some more highlights from Banet-Weiser’s Authenticity™

1. authenticity as an expression of “utopic normativity”

Banet-Weiser derives the term from Lauren Berlant’s description of “intimate publics”

2. brands as fashioning spaces of safety, security, and belonging, of inclusive participation

We cannot productively think about brand culture, or what brands mean for culture, without accounting for the affective relational quality—the experience—of brands. These affective relationships with brands are slippery, mobile, and often ambivalent, which makes them as powerful and profitable as they are difficult to predict and discuss. It is through these affective relationships that our very selves are created, expressed, and validated. Far more than an economic strategy of capitalism, brands are the cultural spaces in which individuals feel safe, secure, relevant, and authentic.

“a faith that despite convictions that everything is for sale, brand culture might enhance possibilities for individual identities, cultural practices, everyday politics” 

Not “despite” but “because”: these possibilities don’t pre-exist brand cultures but are internal to them: brand cultures articulate their own versions of what authenticity, identity, politics are. Their versions are not continuous with older notions of those concepts. Identity conceived within branding culture is not connected to an identity conceived outside it. NO identity pre-exists the constitution of identity in branding’s terms; consumer society means precisely this hegemony of self-branding practices. 

3. authenticity is “branded,” and only relates to brands 

Within contemporary brand culture the separation between the authentic self and the commodity self not only is more blurred, but this blurring is more expected and tolerated. That is, within contemporary consumer culture we take it for granted that authenticity, like anything else, can be branded.

“Blurring” is maybe not the best way to put this; my argument is that the authentic self is nested inside the commodity self. “Authentic” internalizes the idea of older anti-commercial values and operationalizes them without actually assimilating them. Subjectivity as it is structured in consumerism is cut off completely from any understanding of what a pre-commercialized subjectivity was like, but we can pretend we understand and call the commodified tokens of that understanding “authenticity”

4. Banet-Weiser wants to look at “ how areas of our lives that have historically been considered noncommercial and “authentic”—namely, religion, creativity politics, the self—have recently become branded spaces.” 

Again, “become” seems like the wrong word. Branded spaces are built to accommodate those ideas without drawing from their actual earlier historical configurations. “Real” politics isn’t evolving into “brand politics.” A form of brand politics is developed that supplants politics. It is not that there are “real” spaces and branded spaces and we have confused them; it is that the brand spaces are all we know, and they evoke lost spaces that went by the same names as their branded counterparts. We can’t purify or distill the brand spaces and ever reclaim the "real” spaces that they are presumed to be based on.   

That is to say branding isn’t taking noncommerical aspects of life and commercializing them. Rather brands operate as though our subjectivity is fully subsumed to commerciality. Brand logic precedes our imagining of the opposite logics that we imagine to have existed before branding. Brand logic dictates the alternatives we imagine to it and calls the ones that seem like they could have existed before or earlier “authentic.” 

fake news

I keep tripping over the phrase “fake news.” That phrase implies that there is news out there that is not fake, that is entirely real, that is totally accurate. But nothing is totally accurate; everything is an approximation, and how close or far it is from the “truth” depends on where you are looking from and what you need to hear. 

Obviously all “news” is fake in the sense that it is selected and highlighted among all the many things you can choose to talk about and it is shaped according to generic media conventions that allow us to ascertain what “news” is. News is a manufactured media product; it is not a piece of truth that reporters happen to find lying around. It is accurate in so far as it conforms to journalistic conventions that connote objectivity and a concern for “both sides,” as if there are only two. 

As a manufactured form of truth, “news” must be understood according to the specifications to which it is made, the media slots it is produced to fill, the demand it is designed to meet, and the repeat forms of demand it hopes to elicit. The questions that can be answered are “why choose to report this as news, and for whom?” A question that can’t really be answered is “Is this news true?” 

So when we call something “fake,” we mean that we don’t approve of the purposes for which that media product was made, and the desires and demands of the audience for whom it was made. But if we pretend that we have privileged access to the “truth” in making that assertion, we are likely to run into thickets of hypocrisy. 

I am highly skeptical of the argument that “fake news” affected the election results, because it seems to me that view assumes that if not for Facebook, people would otherwise be well-informed, and that most people read for “facts” instead of feelings or entertainment. I think we enjoy fake news the way Barnum’s clientele enjoyed being hoaxed: It was funny to see what you are expected to believe, to imagine a world where it could be true, and to be in on the joke of your own gullibility. 

I don’t think that people are simply empty vessels that can be filled with “real” or “fake” news in order to make them behave as experts or elites or whomever expects. You can’t simply inform (or misinform) people into the politics you want. 

The idea that we approach the news as if we are fact gatherers ourselves, collecting neutral information in order to exercise our judgment about the “concerns of the day” seems very inadequate. We consume news because it entertains us and moves us and confirms our ideological beliefs about the world. That is true whether we are trapped in our Facebook-enforced filter bubble or if we are watching TV or reading the Weekly World News.

So I believe Zuckerberg when he says, “Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic.” I believe that because it is a tautology. I would go further and say that 100% of what appears on Facebook is “authentic” in that it actually appeared there. There was an appraised demand for this content that was in some instances met when people clicked on inaccurate stories. Everything that happens on Facebook is “real”; all the opinions and stories posted there are “true” in that they are expressions of real opinions people have and yearn to see reflected in the world. I get the sense when people get mad about fake news, they wish they could “correct” the opinions of the people who want that content by simply changing the nature of what is reported. Again, as if you can inform people into holding the “correct” opinions. If people only read real news, they couldn’t possibly be bad people!  

Facebook is simply a better engine for creating the news that people want, by harvesting a more detailed picture of what sort of stories they like. News on the site is manufactured to more specific specifications, and with more success. Facebook takes our inchoate world view as expressed by who we know and what we click on and so forth and turns it into a blueprint for content manufacturers to make product for us.

When we are “engaged” with Facebook, we by now know that we are seeing material meant to entertain us. Those who choose to project their entertainment onto the world as a version of reality would likely do that with whatever entertainment they consumed. People who want to make the effort to learn something will not expect Facebook to anticipate that desire and serve it to them. 

But Zuckerberg’s claims that “we don’t want any hoaxes on Facebook” and that users “want accurate news,” seem ridiculous. Facebook wants its users to keep scrolling the newsfeed, and users tend to comply when the newsfeed gives them something to feel. The point of the news feed is to make the world a side show to fill the user’s spare moments, bored at work or in traffic or in line. Facebook shouldn’t bother to root out any hoaxes, as if they are localized to specific stories. The whole news feed is a hoax. 

In fact, the nice thing about Facebook is you can use it to gauge the limits of your unreflective entertainment-driven and friend-driven view of the world; it brings those limits into clear focus. If you are content getting your information from Facebook, you can rest assured that you are only entertained and not informed.

I own a yacht

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

This is a passage from the introduction of Sarah Banet-Weiser’s Authentic™ (2012). I agree that we should “discard as false the simple opposition between the authentic and the inauthentic” and not only because the definitions of these terms entirely depend on each other. 

What I think that paragraph underplays is that “authenticity” as it’s understood within consumer culture is internal to that culture and not the trace of a way of life that preceded it, something off which consumer culture and brands are parasitically leeching. Authenticity as we understand it is a product of consumer culture, even though it is deployed to try to evoke the life untouched by commercialization. 

If “authenticity” evokes “spaces in our lives driven by genuine affect and emotions,” it is because the term works to fashion such spaces as commercial properties. “Authenticity” is that structuring process; it’s not a measure of the degree to which something eludes commercialization. “Authentic” things are not those that evade branding; in fact, only brands can be “authentic.” Authenticity-inauthenticity is fundamentally a continuum that can only be applied to brands. When we examine our own “authenticity,” we are thinking of ourselves in terms of our personal brand. If you are concerned about being authentic, you are concerned about your brand — not about how to escape the impact of branding on your self-concept.   

“Authenticity” is commercialized nostalgia for that way of life that was articulated by a different set of economic relations: precapitalistic, or pre-massified, or pre-globalized — whatever word you want to use to describe how it seemed when you were nine years old, when things were “real” (because you were too immature to understand how they became that way, and how the world as given was both mutable and the product of human decisions).  

In other words, authenticity doesn’t describe what we’ve lost through the relentless and implacable advances consumer culture; it is how that consumer culture structures how the past is to be consumed in the present moment. “Authenticity” articulates contemporary consumerist values as if they were really external to consumerism, and could ground it, give it transcendental meaning: you really can consume your way into being real! 

But authenticity and inauthenticity are both internal to the system of branding and commercialized communication. When something is “authentic” it is certainly not “outside of mere consumer culture”; it is instead the apotheosis of that culture. 

Trying to be “authentic” is to pursue an apolitical, individualistic solution to an intrinsically political question. To short-circuit this logic, one might begin by acknowledging that the affect and emotion generated by brands is as “genuine” as any other feeling. The extent to which “we need to believe” otherwise is the extent to which that “belief” precludes itself from becoming real. Letting consumer culture sell you a commodified sense of your immunity to consumer culture does not dismantle that culture. 

Built into that paragraph from Banet-Weiser above is the assumption that most people think “real feelings” are inherently anti-commercial or anticapitalist, but it may be that commercialization and measurable profit, in the kind of society to which we have been habituated, makes feelings feel more substantial, more shared, more real. Brands are “authentic” because they are valuable, profitable, popular, viral, etc. Many of us feel validated by the same sorts of things: we are more “real” when we get more likes. It is insufficient to think this is simply mass inauthenticity. 

It is not a political solution to insist on the pursuit of “real feelings.” That tends to lead to authenticity being used to disenfranchise those deemed “inauthentic” — that is, those who lack the means to insist on the standards that favor themselves.  

Young Writer by Pierre Jacquet-Droz (c. 1770)

Consistency through adulteration

An article in a recent issue of the Economist details the tobacco industry’s troubles around the world with maintaining the value of its “intellectual property”: brand names, logos, package designs, and advertising aura. Governments have apparently recognized that tobacco companies have “the best pricing power of any industry,” as a consultant cited in the article somewhat euphemistically put it — that is, their customers are literally addicted to their product and will probably buy it if it came packaged in dog vomit. Given that tobacco companies have that sort of leverage, states are acting to take away the their brand power, mandating plain packaging and banning various forms of advertising.

“The design of the box is where they must convey not only the name of the brand but abstract qualities, such as masculinity or the idea that a product is ‘premium,’ and worth an extra outlay,” the article explains. “If such traits are stripped from packs, consumers may choose cheaper brands.” The article also points out that the industry has described anti-advertising initiatives as “expropriation of intellectual property” — theft of the immaterial value added to tobacco products through advertising and design that is not intrinsic to the product itself. Tobacco, seen from this vantage point, is just a (toxic, unfortunately) medium for conveying ideas and social values in a compelling, visceral way. It is just another form of media that we get addicted to.

A cigarette is a cigarette is a cigarette, and when a smoker chooses one brand over another, they are in the realm of pure ideology. They have bought into the idea of the cigarette as a medium, which maybe isn’t physiologically addictive but can be a hard habit to break nonetheless. Ideology is addictive. It feels good to consume an idea like, say, “masculinity” as so much smoke you blow out of your mouth. It functions like a tautological argument: I can’t explain in logical terms why the Marlboro makes me feel more manly, but I can feel something indisputable happening in my lungs. It is reassuring to feel why you believe something on the bodily level, even if that feeling is ultimately associated arbitrarily with what it represents for you.

Governments, then, are trying to turn tobacco from a medium back into a generic substance again. They want to strip tobacco down to its core compulsive essence so that smokers must face that they smoke because they are nicotine addicts, not because they are brand loyalists, or because they like the message the cigarette medium can convey: that they are young or rebellious or sexy or sophisticated or cool or whatever other abstract idea companies have managed to associate with smoking. Rather than regulate the messages cigarettes communicate, the government is trying to make cigarettes noncommunicative by censoring the messages packaged around them, as if people won’t think to feel anything about smoking if the discourse around it is somehow stripped of all allusiveness. As if then they will just be addicted to smoking qua smoking or, even more abstract, addicted to the state of being addicted.

This seems an unlikely outcome. It seems more plausible that addiction generates its own rationalizations, its own myths, its own ideology. We need to experience a physical grounding for our ideological beliefs, and we need to have ideological excuses for our physical addictions, so they tend to work in tandem, symbiotically. The compulsion to smoke drives a quest for ideological rationalizations (“smoking is cool”), just as the need for belief drives the quest for compulsive, physically affective practices that seem uncontestably “real.” Compulsion authenticates practices and the ideas associated with them; it removes incentives and calculations from the equation. You do and feel and believe because you have to, altogether. At a certain point it seems inconceivable that I decided to smoke; the taste for what smoking represents to me no longer seems optional, a conniving ploy at something, either. It feels reflexive, like a craving.

Brands can seem like a way to add a phony value to an otherwise undifferentiated commodity. But they also mark the entry point for consumers into some vicarious fantasy, some idea tangential to consumption. The potential value of a brand rests in the conflation of compulsion and the desire to believe. It must make you feel as though you are choosing and also have no choice.

When governments mandate that cigarette packaging must be ugly, it may be that smokers’ ideas of beauty will change. There is no reference point for beauty that compulsion can’t shift, no absolute ugliness that can anchor a sense of repulsion where we once felt compelled. A substance makes us compulsive and we put that compulsion to use to make something else, some idea of ourselves, feel desperately necessary, mandatory, inescapable. We’ll create a brand-shaped hole wherever we project our compulsions.

So it seems doubtful to me that a government can take a thing that has functioned as a medium, as a vehicle for wishes and fears and fantasies, and nullify it simply by making it plain. The smallest differences can be made to signify. Our desire to enjoy brands is probably stronger even than the desire to smoke. We can’t suppress the yearning to have a specific name for the things we love.