In search of interiority

Certainly, authenticity lays claim to a ‘praxis’. Optimistically, the authentic is given the power to radiate, so that one’s own sanctified everyday life shines in its light (cf. JA, 33). However, since there are no external categories for such a ‘praxis’, no criterion can be found which can urge the existing structures to change. This ethos, therefore, is not a movement outward, but inward; it is not a ‘battle’, but rather a search for what’s been left in the rubble. The affirmation of authenticity, of the untouchable, guarantees that not everything is lost. But the claim is even stronger: Thanks to this loophole, the subject wins by default, as it is the cliff on which power breaks. But if this is the case, then the only change necessary for a way of life to become authentic, is to ‘become aware’, which ultimately means that everything remains the same. While awareness as a political category is indubitably valuable, its ability to bring change on its own is highly overestimated. The cliché of ‘Eat up for the children in Africa’ conjures the image of a whole starving continent, without ever changing one’s behaviour — outside the dining table.

What makes such a journey inwards problematic, is that the claim that an untouched core is to be found there is derived purely from of a desperate necessity: because it has to be this way (or else everything is lost), it is so: “The Being of the sheltering space of shelteredness [des bergenden Raumes der Geborgenheit] is simply derived from the necessity that man should ‘make for himself’ such a space” (ibid., 34). Such a conclusion, in which suffering only damages the ‘circumstances’, ignores that in robbing the exploited of their childhoods, creating traumas, lasting insecurities, it is the very existence of the individual that can be broken. But this example of Hume’s law is not just erroneous, but also dangerous. What remains untouched in this process is not the soul, but power itself. If it is claimed that what is oppressed, exploited, abused is merely the body, the psyche, and all the other ‘illusionary’ elements, then all suffering is at best self-inflicted, or otherwise non-existent. This releases the powers of all guilt and negates the necessity for change. The ‘praxis’ of authenticity takes place in a ghostly parallel world, while at the same time, paradoxically, the marionette of the body, as it were, performs its dramas in a world of dreams.

What matters in the inward movement of this ethos of authenticity, is that every action is an emanation of that inner power that imposes on each act the seal of selfhood. This ‘doubling’ of each act is not to be confused with actual change, as such an ‘awareness’ is but a reaffirmation of the already existing. Still, the fact that such an inner connection exists can only be known by the subject; from the outside, a ‘real’ and a ‘faked’ authenticity can not be distinguished (as Kierkegaard also explicitly recognised). The thread that leads into interiority is as invisible as this interior itself. But if the ability to distinguish ‘real’ authenticity from its ‘fakes’ depends on the subject’s power of judgement, while the latter, like all other forces of the self, has been ceded to the external powers, then even the solipsist affirmation is disempowered. If being a self is an effort, so too is to recognize oneself as a self; the latter, however, is practiced in the mundane. Kierkegaard knew this, hence his “insistence on the unity of the sublime and the pedestrian” (ibid., 33); but the ‘sanctification of everyday life’, as a parody of this insistence, plunges the two, both of which Kierkegaard develops dialectically, into indifference. Only when the self becomes, as with Kierkegaard, the concept of authenticity stops belonging to a mystical interiority — or past. This opens the path of reflection.

In search of origin

Authenticity is not only said to be found ‘within’, but also in the past. The ambivalence is even stronger here, as the praise of the ‘noble primitive’ is a known currency of imperialism. As long as a civilization does not abandon the myth of the expulsion from paradise, barbarism overwinters in it, reoccupying its ‘authentic’ place in heated times. Ideas of the innocence of children, who then get ‘spoiled’ by entering the adult world, are examples of this myth’s persistence. As Bergson rightly notes, it is wrong to think that the ‘primitives’ have stopped where ‘civilization’ has progressed (cf. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, passim). All cultures that are still alive today have developed and lived over the same amount of time. Today’s ‘primitive’ is as far removed from the origins of humanity as ‘we’. ‘Distance’ here has a purely normative character; it measures both the apparent superiority of those who have ‘gone further’, thus legitimising the domination over the ‘innocent’, and the accumulated guilt, consequence of the primal expulsion. It never contradicted a racist mindset to admire minorities for their talents in sports, singing, dancing, or playing instruments, just as it didn’t contradict it to rape and having children with them, as those are aspects of an ‘authentic’ sensuality. But even the ‘cerebral’ talent of composing, just like all intellectual activities, were denied, as the apple of knowledge, as all rationality, was supposed to be both a sign of guilt and superiority. Such ideas persist in contemporary critiques of capitalist greed, in contrast to the self-sufficiency of the ‘primitive’ and the frugality of the poor — a form of critique that at the same time affirms their exploitation. The lifestyles that such a ‘critique’ creates are perfectly compatible with consumerism, with yoga, super-foods, and ‘alternative’ medicine all drawing from the ‘wisdom’ of the authentic ‘primitives’. But even more so, excluding the ‘dignity’ of the poor and the exploited from materialist culture, thereby ‘preserving’ their ancient ways, served as an excuse to vindicate their perpetual exclusion from access to material goods and to the market, as much as their lacking possibilities to rise in the social and economic hierarchy. The embracing of materialism in hip-hop culture (C.R.E.A.M.) was thus more subversive than one would expect.

As authenticity is something that cannot be lost, but only covered by one’s being lost in the world, the condition of the ‘primitives’ is universalised and essentialised. Heidegger’s conception of man as the “shepherd” and “neighbour of Being” is such a mystification, lauding the “essential poverty of the shepherd, whose worth consists in being called, by Being itself, into the trueness of its truth” (quoted in JA, 51). Real poverty is blindly equated with a metaphysical asceticism, a form of existentialist liberty, while at the same time the former is supposed to facilitate experiences that overcome the latter. The poor and the exploited thereby have a privileged access to metaphysical insights — their suffering is thus sanctified, as their primordial proximity to Nature. Indeed, such a view can be calming for those whose existence has been drenched in pain, a kind of religiosity that Adorno calls “the front-line creed [Schützengrabenreligion, literally: religion of the trench] of the escapee” (ND, 367); but it does, at the same time, exempt the oppressors, who, in their ‘metaphysical suffering’ claim to be in the same boat, both from having to experience real anguish and from undoing the pain that they themselves perpetuate — and profit from. Yet, this “front-line creed” has not only a calming effect, but often comes along with a certain pride in regard to the hardships that one had to bear. Just like those who have had to live with depression for a long time are afraid of being healed, feeling that their identity is inherently tied to it, those who have lived through painful times might feel that their strength is tied to their suffering. The latter now becomes a necessity, a didactic tool, which affirms its perpetuation. But it is not the imperturbability of standing in adversity that is a sign of strength, and rather the capability to make sure that suffering is no more. And this capability can express itself just as well in acts of compassion, love, and liberation.

Since the hopeless, when they reach the point where they have nothing left to lose, are prone to starting revolutions, the appeasing affirmation that one’s ‘authentic’ dignity is untouchable, expresses the no lesser hopelessness of ‘that’s how it is’. Power bows to authenticity, and at the same time occupies all its territories. Hope lies in the invincibility of the last tower; but this hope is instrumental for the voluntary withdrawal. The war is over before it has begun. In general, the powers can discard all martial rhetoric; since they are now equated with the mundane, the world (mundus) is theirs right away, while the authentic rules in a ghostly realm. This is expressed in the concept of the ‘world order’. It proves the ruling classes’ legitimacy by showing that their rule is primordial, as once the nobility did with its genealogy to archaic kings.

Power and authenticity, it seems, are both works of essentialisation, and more interdependent than it might seem — even more so as they both need to found their originality and their legitimacy in myths. We saw one such example in the myth of the expulsion from paradise. The essentialisation of gender, to give another one, lies in the near universal association of the masculine with activity and of femininity with passivity — whose universality does not stem from a presumed wisdom of the ancients, and which is instead merely a crude extrapolation not even of the sexual act, but of the male ‘giving’ his ‘seed’ that the woman ‘receives’. But given that one could just as well choose the moment of birth, in which it is the man who is passively standing by, as the ‘essential’ aspect of the, say, ‘energy polarity’ of gender, it seems that the choice of what event constitutes a legitimate foundation, is arbitrary. Or, rather, it is a question of power, of the power of decision and the creation of narratives. And it is here that we might ask ourselves, if not all essentialisation is but a mystification, while the function of the latter is to legitimise and perpetuate power structures, but also to inhibit and divert the aggression of the oppressed away from the oppressor (for that aspect also cf. Fanon 2011, 465f.). The persistence of such myths, it seems, is due to the persistence of the power structures that feed them. Assuming one’s essence amounts to knowing one’s place. It is in that sense that Adorno calls the critical impulse of rationality demystification (Entmystifizierung) — but, of course, the ratio is also in constant danger of mystifying itself and surrounding itself with heroic narratives of progress that cloak its tendencies of domination and control in its guise as the calculating mind. Herein lies the dialectics of enlightenment and the necessity for a negative dialectics: “If negative dialectics calls for the self-reflection of thinking, the tangible implication is that if thinking is to be true — if it is to be true today, in any case — it must also be a thinking against itself” (ND, 365).