a detached form of self-awareness that potentially
measures everything in terms of its strategic value for visibility,
recognition and reward. And, knowing the game, it fosters the sceptical
sense that everyone else’s actions carry an ulterior, manipulative
intent. Just being ourselves becomes a guise, behind which we fashion
ourselves to be – in the worldly scale of values – someone who counts.
The performative mode fosters a profound isolation and sense of
insecurity. This mode captures many of the normative standards against
which the people I interviewed evaluated themselves and found themselves
wanting – they weren’t outgoing enough, positive enough, performing
highly enough, moving on from loss or defeat quickly enough, organising
their intimate relations contractually enough. They weren’t ‘special’,
but ordinary – in dread of being labelled ‘losers’. What I found
confirms Reckwitz’s claim that the demand to stand out and prove your
worth is ‘a systematic generator of disappointment that does much to
explain today’s high levels of psychological disorder’.
Taylor suggests that, to confront false modes of authenticity and
open a space to consider alternative conceptions of the good, we should
remind ourselves of those features of the human condition that show
these modes to be empty. A place to begin, following Marino’s guidance,
is with the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.
Our existential condition reveals itself to us most clearly when our
lives have become unmoored, when we come face to face with our
vulnerability, our dependence, our limits, the seeming meaninglessness
of it all. Just here is where Kierkegaard intervenes. If we want to live authentically – properly understood – there’s no wiser guide.
