My poker buddy Mark Weinberg turned me onto this quote from New Republic cultural honcho Leon Wieseltier:
"Authenticity is a paltry standard by which to appraise an idea or a work of art or a politics. Authenticity is a measure of provenance, and provenance has nothing to do with substance. An idea may be ours and still be false. A work of art may be ours and still be ugly. A politics may be ours and still be evil.
"Authenticity is a reactionary ideal. And speaking strictly, it is an anti-ideal. It says: what has been is what must be. It is the idolatry of origins."
While I think Wieseltier is mostly right, he's wrong about a few things. First, provenance does inform substance. You cannot divorce substance from provenance, or else you end up with free-floating substance--an idea that has its attractions (remember the New Criticism?), but involves decontextualizing things from their origins. Second, authenticity is a conservative ideal, but not a reactionary one. The real reactionaries out there may pay lip service to authenticity, but their ideologies usually depend on deliberately manufactured untruths--or inauthenticities, to coin a word. Reactionaries are motivated by ideals, and, as Wieseltier rightly points out, authenticity is an anti-ideal.
I would modify Wieseltier's thought as follows:
Authenticity is only one of several standards by which to appraise an idea or a work of art or a politics, and should not be the beginning and end of any such appraisal. It is at heart a conservative notion, one opposed to ideology, for it says: what has been, or what really is, is what should be. It is the idolatry of origins.
Any thoughts?
- Yuval
a comment not a propos to this entry, but to say I really enjoyed hearing you on "The The Best of Our Knowledge" here in Seattle tonight. Hope the years have kept you well, and nice to learn a bit about what you're up to.
Of course, my knowledge is mediated and therefore possibly outside the scope of this blog.
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