The Youthful Search for Authenticity
in which we borrow images to ‘forge’ ourselves
Posted Jul 16, 11:57 am in consumerism, culture, experiences, human nature, postmodernism, semiotics, unfinished thoughts
People of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they’re all so envious of it.” – Chuck Klosterman, “Killing Yourself to Live”
The above passage is from a chapter of a book called “Killing Yourself to Live” in which music writer Chuck Klosterman discusses the Great White nightclub fire in Rhode Island a couple years ago, in which 100 people died due to a pyrotechnic mishap. Being that this was in a small, lower-middle-class town, the crowd was made up of blue-collar types who were actually (perhaps unbelievably) fans of the band. Klosterman was contrasting this audience profile with those of the many big city shows he’d been to where washed-up bands like Great White would play long after their primes to crowds half full of hipsters who were just there “ironically” so they could mock the music and scoff at those who were genuinely into it. Klosterman suggests that these hipsters scoff at these true-blue fans because they want to express being above liking things, because they can’t stand to be genuine.
The sentiment expressed in the quote is an interesting one, but I’d make a slight, but significant alteration; the word “despise” should really be “crave.” This, of course, renders the phrase a considerably more obvious one. Yet, for the most part, Klosterman’s observations resonate with me; I’ve noticed that people of our generation often have weirdly amorphous personalities and images, shifting wildly based on social circumstances and how those circumstances can be manipulated for social capital. Our generation seems fixated on self-awareness as its own virtue, and is highly obsessed with carefully controlling and crafting our images in the eyes of others through symbols whose meanings likely did not carry so much symbolic weight in identity construction just a few generations ago (clothes, vehicles, online personalities, musical taste, etc.).
Anyway, as I see it through Klosterman’s lens, the reason the indie kids of this generation can’t stand to be genuine is because they grew up entitled, in sheltered environments in which they never had to endure hardships. Their entire personas were cobbled together by borrowing images they liked, never borne organically from their own experiences. These images they adopt are never their own; they are fashion objects, constantly subject to the winds of change and shifting public opinion.
Because of the postmodern focus on image and its central import in identity, choosing images and consumer goods to be associated with are critically important decisions; no one wants to be associated with images that may turn out unfashionable or appear to suggest that a person is, in fact, a loser. Therefore, it’s easier to just reject them all (at least publicly), or to simply adopt them “ironically.” But clearly, we can’t be free of symbols entirely. The ubiquity of symbolism in nearly all consumer goods is an unavoidable byproduct of a post-modern era; everything we see forces us to think about “what kind of person would own that” and form schemas about these individuals.
Therefore, such individuals bitterly resent those whose life experiences are more “authentic” (read: difficult and uncomfortable) than their own, because such trying experiences are never unfashionable, and those who have endured them are never subjected to the plaguing self-aware scrutiny that everyone else has to deal with. Living through hardship engenders respect, never mockery. Thus, these entitled kids want nothing more than to have had some hardships— “grit” as Klosterman puts it— to confer them authenticity. There is nothing authentic, as these people see it, in their comfortable upbringings. Their lack of unmolded identity is a source of inner conflict because it forces them to constantly question their symbolic choices.
The ubiquity of multiplicities of divergent images, tropes, and cultures has given us license to treat our personalities like clothing that can be switched at will. On one hand, this allows a sense of psychological freedom to be whatever we want to be; but on the other hand, I think many people born into this postmodern world feel like they don’t have a “baseline” self that is grounded in anything that wasn’t calculatingly copied from something else they perceived as authentic or identity-conferring in a categorical sense (e.g. “punk”, “skater”, etc.).
There are some people who lead the way in cultural transformation, but they account only for a small fraction of individuals. Most of the rest are what academic and sociologist Doug Holt describes as “feeders”— basically, people who crave brushes with authenticity, and who just copy what the innovators are doing, often without the understanding of where those ideas came from. Since they can’t lay claim to the authenticity, having been deprived of the experiences that created them, they settle for the next best thing: adopting the symbols of it. And since the symbols are the easiest way for outsiders to categorize people (e.g. torn jeans and a mohawk means ‘punk’), that works out just fine for feeders.
This generation’s youth craves authenticity, but rarely one that they can have (that is, one they are genuinely entitled to through experience); it’s always someone else’s authenticity that they wish they could have.
But perhaps it’s not limited to youth; we engage in such activities largely as a means of arriving at a manufactured authenticity that constitutes our ‘image’ at any given point in time; the bevy of images we’ve been presented with for all our lives through media have, ironically, taught us not to want the real authentic with respect to ourselves, but instead to want something we can’t have, but which we can fake well enough to convince others. Our true self, it seems, can be manufactured through symbols.
catherine malabou in her book ‘what should we do with our brain?’ writes about new scientific data that shows that the brain is a historical artifact that changes as we age or experience new things. in a sense, she argues that the brain is inherently ‘plastic.’ this might account for our generation’s lack of authenticity or ultimately, fruitless search for it.
— FernandoG · Jul 16, 12:00 pm · #
There is much merit in all of this and I tend to chalk it up to the destruction of indigenous/regional culture. But then have we not become our own culture of aimless, tech dependent tweeters in search of identity? Are these not the authentic birth pangs of a tech-infused, cyborg-humanity?
— MoonDog · Jul 16, 12:01 pm · #
>> destruction of indigenous/regional culture
I agree; this is surely a big part of the loss of identity; Robert Jay Lifton attributed this constant morphing as a search for identity in a world where we are constantly bombarded with arrays of appealing and changing images with no constancy. Regional culture provides such constancy; and moreover, I strongly suspect that identity issues are not as prevalent in rural areas, where there is stronger community/regional culture.
>> the brain is inherently ‘plastic.’…
I would agree with this too. The sheer breadth of “experiences” this generation has far outstrips that of previous generations. However, the bulk of the additional breadth, in my opinion, is found in the form of shared media experiences (movies, music, tv, books), and not in the form of first-person life experiences. This ensures high levels of variability in everyday experience, and with it high impact on neural plasticity.
— Rahul · Jul 16, 12:03 pm · #
your skepticism is your own undoing. yet, i am skeptical of how the loss of regional/indigenous culture was if not necessary, then irreversible for this type of communique to occur. look at the the american indian college ads in the ny times – the ads call for you to ‘think indian’ as though the property of a lost indigenous culture, their ‘thought… ’ so to speak, was essentially always, already ‘plastic’ and thus reproducible. what i think marks this generation and future ones is a will to re-discover an ‘authentic aesthetic’ via artificial means. Being envious of or despising such a pursuit are secondary byproducts and reactions of the search for ‘authenticity’ and not necessarily or primarily indicative of any wide ranging generational identity.
— FernandoG · Jul 16, 12:03 pm · #
But seriously, I agree about the plasticity, and I agree with the sentiments about people seeking the ‘authentic via the artificial’; however, it’s fallacious to believe that this ‘authenticity’ is only available in the experience of ‘others’ and not in one’s own experiences. I realize that what I am about to write might sound facetious, but really…, what is ‘inauthentic’ about growing up in faceless suburbs and shopping at strip malls? It’s only less sexy because it hasn’t been romanticized, unlike, say the ghetto. Suburban life is as ‘authentic’ as any other human experience. The only part that is inauthentic about it is the fact that the people who live lives that revolve around privilege and guilt-for-being-privileged choose not to see legitimacy in their own experiences. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they despise authenticity, but I think that it does pose some kind of psychological threat to their transition from their actual self to their idealized self.
— Rahul · Jul 16, 12:04 pm · #
actually, your first response is the tone and face, so to speak, of the suburbs. and your second response would be, as you articulate, the face of the idealized self. the threat, i suppose, that you write of comes from one’s own experience of knowing that the everyday life of the suburbs is anything but romantic. conceptually, the suburbs remains a… soulless landscape, a plastic landscape, if i may be so bold to state. not because it is, but because it is without iconography and so, without excitement. in the suburbs everything happens elsewhere – on the tv, on youtube, on facebook, etc. it is the most mediated zone there is, where danger is reduced to the utmost position of and as simulation. it’s where the american dream sits and roosts. the drive to acquire this kind of mediated vision or dreamscape, to see more with technology (artificial means), this will to see, to believe and thus experience more is what Klosterman ineptly interprets as envy of authenticity.
— FernandoG · Jul 16, 12:05 pm · #
So are you saying that he’s confusing “authenticity” with “excitement”?
— Rahul · Jul 16, 12:05 pm · #
not really – i don’t think it’s a matter of switching words or sense at all. it’s just that the ‘authentic’ experience, i think, is bound up with time somehow and life, as well. and what Klosterman is writing is that the envy of the authentic brings about a hate of it or the apparent hate of the authentic, as he sees it, is borne of envy. i simply … think he’s wrong about that. consider the example – being at a live event (ringside) or watching it on television (pay-per-view). which is more authentic? and secondly, what does envy or hate have anything to do with the authenticity of either event? reading Klosterman is like watching pay-per-view while he’s the announcer telling the viewing audience that everyone who is watching should be ringside and that all those who aren’t ringside despise the actual event due to their being envious of those that are ringside. It doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes, people like to pay-per-view with people they actually know and eat Cheetos.
— FernandoG · Jul 16, 12:06 pm · #
Yo Dude, klosterman is the whitest person alive. he is the real, authentic GREAT WHITE.
— Yo Dude · Jul 16, 07:43 pm · #
A wise latina woman would have greater insight into this situation for sure!
— HayDood · Aug 6, 08:26 pm · #