Is privileging inauthenticity the new rockism?

Richard Rorty to thread.

With better grammar, one hopes.

Copernicus was a coward, withholding his theories! He was afraid to rock even the boat! Now Kepler, on the other hand, rocked.

Is such a proposition logical? If not, can it be meaningful?

Well it's a question that many people who not only have studied philosophy but also teach it tackle. Scruton uses it against Rorty, by way of a response Rorty uses the mind-bending "it's pragmatic sometimes to talk about truth even if truth doesn't exist" answer, etc. etc.

Like DUH.

In a wafer cone.

Slow down Jess, we're all reading.

It's like being in a school playground. Anyway thanks Strongo for the reading matter. Pip pip!

Dave Matthews Band : Name Your Reasons Why They Are So Bad & Hated.

"A drag queen in no way wants to pass as a woman"

here might be a crux.

If you stick around people will get used to you etc. Don't worry about it.

x-post

make sure you can back this up though. don't take it personal.

I think tmwttw may be right in that valuing 'inauthenticity' as an in-itself virtue is more or less the same as valuing 'authenticity' as an in-itself virtue. The two aren't really divisible.

Privileging either remains a good way to irritate people of course.

Are people here really instigating some Nietzchean flip-flop of rockist values, though, making a demand that music should inauthentic? Now I haven't read the PJ Harvey so I don't know if there's some new convolution running through ILX, but my sense is that people round here don't prize inauthenticity as the standard by which all things rock should be judged by, they just give it its due.

As for replacing one binary for another...are all binaries essentially equivalent?

I don't think anybody's scared of discussing the subject. Aren't Jess' links kinda proof of that?

Slavoj Zizek said: 'We do not escape from guilt, we escape to guilt, we seek refuge there. By assuming guilt, the son attempts to keep intact the image of the father as the representative of the Law. In other words, the desire for parricide is already an illusion that veils the impotence of the father.'

Binaries create and define each other, but they also have a power relationship; they contain one term which dominates. It dominates by being seen as the 'positive' element, or by being seen as the 'original' element, or the more powerful element, or the more virtuous element. Pretty much everybody who uses binaries agrees on which element is the dominant one. They don't agree, however, on whether it should dominate. Those who agitate for black to dominate over white, woman to dominate over man, the fake to dominate over the real, etc, must, in a sense, project into a future or looking glass world where things will be radically different. Personally, I'm interested in this simply because it requires more imagination than saying 'Whatever is, is right'. But of course I'm also interested in justice, and change, and what I'd call 'divergent values'. Because, when you think about it, the desire to be authentic is a desire for 'the one right answer', whereas the desire to be fake is about playing with the thousands of ways there are to be wrong. Authenticity is exclusive and convergent, fakeness is a club anybody can join.

People might be surprised to hear me put it this way, but one of the things I love about America is that it's the most plastic nation there is. To quote from an interview I gave Index magazine when I first moved to New York:

STEVE: You seem to really enjoy living in America. Isn't our pathology almost off the chart, though?
MOMUS: But it's so pluralistic here. That's a real counterbalance to creating any danger. In Europe we still have these monolithic populations with small fringes of immigrants at the edge. People still have an ingrained national mind-set. Here the national mind-set is totally synthetic, and everybody knows it. The American Dream is a thing you plug into when you get here, a common property for all of humanity.
STEVE: So, does the "fake folk" idea of your new songs relate to this?
MOMUS: I think fakeness is a democratic value. If you can only be a real folk musician if you have certificates to prove you're poor, or badly educated, or mentally retarded, or slim, fat, or blind, that's an inverted snobbery. Whereas fakeness is a core American value. Here you can be a Jewish folk singer, or a Ukrainian Baptist from Alabama, or any combination of identities — which makes them essentially plastic. A lot of Europeans are terrified of that. I think it's great.

You could maybe equate "inauthentic" with ironic. And the ironic does indeed become unironic with habit. Think of all the ironic takes on masculinity in gay fashion (the handlebar moustaches and lumberjack shirts of the 70s, the football strip tops of the 90s etc) which eventually become unironic and get recycled back into the straight world. Or mullets being uncool becomes mullets are cool/ironic becomes mullets are cool/unironic etc.

yeah but like all of those threads, the rockism ones I mean, feature regulars goin' "not again" and "we've done this" and so forth, usually early and often

Ironic to me only implies distance. Irony is a space in which people can detach cultural objects from their normal signifiers and play games with them. Or else it's a way for people to get close to something they would normally not want to be associated with. In this sense, irony is a bit like carnival. It's when you get to wear a mask, and kiss people you normally wouldn't give the time of day to.

I think satire has a similar, equally valuable function: it fuzzes the edges around things. For instance, when Jacques Tati made 'Mon Oncle' and 'Playtime', some people thought he was simply saying 'Modernism is crap'. And yet, those films incarnate the values of Modernism beautifully. I believe Tati was ambivalent about Modernism, fascinated by it, and wanted to play with that ambivalence. So he built a Modernist Paris and tried to think about the kinds of things that might happen there. His satire was not criticism, it was a desire to make the relationship between binaries fuzzy, vague, changeable.

the ironic does indeed become unironic with habit.

I'm with you on that. I would have been arguing very differently about rock values in the 1950s or even the 1970s. On the PJ Harvey thread I described how a music which was about losing control has now become a means of maintaining control: once rock music made frenzied audiences rip up cinema seats. Now you're in your Virgin Airlines seat, taxi-ing towards the runway, and they're playing rock music to keep you buckled into your seat, and calm.

John Kerry is an authentic North-Eastern intellectual. Bush is an inauthentic Texas oil-man. Does that make "red state" voters the new rockists, the ones that the original poster was talking about?

Maybe that makes me a "baby" or a "mongol" (that's really unpleasant term for lots of reasons and I'm uncomfortable with you using it in that way, by the way).

Then you could quote what I said about America above, how it's the most plastic nation, and say 'We'd expect America to be spreading its plastic ways of life all over the world'. CHECK! Then you could say 'Nobody would be making appeals to their genuineness or down-to-earthness any more'. Well, I don't see that yet. Politicians, musicians, dress designers, all be 'keepin' it real', at least in their own accounts of what they do. But isn't that exactly what they would be saying if the fake were, in fact, the new real? Wouldn't that be part of their unreliable narration, their mask-wearing?

Probably there are many onion layers to the question. We are simultaneously living in a world where real dominates fake, and a world where fake dominates real. The same gesture is both real and fake to the person making it and the people observing it. Right next door to the bar where 'real' passes for a term of blanket approval, there's a club where dressing up and shape-shifting is what gets kudos.

Does this have anything to do with the thread I say YES! it does, because satire's m.o, from its (claimed, probably specious) Greek "origins" through its (probably actually-original) Roman heyday, has been the positioning of its voice as the locus of authenticity. Call that locus into question and the whole project falls apart, even if you don't answer the question.

1. The blues are "authentic" (songs about blind poor cotton-pickers actually really sung by blind poor cotton-pickers)
2. PJ Harvey/Stripes/whoever searching for the "authentic" experience in rock/blues is not right because they are not a blind poor cotton-pickers. It's "inauthentic" but bad, because unimaginative and won't admit to its inauthenticity.
3. Momus makes a "blues" record that digitally reproduces the crackles and scrapings of an original blues record. But in a knowing, half-parodic fashion. This is "inauthentic", but good because it is imaginative and admits to its inauthenticity.

J0hn on satire: Well, I might be giving satire my own personal definition (but then so might you). To me it's still possible, but it's ambiguous. I could do something 'Gulliveresque' or 'Rape of the Lockesque' tomorrow and feel the same kinds of mixed feelings and messy intentions Pope and Swift probably felt. Tom Lehrer said satire was no longer possible because things got too fuzzy after the 1960s -- to me that's where satire starts.

The thing about satire, which if you look in Juvenal (a pretty incontestably monolithic example of the form) you'll find buzzing and crackling out of every line, is that it has to do two things: one, deride EVERYTHING present-day (i.e., it cannot be partisan: there couldn't really be an anti-Bush satire unless it devoted considerable time to pointing out that his opponents are no better), and two, posit an idealized past when "people knew better." Satire is inherently conservative in this. This is hugely problematic for me, since I think some of the best writing ever done has been satirical. But it's an essentially reactionary form, I think.

I would attribute our inability to do tragedy as a question of faith, not humor - whence tragedy might be possible if we could i.d. our gods (again I say The Texas Chainsaw Massacre = Seven Against Thebes and Play It As It Lays = Hippolytus, sorta, tho Didion has so much going on that it's hard to attach her to a single tragedic model).

I should have added Fate as well, or The Fates. And where are The Furies?