"We have a hunger for something like authenticity, but are easily satisfied by an ersatz facsimile."-George Orwell, c. 1949

"You have to appreciate authenticity in all its forms."-advertisement for Winston cigarettes, 1999

When Orwell complained about people's misguided enthusiasm for ersatz facsimiles, he was on the one hand referring to something like Bakelite, which was often manufactured to look like something "real" (e.g. wood, or ivory-as in a jewel case, or the handle of a hairbrush), but which was more easily mass-produced and therefore less expensive than an authentic original. But more importantly, he was referring to that desirable mode of existence called, by French and German existentialists around the time he was writing, "authenticity." In the latter case, he might have been lamenting the fact that middle-class people were seeking "liberation," or their "true selves," but were merely getting out of one rut and into another, by settling into a complacent bohemianism, or by seeking "extreme" situations (in which one's "true self" is supposed to emerge, according to theory) in tourism or sport. One feels for Orwell, who could never have imagined that some day "authenticity" would be used to sell cigarettes with the same name as the victimized protagonist of his 1984-and which simultaneously glorifies and mocks those pitiful few figures (e.g., old men in Bermuda shorts and black socks) whose "style," because it's so "white," have not yet been entirely appropriated and commodified. But whichever type of authenticity Orwell was defending, he was wrong.

The misdirected quest for authenticity is an ugly thing. Will there never be an end to the spectacle of (white, middle-class) people draping themselves in exotic fabrics, bribing sherpas to haul them up mountains, spending $15 for turkey-burgers in urban hunting lodges, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over macaroni paintings by schizophrenics, throwing out perfectly good old kitchen tables for new tables into which fist-sized holes have been carefully drilled, and-of course-emulating or at least fetishizing people darker and/or poorer than themselves [see "The Green Hills of Elsewhere" by Thomas Frank, this issue]? We believe that all of the above, and more, can be usefully summed up under one phrase: "fake authenticity."

Coined by Hermenaut's hard-working Critical Affairs Department, fake authenticity is that which is false, in the sense of "counterfeited." Need an adjective to describe bars and restaurants with "authentic" themes (usually: ethnic, historical, or outdoorsy); or expensive new items of clothing or furniture which have been "distressed," "weathered," "stone-washed," and otherwise pre-aged for the purpose of looking like it's been used or worn, for years and years, by someone who works on a farm/with his or her hands; or urban hipsters who adopt or otherwise excessively admire what they imagine to be the non-white (or ethnic white), urban/rural (i.e. non-suburban), working class, and "outsider"-in-general style of life; or anything and everything "re-enacted," "authentically reproduced," and Disneyfied in general? Try: "fake-authentic."

It's important, however, to distinguish between the "fake" (which can mean "insufficiently authentic," but which usually just means "fake") and the "fake-authentic." Returning to the language of our "Camp/Kitsch" issue, whereas the "fake" is simply kitsch, which can be transformed by the lovingly ironic person into camp, the "fake-authentic" is nothing but cheese. Let's use, as an example, one of those restaurants which try too hard to seem "Italian"-by hanging overly sentimental postcards of Rome all over the place, or something. This may not be your idea of authentic-shouldn't the theme to The Godfather be playing in here?-but so what? As writer Al (Thrift SCORE!) Hoff asks: Is the food good, or not? The insufficiently "Italian" restaurant is harmless kitsch, and it likely offers beautifully weird rewards to anyone with eyes to see them [see my "Interview with Daniel Clowes," and "Our Night on Mars" by Daniel Brantley and Pauline Wolstencroft, this issue]. There is nothing you or I can do about the bad taste of people who can't distinguish between fake and authentic, people who wear imitation leather jackets and "Kiss Me I'm Irish" T-shirts like they mean it... but again, so what? Which is really worse: honestly enjoying the whitebread stylings of Pat Boone, or just pretending to enjoy cheesy Cocktail Nation send-ups of whitebread [see "Comoerotic" by Joseph Lanza, this issue]? Irony, the engaged kind of irony which does not preclude real emotion, nor even seriousness, is still possible in a world of fakeness; but in a world where fake authenticity has triumphed, nothing remains but sincerity on the one hand, and a glib, mocking version of irony-cheese-on the other.

Sentimentality is one of the problems, sure, but only if we can't replace it with real emotion [see "The Mint Condition" by Matthew De Abaitua, "Onward Christian Tourists" by Mary E. Ladd and Julie Wiskirchen]. The Olive Garden, for instance, which is one of these places where you're "treated like family" and the portions are too enormous to be believed, is not the answer to Italian-restaurant kitsch. It's worse: It replaces the (cheap, degraded) emotion of the ersatz facsimile with the cold calculation of the simulacrum, the replica which has replaced that which it was only supposed to replicate. The fake, as Baudrillard has said for years, is charming; the simulacrum is not.

This is why cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas are no longer as awful to us, today, as they did to progressive types forty years ago. A culture of fakeness has actually inoculated these places against fake authenticity (though not for much longer, surely) [see "Letter from LA" by Dan Reines, and "Club 9, Pioneertown" by Marilyn Berlin Snell, this issue]. But here in Boston, a city which prides itself on its authenticity, fake authenticity has long since won the day. Through a process which America's favorite columnist Slotcar Hatebath (misappropriating the term from the museum world) calls "authentication," everything here in the Hub of the Universe which was actually old has been made Olde instead; historical façades and interiors have been restored not to how they used to look, but to how (city planners imagine) tourists want them to look; every incident of (family-friendly) historical importance which has ever transpired within city limits is now re-enacted in an entirely Disneyfied manner [see "Bar? None" by Slotcar Hatebath, this issue].

Even the 19th century brewery building (now owned by the company which invented Samuel Adams beer, itself an excellent example of fake authenticity) in which this publication is headquartered trembles on the verge of authentication. No doubt we will soon be forced out, to make way for fake-authenticity-seeking suburbanites who want "artist condos" in an historical building where someone else's ancestors once roasted hops. (Luckily, we have a money-making scheme in the works. All I can say right now is: Pre-Off-Roaded SUVs. Beaten with chains and tumbled around in a gigantic clothes dryer. Beep me, babe, I'll fedex you the prospectus.) Boston is not a "museum," as hipness-deprived college students, transplanted New Yorkers, and ex-suburbanites complain-because museums are supposed to preserve the past. Instead, this city has become a simulacrum of itself, a gift shop(pe) writ large [see "Pilgrim's Progress" by Jessica Hundley, and "Memories of the Biosphere" by Margaret Blonder, this issue].

This is not to say that there is something authentic about Boston, which must be allowed to speak for itself as opposed to through the interpretations of historians. But, as Clarke Cooper notes in "Debasement by Acclaim" [this issue], it's one thing for an individual (a historian, here) to express his or her unique and inspired vision of reality, but it's another thing for the culture, whose place and ability it is to generate the consensus that makes communication among us possible, to try to do the same thing. An historian's interpretation of Boston is a work of artifice and imagination, it's a fake--but this does not preclude it from being an authentic representation of the city. But when that sphere of society whose role it is to enforce inherited forms and norms gets into the action, the result is always an example of fake authenticity.

A note, here, about Disneyland. There was something attractively naïve about that amusement park's recently-demolished "Tomorrowland" exhibit, because although Disney's Wernher von Braun- and science fiction-inspired world of monorails, rocket ships, and homo sapiens extra-terrestrialis began as a fake-authentic vision of the future, the passage of time has revealed it to be nothing more noxious than a fake [see "That Darn Drunk!" by Todd Levin, this issue]. Tomorrowland has been replaced, however, by a more "realistic" vision of the future, one in which rich executives (whoops, I mean "we") won't get to wear anti-gravity shoes, but in which we will instead telecommute from bucolic farmhouses and fly-fishing streams. Fake authenticity, in this example, is so little removed from life that it makes reality itself inauthentic. Which is part of the problem.

"No authentic human life is possible without irony"-Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony (1840)

So, is there any such thing as authenticity? No, there isn't. To Baudrillard, whenever "authenticity" is evoked, we are already in the world of the fake. Hermenaut suggests the following update: Whenever "authenticity" is evoked, we are actually in the world of fake authenticity. Although Italians do open restaurants, there is no such thing as an authentic Italian restaurant. Although history, nature, race, and class are very real and very much with us, there is no such thing as an authentic past, an authentic outdoors, nor an authentic non-white/middle-class style of life. News flash: Poor urban blacks do exist when they're not being featured on America's Funniest Race Riots, but there is no item of clothing, no compact disc, and no affected manner of walking or talking which will allow anyone who is not poor, urban, or black to approximate that. "Authenticity" is a reality-label from the art world, and as such it cannot be fixed to anything living and vital. For that matter, it's even difficult to describe a piece of art as "authentic" in the sense of "not fake" [see "Saved By Betrayal" by Chris Fujiwara, and "Marlo's Meiji Masterpiece" by Venus de Malachite, this issue].

Art, as we all know, is "something everyone can do"; "we are all creative," we're told, and apparently the more middle-aged and career-damaged we are, the better. What everybody cannot do, however, is brilliantly express a singular vision of reality. Art made by the kind of artist who can do this is often derided-particularly when he or she works without sufficient resources, or in a despised medium (science fiction, comics)-by audiences brainwashed by the smooth, shining surfaces of capitalist realism, as "fake" [see "The Will to Scorn" by Clarke Cooper]. But, as I've said, "fakeness" isn't a bad thing. In fact, as long as we include "fakeness" within our definition, we can still apply the term "authenticity" profitably to all manner of phenomena-because not only is the fake often as authentic as that which it imitates, it can be more so. It's possible for young Japanese rock musicians inspired by the Cramps, or even the soundtrack to Grease, to play a wildly twisted version of rockabilly with passion and originality. How is this not authentic rockabilly? That it's in no way "authentic" in a manner which the world of fake authenticity would recognize is a plus, not a minus. The phenomenon of "jiggers," however-Japanese teens who darken their skin with UV rays and generally make idiots of themselves-is a fake-authentic thang.

At the risk of sounding foolish, because of course the terms "art" and "creativity" have been enormously devalued in recent years, it's important to talk about them here-because all great thinkers on the subject of existential authenticity use the artist as their paradigmatic example. Breaking with the Platonic/scientific tradition of "discovering" pre-existing meaning, objective reality, transcendent values, and the true self, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus-to name only those philosophers discussed in In Search of Authenticity (Routledge, 1995), Jacob Golomb's excellent history of existential authenticity-choose to make these things themselves. When the 22-year-old Kierkegaard wrote, in 1835, "The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live or die," this was no exercise prescribed by The Artist's Way. Instead of looking inward, hacking his way romantically through the underbrush of convention and habit to "the source of [his] self," or however it's usually put, he was creative; he artistically engaged with a social world he found constraining and immoral [see "Minnie Minnola's Story" by Ingrid Schorr, this issue]. When Nietzsche wrote that the world is composed not of questions with answers, but of "infinite interpretations," this was not a resigned statement of relativistic nihilism, but a challenge to each of us: to boldly interpret where no one has interpreted before; to create not truth, but truthfulness, where none would otherwise exist; to be, for lack of a better word, an artist.

Before being an artist, however, the would-be anti-hero (anti-, because whereas a "hero" perfectly embodies society's prevailing ethos, the person seeking existential authenticity rejects every ethos in favor of his or her own subjective pathos) of this type of authenticity must become an ironist. By "irony" I in no way mean to refer to that hip, sarcastic glibness which passes for irony at the moment, and which is nothing but the flip side of a hip earnestness which, being in no way less glib, is even more outrageous. Kierkegaard, a master ironist, warned against an overly-corrosive irony in his essay The Concept of Irony, noting that Socrates was "overwhelmed by irony; he became dizzy, and everything lost its reality" [see my "Dr. Extaticus, Master of Irony," issue #11/12]. So precisely because our kind of ironist is someone-and here I use Richard Rorty's definition, from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, 1989)-who faces up to the historical contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires, and recognizes that these beliefs and desires don't refer back to anything transcendent (beyond the reach of time and chance), he or she is also someone who'd never buy into that cynical legitimization of the status quo which today goes by the name of irony.

To the anti-hero of authenticity, Golomb suggests, irony -which facilitates the emergence of authenticity by helping us become detached from those things we take for granted-is paradoxically "the voice of commitment and caring, the optimistic call to innovation and formation, rebirth and transformation." Like empathy, creative interpretation only becomes possible when we've de-centered ourselves, and learned to see (and hear) the world with new eyes (and ears). An ironic appreciation of the fake can help, here [see "The Trouble With Trekkers" by Greg Rowland, and "The Phenomenology of Reverb" by David Rothenberg, this issue]. In Sincerity and Authenticity (Harvard, 1971), Lionel Trilling describes an irony of simultaneous commitment and detachment, a "patrician posture" which he says "cannot fail to outrage the egalitarian hedonism of the educated middle classes." That's the kind of irony I'm talking about. The sincere do-gooder and the earnest moralist, as former Hermenauts of the Month Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde knew all too well, judge everyone by received criteria of behavior, criteria which are what Rorty calls "inherited contingencies." It is up to the (anti-)heroically "insincere" person (in Wilde's terminology) to judge without being judgmental, and to behave morally without being moralistic.

"It doesn't matter what the jargon [of authenticity] says, so long as it is spoken in a voice that resonates properly."-T.W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (1964)

Existential "authenticity," then, could be defined as something like "that mode of existence in which one becomes ironically and radically suspicious of all received forms and norms, and in which one strives to lucidly affirm and creatively live the tension of human reality in all its contingency, ambiguity, and absurdity." Fake authenticity, in this context, means something like "an overly subjective, anti-bourgeois rebelliousness in which the cause of social and political revolution is furthered by wearing pre-frayed Dockers, driving a luxury version of a rancher's utility vehicle, and maintaining a sarcastically vague and noncommittal suspicion of bourgeois society." This mode of fake authenticity is all around us, every day, typically expressed in what Theodor Adorno called, in The Jargon of Authenticity (1964; translated for Northwestern U. Press, 1973), "the jargon of authenticity": a nonsense-language that seems to express (in a resonant voice) a need for meaning and liberation, but which only serves to mystify and oppress.

Thirty-five years ago, Adorno argued that the jargon of authenticity is closely allied with the manipulations of advertising. Sure enough, as the twentieth century nears its end, the idea that one can rebel against bourgeois life by buying what Thomas Frank, the editor of the Baffler, has described as "soaps that liberate us, soda pops that are emblems of individualism, and counter-hegemonic hamburgers," is all-triumphant. We can see what the Baffler calls the "commodification of dissent" present in the pre-history of existential authenticity; perhaps by understanding the origins of both authenticity and fake authenticity we can finally get a handle on why (as opposed to how) the commodification of dissent has been so successful.

The pre-history of existential authenticity begins two hundred years ago, according to philosopher Charles Taylor's The Ethics of Authenticity (Harvard, 1991), as the bastard child of German philosopher J.G. von Herder's ur-Romantic notion that each of us is called upon to live our lives in an original manner, and to realize a potentiality that is properly our own, and of Rousseau's articulation of the idea that the freedom to do whatever we want, without external restraint, is not enough-that we are only truly free once we've liberated ourselves from internal constraints, and decided for ourselves what's important. Rousseau is still very much with us, of course, in New Age "thought" and all manner of progressive politics; and Herder lives on in the cult of individuality which atomizes communities and sells oceans of "radical" soda pop. The pseudo-radical cult of authenticity which bothered Adorno so much in post-war Germany (and which thrives today in the form of goateed para-boarding schwags who imagine there's something inherently rebellious about "extreme" sports) began here. Decades before the slogan "Just Do It" was burned into our brains, Adorno noted that "Authentic Ones" like Heidegger were given to making gestures of autonomy without content, serving only to help advertising celebrate the empty meaningfulness of immediate experience. But this still doesn't quite explain the commodification of dissent. There's a missing piece, somewhere.

Taking Adorno's cue, we can work our way upstream to Heidegger, the existentialist thinker who made the term "authenticity" popular in the first place, and whose many real achievements as a philosopher of authenticity are almost negated by his proto-schwag propensity for dressing like a Swabian peasant and living in a ski hut all year round. True, Heidegger betrayed authenticity's ironist position by making a cult of rusticity, by demonizing cosmopolitan (Jewish) intellectuals, and by insisting that the philosopher's true place is in the field with the farmer. ("One would like at least to know the farmer's opinion about that," muses Adorno.) It's true, as Adorno notes, that Heidegger was in this sense an anti-intellectual intellectual, obsessed not with helping people become more suspicious of received truths and values, but instead with rediscovering their true "roots." But again, although this does help explain much of today's fake authenticity, it's not enough. How is that authenticity developed into the "jargon of authenticity"? How did it become possible for radical ideas ("encounter," "commitment," and "conviction," at one time-today even our jargon, whose most often-chanted mantra is a flaccid "choice," is debased!) to be "squirted like grease into the same machinery it once wanted to assail," as Adorno put it, while the oppression and atomization of those without power continues apace? How did the truly rebellious ideal of authenticity come to "accommodate itself to the world through a ritual of non-accommodation" [see "Lights, Camera, Organ!" by A.S. Hamrah, this issue].

Fake authenticity begins with Hegel, whose Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is always referenced as the most important text in the pre-history of authenticity. In it, Hegel attacks the bourgeois "honest man," whose self-seriousness and sincerity exemplifies a passive submission to a received social ethos. Believing that history can be seen as a progress toward a truly self-determining freedom, Hegel used the word "base" to mean "alienated from and antagonistic towards the prevailing ethos of society"-and applied it to the agent of this kind of freedom. Likewise, he turned "noble" into a pejorative, using it to mean "overly identified, internally and externally, with the prevailing ethos." The anti-hero of authenticity spends his days, Hegel insists, "in universal talk and in deprecatory judgment which rends and tears everything." At the very moment he wrote these words, somewhere else in time the glue-sniffing teens of Levi's "What's True?" ads were flickering into existence.

Hegel's overly romantic portrait of the anti-hero of authenticity (who, as Kierkegaard writes, in Fear and Trembling, probably "looks like a tax-collector," "tends to his work," and in the evening "walks home, his gait as indefatigable as that of the postman") was deeply influenced, as Lionel Trilling is careful to explain in Sincerity and Authenticity, by "Rameau's Nephew," a dialogue discovered after Diderot's death in that philosophe's papers. In it, Diderot appears as "Myself," an honest bourgeois philosopher; and the Nephew of the title is his opposite number, a poverty-stricken musician who earns his keep in the homes of wealthy patrons by being himself: an insincere, buffoonish parasite. (Think Oscar Levant, without the neuroses.) The Nephew, Hegel, decided, was a prime example of the courageously "base" man-a disintegrated, alienated, distraught consciousness seeking a self-determining freedom. He pours out his irony on the bourgeoisie, mocking their earnestness, and exposing the constructed nature of their taken-for-granted ideas about truth, meaning, and morality. And the Nephew does do all this, it's true.

But try reading "Rameau's Nephew" after you've just read Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool (U. Chicago, 1997), and it becomes immediately apparent that the Nephew rejects the prevailing ethos not in order to follow his own pathos (i.e. like a real anti-hero of authenticity), but because, as he puts it, "with the aid of vices natural to me [I have made myself] agreeable to the tastes of my patrons." The solid bourgeois Diderot finds the Nephew's company enjoyable not because he's been revolutionized by this abject outsider, but "because [his] character stands out from the rest and breaks that tedious uniformity which our education, our social conventions, and our customary good manners have brought about." The Nephew is a romantic rebel-with-a-small-"r," through whom solid citizens can vicariously fantasize about surpassing the limits of their own freedom. Rameau's Nephew is Jake Burton, the snowboarding pioneer whom Jonathan Dee (in the January, 1999 issue of Harper's) calls a hero of capitalist realism, because his "dissent" is perfectly tailored for the American Express ads in which he appears. Two hundred years before Fast Company, the Nephew is the hip face of capitalism, an architect of consumer dissatisfaction and of perpetual obsolescence. The Nephew, the original "boundary-testing, lifestyle-radical consumer" (as Gavin McNett put it on Feed recently), is not the first anti-hero of authenticity, but the first hero of fake authenticity.

"I can only follow my own path."-Orestes, in Jean-Paul Sartre's play The Flies (1943)

"Follow your own path."-SUV ad (you know the one)

Authenticity, as a mode of existence, is a struggle against received truths, inherited contingencies, any "ideology" (in the Frankfurt School sense of the word) which impedes the possibility of freeing oneself-and others-from all forms of oppression. But thanks to Hegel's appropriation of Rameau's Nephew as the first anti-hero of authenticity, authenticity itself has become a kind of ideology. In fact, as Adorno's 1967 introduction to The Jargon of Authenticity puts it, one of the most pernicious forms of ideology is "a vague and noncommittal suspicion of ideology": Welcome to your life.

This kind of authenticity is not only easily commodified but serves as the engine for the commodification of dissent, which is to say, "late capitalism" in general. In an attempt to channel Adorno, I'd like to close with two examples of present-day fake authenticity, in which the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, and others are packaged and sold to people who will never know any better: the House of Blues and the Spice Girls.

As Baudrillard says in Paroxysm, a new collection of interviews (Verso, 1998), art is only possible when the true and the false are still struggling for each other's "energy"; when there is no longer any contradiction between them, he writes, there is no electricity, and the outcome is not artifice (authenticity-in-the-form-of-fakeness) but "simulation, the lowest degree of illusion." The House of Blues, a chain of theme restaurants/nightclubs modeled on Southern juke joints which is partially owned by wealthy celebrity faux-bluesman Dan (The Blues Brothers) Ackroyd, is an excellent example of this kind of simulation. Not content just to imitate the Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood, Akroyd's clubs are a little slice of the delta brought to the outdoor mall that is your city, where you won't find the to-be-expected famous bluesmen's guitars behind plate glass. Instead, the House of Blues has been shellacked with layer upon layer of fake authenticity. The windows weep with fake water damage; ersatz graffiti confronts you in the toilet; pretend tobacco stains dot the ceilings. I know, because the former Creative Director of this magazine was hired to paint the flagship House of Blues in Harvard Square. (Although there's an International House of Pancakes with real stains on the walls just minutes away, for some reason it's not as popular.)

Equaled in fake authenticity only by Restoration Hardware, which sells new-but-old-looking pencil sharpeners and fire irons to people who apparently want to live inside a catalog, The House of Blues doesn't bother to lacquer its walls with old Ebony magazine covers, like the recently deceased bluesman Junior Kimbrough did at his juke joint in Mississippi. Instead, Ackroyd & co. just bought Kimbrough's place as soon as he died and carved it up for cufflinks. That might not be exactly accurate, but it is how you feel when you step inside a House of Blues. They do sell "outsider art" cufflinks, though. Did you know that The House of Blues has its own curator? who's aggressively acquired for that chain the world's largest collection of outsider art? A questionable category anyway, this kind of painting is freely mixed at the Harvard Square House of Blues with old signs advertising everything from shoeshines to churches, and faux-aged signs entreating you to "Have mercy & say yeah!" and directing you to the T-shirt display.

Cartoonist Dan Clowes has mocked "blues clubs where all-white upper-middle class audiences who imagine themselves to have 'soul' like to congregate"... but the thing about the House of Blues is, it's so over-the-top that it doesn't just appeal to our yearning for authenticity-it actually rubs our noses in the impossibility of ever discovering an authenticity which has not always already been commodified. In a way, that's a good thing-but only if it freed us from the futile quest for authenticity, which of course it does not. Instead, it makes you feel hopeless and resigns you to the world it has created. You find yourself accepting, with a weary shrug of the shoulders, the aesthetic which comes with the "Elwood" blackened chicken sandwich and watercress-jicama salad.

The Spice Girls are predicted by Baudrillard's dry comment that one of the goals of existential authenticity-becoming a unique individual, different from everyone else-is today "fully realized, and fully pointless." That's because the anti-heroic quest to create yourself has become, thanks to Rameau's Nephew, the quest for "identity," which Baudrillard describes as an "obsession with recognition of the liberated being, but liberated in a vacuum, and with no idea at all now where he is. It's an existence label. All energiesŠ are concentrated today on this derisory affirmation, this statement bereft of pride: I am! I exist! I'm alive, I'm called so-and-so!" [see "Identiopathy" by Carol Carbone, this issue]. Our "identity," Baudrillard points out, is just a pre-fab set of characteristics located at a particular intersection of the social web; we should strive instead, or perhaps it's already too late, to be a "singularity," someone whose very existence tears holes in the web. Baby Spice doesn't tear holes in the web; neither do Posh, Sporty, or Scary. The Spice Girls' whole gimmick is that they are unique individuals, individualists even-you can tell, see, because they don't all dress the same. If this is individualism, give me the opposite!

Oh hell, the Spice Girls aren't that bad. In fact, they straddle the line between fake authenticity and fakeness, so I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than I could find great amounts of value there. (See Spice Capades, the entertaining one-off magazine from Fantagraphics, for example.) But the point is this: What started as Bildung-the Romantic struggle, marked by renunciation and sacrifice, to develop the self to its fullest by expressing one's negative relation with society-has, minus the renunciation and sacrifice, become status quo. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche-one of the great prophets of authenticity-has Zarathustra say that the human spirit, born in freedom, is doomed to become a "camel," which is to say weighed down under layers of institutional conditioning. As The Spice Girls demonstrate, however, there's no point in striving to become what Zarathustra calls a (self-determining) "lion." Why bother? To paraphrase Baudrillard, and to reference yet another fake-authentic cigarette ad campaign , today the self-determining values of the lion are rehabilitated not in their dialectical tension with the camel, but as the pseudo-liberated values of the Kamel. And nobody notices. Fake authenticity speaks a nonsense-language, true; the horrible part is, we have learned to understand it [see "Feel Like a Stranger" by Matt Goldberg, this issue].

Earlier, I wrote about how artists seeking to express an original vision are too often dismissed as being "unrealistic." The inverse of this is what our Critical Affairs Department calls "unrealisticism." This process, which gets its name from "mysticism," in the sense of "mystification," is one in which things that are totally and obviously unnatural have, thanks to the triumph of fake authenticity, become naturalized-and even held up as an example of "realism." America, a country obsessed with realism, is the most unrealistic (in the sense of "simulation," not "fake") nation in the world. Richard Rorty argues that reality is created by strong poets and artists, whose new metaphors for understanding the world are so compelling and seductive they eventually become the filters through which we perceive everything; we accept their biased, artificial vision of the world, in other words, as "reality" [see "From Italy to Iran" by A.S. Hamrah, this issue.] So I'm not criticizing the Spice Girls because their stage personas aren't realistic enough. There's nothing inherently wrong, as Clarke Cooper says in "The Will to Scorn" [this issue], with cartoons. Though not as charming as Josie and The Pussycats, the Spice Girls aren't frightening, either. It's just that I don't want to wind up living in their reality, even though I probably already do.

"The absurd man says yes."-Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1943)

We can't all be ironists; not everyone will stare into the abyss. Nor are all ironists able to craft something meaningful out of contingency and absurdity. But let's take our cue from Camus who, only too aware that the fake-authentic nature of daily life is an absurdity, concluded, in The Myth of Sisyphus , that the only possible alternative to suicide is poiesis, creation. For Camus the myth of Sisyphus, who must eternally push a block of stone to the top of a hill, only to see it roll back into the valley, is inspiring: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy," he insists. The myth, he says, is not a lesson in futility, but "a lucid invitation to love and to create, in the very midst of the desert."

Golomb, in his history of authenticity, describes Camus as "the last thinker on authenticity"-as though for some reason no one would ever be able to think about these issues again. But the philosophy of authenticity didn't disappear when Camus died in a car crash in 1960: It went underground. Baudrillard, who says that we're living in an era in which the true "cancels itself in the truer-than-true, the too-true-to-be-true," and the false "disappears into the too-false-to-be-false," credits his discovery of fake authenticity to his encounter with the pulp science fiction novels of Philip K. Dick, this issue's Hermenaut of the Month. It's time for a general reconsideration (by individuals, not by the culture) of all things "plastic," all things "fake," all things "mediated" or "inauthentic" [see "Ubik" by Dame Darcy, "Copy Lady" by Marcus Aurin, and "Intimate Televisions" by Ernest Pascucci, this issue]. Dick, whose writing explores the no-man's zone between the too-easy poles of real and unreal, authentic and fake, is the place to begin.

What frustrates people so much about Dick is his habit of obsessively offering interpretation after interpretation for why the world is the way it is, without ever coming to any conclusions. But authenticity is not only a lucid recognition that the situation into which we find ourselves thrown is contingent, absurd, irreal... but an acceptance and affirmation of that situation. The authenticity-seeking ironist-artist knows that authenticity is not out there somewhere. It needs to be created. Authenticity is always a point of departure, never a destination [see "How I Stopped Rockin' with Dokken" by Lisa Carver and David Goolkasian, this issue].

The anti-hero of authenticity is serious about rejecting the prevailing ethos, which means being unafraid of seeming insincere, or even fake. The tongue-pierced, tribally-tattooed, dreadlocked heroic Authentic One of today is an in-your-face Kamel; the anti-hero of authenticity is a lion. Take your pick.