In Praise of Inauthenticity

                You can always spot a faker, because they’re always obsessed with authenticity.

                Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with being a fake; if we all acted on every impulse we have, we’d be at each other’s throats so fast that civilization would be a burning mess by this time tomorrow. It’s all good and well to make the old complaint that, “Our lives are so constrained, we’re just cogs in the machine, modern life is so alienating, we should all act on our desires and reclaim a really authentic human existence.” The idea (I think) is that it’s supposed to be better to live in a society where it’s possible to act out your desires, because getting what you want and being true to who you really are inside is supposed to be the true meaning of freedom.

                I’ve got a certain sympathy with this idea—who could avoid having at least some sympathy with it? But still, you’ve got to wonder just what people are, deep down. Just what is this “true self” that people talk about when they tell you to be true to yourself? From what I know about myself and other people, there’s good reason to keep the “true self” on a pretty short leash. I won’t open this whole conceptual can of worms, but let’s just stop to consider what we really want, deep down. Do we know? Can we even begin to answer that question? Most of us would probably say the usual kind of thing, say money, power, pleasure, or love. (Of course I would say that I’d like to find some mystical union with the Divine or maybe a kind of Nirvana state, because I’m just so profound and beyond all those hedonistic desires…)

                But then the obvious next question is this one: how much does what people say they want have to do with what they really want? Are our minds really so self-transparent as all that? We say that we want these things, but it’s only because we haven’t thought them through. Say that someone could experience all the possible pleasures in the world, from the most subtle to the most overwhelming. There would have to come a point where they got bored of the whole thing, where they’d become less and less sensitive to their own enjoyment, to the point where they’d have to get more and more creative simply in order to enjoy anything at all. They’d find that they didn’t really want that pleasure at all, and that what they really wanted was to enjoy their pleasure. But what does that mean? Clearly, the first thing that it means is that desire doesn’t hold up under analysis—just think of the old monastic meditations along the lines of, “Behind the woman’s beautiful exterior there’s a mess of internal organs, a stomach full of bile, and a network of pulsing blood vessels. Behind those enchanting eyes there’s a complex of nerve endings leading into the brain. Behind the vitality of the body there’s the skull, the shadow of death, and the inevitability of decay.”

                Of course, there’s a kind of analytical perversity in the game of saying, “Yes, I know what I want, but even more I enjoy convincing myself that I don’t want it.” We do want what we want—obviously—but at the same time I think we want to tease out our desire to its maximum. In order to want anything at all, we have to want something above and beyond what we really want. There is desire, yes, but it can only survive as long as it involves a kind of fantasy, this apparently unnecessary element that is in reality entirely crucial to the architecture of desire.

                So if fantasy is necessary for the very existence of desire, what does this mean for the worries about authenticity and inauthenticity that we started with? Now, I don’t have any definite answer, but let me at least make a few preliminary gestures at the beginning of what might be an answer. I wonder if this feeling of inauthenticity is tied to the fact that we only know ourselves and others through language, which already turns our world virtual in a way. (Even a statement as simple as “Her eyes are brown” is to some extent abstract, because it only invokes “her” to the extent that she is like others, and the same for “eyes” and “brown.” You could almost say that abstract statements are actually far more concrete than “concrete” statements, since there’s far less of a gap between words and abstractions than there is between words and reality.) In a way of course it’s impossible to be inauthentic, because we can always imagine some objective point of view from which we really are what we are, so we’re always authentically ourselves. But then again there’s always the felt gap between our experience of ourselves as speaking beings and our experience of ourselves as living bodies in the world—which probably makes a degree of fakery inevitable.

                Another way of saying the same thing: highly self-conscious writers are often accused of “trying to be cute” when they draw the reader’s attention to the artificiality of their creations. This is entirely true. But the accusation goes wrong when it goes so far as to say that self-conscious artificiality is any more artificial than self-effacing artificiality. Writing is always an exercise in pretending to be something it’s not, always an attempt to approach the reader and create a felt sense of intimacy. The writer is a performer who only wants to please, and it’s always up to the reader to decide whether or not he succeeded.