Summary:We live in a world increasingly dominated by the fake, the prepackaged, the artificial: fast food, scripted reality TV shows, Facebook "friends," and fraudulent memoirs. But people everywhere are demanding the exact opposite, heralding "authenticity" as the cure for isolated individualism and shallow consumerism. Restaurants promote the authenticity of their cuisine, while condo developers promote authentic loft living and book reviewers regularly praise the authenticity of a new writer's voice.
International bestselling author Andrew Potter brilliantly unpacks our modern obsession with authenticity. In this perceptive and thought-provoking blend of pop culture, history, and philosophy, he finds that far from serving as a refuge from modern living, the search for authenticity often creates the very problems it's meant to solve.What does it mean to be authentic? For many, the search for the authentic provides a powerful source of meaning in a secular age, allowing a person a unique personal identity in a world that seems alienating and conformist. This demand for authenticity—the honest or the real—is one of the most powerful movements in contemporary life, influencing our moral outlook, political views, and consumer behavior.
Yet according to Andrew Potter, when examined closely, our fetish for "authentic" lifestyles or experiences—organic produce and ecotourism, bikram yoga and performance art, the cult of Oprah and the obsession with Obama—is actually a form of exclusionary status seeking. The result, he argues, is modernity's malaise: a competitive, self-absorbed individualism that creates a shallow consumerist society built on stratification and one-upmanship that ultimately erodes genuine relationships and true community.
Weaving together threads of pop culture, history, and philosophy, The Authenticity Hoax reveals how our misguided pursuit of the authentic exacerbates the artificiality of contemporary life that we decry. Potter traces the origins of the authenticity ideal from its roots in the eighteenth century through its adoption by the 1960s counterculture to its centrality in twenty-first-century moral life. He shows how this ideal is manifested through our culture, from the political fates of Sarah Palin and John Edwards to Damien Hirst and his role in contemporary art, from the phenomenon of retirement as a second adolescence to the indignation over James Frey's memoir. From this defiant, brilliant critique, Potter offers a way forward to a meaningful individualism that makes peace with the modern world.Table of ContentsIntroduction The Jargon of Authenticity
One The Malaise of Modernity
Two A False Return
Three The Creative Self
Four Conspicuous Authenticity
Five Perils of Transparency
Six Vote for Me, I’m Authentic
Seven Culture Is for Tourists
Eight The End of History
Conclusion Progress, the Very Idea
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Interesting points:“My argument is not that once upon a time we lived authentic lives – that we used to live in authentic communities and listen to authentic music and eat authentic food and participate in authentic culture – and now that authenticity is gone,” Potter writes.
No, his argument is that now that we've rejected the religious practices, social mores and hopeful belief in progress of our parents, we make do with Oprah's Book Club and Real Simple magazine, and call it authenticity instead.About this AuthorAndrew Potter is the coauthor of the international bestseller The Rebel Sell. A journalist and writer, he holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto, and he is a former assistant professor at Trent University in Peterborough. He has also taught at the University of Toronto and the University of Quebec at Montreal. He is currently a public affairs columnist with Maclean’s and an editor with Canadian Business magazine.CITATION:Potter, Andrew. 2010.
The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves. McClelland & Stewart. (308 pages.)
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Questions that might stem from this:Does this book mean that authenticity is becoming a fore-front of modern life?Yes, I think Taylor was right when he pin-pointed authenticity as the high moral virtue of modern life, and I think this book is showing signs of this seeping into everyday consciousness.
Why is authenticity so popular these days?I would rather say, reflecting Potter's work, that it is actually unpopular these days. I think this is because people bought the notion that traditions were oppressive, so they ran after authenticity, believing one could create this thing completely
sui generis, only to discover they were no happier than their forebearers, so now they blame authenticity, when, really, they need to look harder at how they are defining and creating the authentic.
How does this book improve the profile of my research for publication?I think the popularity of this book will certainly help me publish an article or two, and possibly the whole dissertation, as long as I can do it before the ennui and backlash results. I certainly plan on writing a review of it, once I can convince my authentically stingy self to buy it. (Maybe I will get it for myself as a grad present.)
In what ways does my research parallel Potter? Refute or contradict?I think, from the reviews, my work parallels his greatly by critiquing the shallowness of individualist, liberal and personalist notions of what constitutes the self and happiness. We agree on the fact that appetites and transitory notions of personal happiness, without connections to others (i.e. social capital), cannot sustain satisfaction or lifelong happiness. I think his work is valuable, as is mine, in critiquing the role of pop culture in selling us on this commercial notion of romantic happiness. He goes further than I did in exploring the commercial aspects of this happiness, though I do have some of that in there with the marketplace theory of liberal self-building. However, I think my work refutes his by having a differing definition of "authentic" - I see it not as a thing, but as a category, and to fix this malaise all one must do is open that category's definition. I seem to not agree with Potter that authenticity itself is the problem. I think authenticity is, indeed, a prime goal of life. To trash that just because people have defined it poorly is rather like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. (Of course, I have not read his "solution," so we might be closer on that than the reviews imply.) I believe the difference is that Potter really has two terms: authentic and "authentic," whereas I have just the one - that which we define as authentic that actually works for us. He rails against the "authentic," just as I critique it, but I think we both embrace the authentic to some extent. He just doesn't seem to look to communitarianism as much as I do for the solution.
Does this book hurt my reliance upon on authenticity as a meaningful link between liberalism and communitarianism?Not at all. My inclusion of communitarian ideas of the authentic, which, I gather, is an innovation in my work, takes authenticity out of the hands of the personalists and opens the definition up to less shallow means/modes of the authentic. For this reason, I still contend that authenticity is an important goal of life.
How does my work change the definition of authenticity?By including communitarian notions of authenticity, I am taking it away from the transitory - my work suggests that extreme individualists are wrong when they say that tradition harms the authentic self. Rather, my work suggests that one also hamrs the authentic when one ignores one's traditions. By using the contradictory definitions found in Sartre, I make the link between tradition and individualism, to come to a fuller idea of the authentic. This book doesn't harm my understanding - in fact, I think my understanding shows the ways that Potter is willfully setting authenticity in the worst possible light, when he should be shooting at better targets.
Why is my authenticity different from Potter's?My authentic is a definition, not a thing. To put it this way - for me, the War on Terror makes no sense, because "terrorism" is not a thing that can be stopped. It is a category of behaviour that will always just crop up when people have need of it. Such is authenticity - it is not a thing (not yoga or individualism or romance), but, rather, an aim. If we keep it as a simple word - that which is true, voluntary and good for your soul - then it really can be anything, can't it? The authentic is in the eye of the beholder. I merely suggest, like Potter, that modern life is failing to make/keep us happy, so, therefore, we need to take a second look at what constitutes the authentic - not whether we need to second guess whether the authentic is a good thing to begin with.
How would this book have changed your work if it had come out soon enough for you to use it?That is a good question, which, sadly, we cannot answer without a time machine. However, I think that I likely would have included some dialogue with this book in my conclusion, or in my chapter on authenticity - both an agreement and critique. It might have helped me refine my argument or definitions. It also might have inspired me to do more with authenticity than I did - which is one of my regrets with this work as it is, as I feel I could have done more with the authentic if it had have occurred to me sooner in the writing process. I have a feeling this book will inspire some re-writes in the process between dissertation to book, which I look forward to.
