The Age of Sincere Inauthenticity

Oddmakers took bets on the 2020 State of the Union Address that President Donald J. Trump couldn’t go 45 seconds without making a false statement. The president made his first untrue statement in his opening sentence, followed by 30 more in his speech. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker had previously documented 16,241 false or misleading claims by the president during his first three years in office.

To help us understand how Trump gets away with constant falsehoods — and even maintains considerable public support — his former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci explained on Bloomberg TV, “He’s an intentional liar. It’s very different from just being a liar-liar.” Trump isn’t inauthentic when he “uses a methodology of mistruth,” Scaramucci clarified on Fox News; “he’s trying to galvanize his base, and it’s a media device.” In other words, Trump is being sincerely inauthentic.

It’s a mistake to see Trump’s inauthenticity as a singular phenomenon. He couldn’t survive, even thrive as he has, without the pervasiveness and broad acceptance of inauthenticity throughout American life, something years in the making. Alternative facts, slanted histories, fabricated videos, fake memoirs, fantasy games, virtual reality, and celebrity unreality have been bubbling in a cultural cauldron — a veritable olla podrida — for some 50 years since Nixon’s inauguration in 1969. Trump isn’t an anomaly. He’s an iconic example of an enormous shift in much American literature, art, film, comedy, architecture, music, television, social media, sports, as well as politics which might be aptly described as “sincerely inauthentic” in both positive and negative ways.

“Now and then it is possible to observe the moral life in the process of revising itself,” the literary and cultural critic Lionel Trilling announced in 1970 in a series of Harvard lectures, titled Sincerity and Authenticity. The cultural anxiety of those transitional Vietnam War years, similar to our own, led Trilling to investigate the primary values in Western culture. An emphasis on sincerity as a virtue, he said, dominated moral life for some 400 years with its injunction for people to present themselves to others as they honestly think and feel. The chief cultural villains of the time from Shakespeare’s Iago to Dickens’s Uriah Heep were liars and dissemblers whose public impersonations and false behavior deceived others. Dissimulation or feigning or pretense was the height — or nadir — of insincerity.

By the 20th century, sincerity as a public virtue came to seem antiquated, according to Trilling, undeserving of respect in modern culture. Displays of moral earnestness and honesty were increasingly exposed as ways of conforming to the opinion of others. “There is no deeper dissembler than the sincerest man,” Emerson wrote in the early 1840s, early recognizing the need of individuals to engage in public role-playing to gain esteem. “The public be damned!” modern writers and thinkers proclaimed. What’s important in life and art is authenticity, not to respond to conventional social demands but to be autonomous individuals, unfeigning and indifferent to approval from the establishment herd.

At the time of his lectures in 1970, Trilling sensed cultural values again shifting. Authenticity seemed to be falling into disrepute just as sincerity had slipped downward in the previous century. Trilling observed without approval the increasing celebration of individuals devoid of authentic accomplishment and the fantasy of melodrama overtaking authentic literature. Fakery and lies about an inauthentic war led to the questioning of authenticity everywhere.

Looking back on Trilling’s lectures, it’s not unreasonable to imagine his voice from the grave saying that even beyond Trump we now live in an age of sincere inauthenticity. An odd cultural mutation has occurred. Inauthenticity is sincerely embraced or understood as an expression of sincerity as in the recycled songs on TV’s American Idol, now in its 18th season. Singers’ exaggerated displays of karaoke demonstrate one extreme of how inauthenticity can be sincere, as when untalented singers on the show sincerely maintain belief in their authentic talent despite the judges’ mockery of them; after all, family and friends have told them they’re good. Opposing this heartfelt form of misapprehending inauthenticity is a self-conscious acceptance of it to a degree that can be transformative, as when the professional singer Courtney Love says, “I fake it so real that I’m beyond fake.” In a keynote address at a music-business convention in Austin, the American troubadour Bruce Springsteen announced, “We live in a post-authentic world.”

The single nod Trilling makes to popular culture is when he asks, “What is a hero?” He finds the answer not in the traditional notion of a person performing an approved act of unusual courage but in the famous line from the critic Robert Warshow on Western films, a statement that like a Zen koan you either get or you don’t: “A hero is one who looks like a hero,” referring to the iconic figure of the movie cowboy. From Greek theater to contemporary films, the male hero is one who looks like a hero, Trilling says, because “the hero is an actor — he acts out of his own high sense of himself.”

Trilling didn’t live long enough to see actual actors and game show hosts become presidents of the United States to illustrate his point about the shakiness of sincerity and authenticity as criteria for admired public behavior. Skillful role-playing became increasingly apparent with the election of the “Cowboy Presidents,” Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Reagan was a professional actor and Bush was potentially one. Norman Mailer, who at the time of Trilling’s lectures was the most public of famous writers in the United States, said about Bush, “The presidency is a role, and George, left on his own, might have become a successful movie actor.” Bush defeated an authentic war hero and accomplished athlete in John Kerry because, Mailer said, “Bush is the better actor. He has been impersonating more manly men than himself for many years.”

Now comes Trump. “This guy’s a performance artist,” journalist Mark Singer, author of Trump and Me, told a colleague after his first encounter with the future president two decades ago. We all to one degree or another inhabit a persona that masks our most intimate thoughts and feelings, Singer wrote in The New Yorker, but Trump “has deliberately chosen to exist only as a persona, never as a person.” He remains in character at all times. None of his biographers has figured out what truly goes on in his head. After the election, Singer asked several actors and acting teachers about such a calculated persona.

“With a really great actor, it always comes down to a feeling of spontaneity,” Austin Pendleton of HB Studio said. “Trump has that — the freshness of a really fine actor-artist. The reason his positions are all over the map is because he lives in the moment. That’s electric to people.”

Richard Feldman of Juilliard said, “What makes Trump so powerful is that he believes his own story. When he says those women made up those stories of sexual assault, what makes him feel authentic is that some part of him believes it.”

Everyone remembers Trump saying, “Grab ’em by the pussy,” when he bragged about his exploits with women in a taped conversation with Billy Bush, host of the TV show Access Hollywood. What isn’t so often cited is that Trump was then NBC’s biggest star, the network’s “cash cow,” as Bush wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece. Bush and seven other guys on the bus laughed at what they took to be Trump’s “crass standup act. He was performing. Surely, we thought, none of this was real.” But much was real, according to firsthand accounts of Trump by some 20 women. Then the president claimed the voice on the tape wasn’t his. In another off-camera conversation, after Bush reportedly challenged him for inflating his TV ratings, Trump replied, “People will believe you. You just tell them and they believe you.”

During his initial year as president, Trump asked people to believe an astonishing 2,140 documented false or misleading claims, something that would’ve been his undoing in an earlier time. During and since his impeachment, the untrue statements have kept mounting to include fantastical assertions about the coronavirus. In London last year, I saw All’s Well That Ends Well, a play that exposes the character Parolles as an inveterate liar. Parolles, whose name means “Words,” is both a braggart and “the lie incarnate,” as described by the Shakespeare scholar Muriel Clara Bradbrook. “To give the lie was the deadliest of insults,” a violation of the Elizabethan code of honor. “Crimes of violence were less dishonorable; the convicted liar was finished socially.”

As opposed to today’s political moment of repeated lying and fakery, sports used to offer a rare arena in American public life for displays of authenticity. An athlete presumably couldn’t fake catching a sphere of laced cowhide in the end zone or pretend to run a sub-three-hour marathon. When I was a boy, interest in athletics, at least on the professional level, was mostly limited to the three major sports — baseball, football, and boxing. Boxing was the essential sport, the authentic sport, now replaced in TV popularity by mixed martial arts, a combination of kicking, wrestling, and slugging that emphasizes violent street-fight action over technique. The biggest payday in professional boxing history occurred in 2017 when former boxing champion Floyd Mayweather came out of retirement and without serious training easily knocked out a mixed martial arts champion in what The Ring magazine derided as a “spectacle.” An authentic boxing match alone couldn’t garner such fans or money. “There’s no way I can watch boxing,” a 25-year-old fan of mixed martial arts recently told The New York Times. “It’s just too boring.”

The same response to wrestling as “boring” occurred early in the last century when fans wanted the spectacle of nonstop action rather than skilled matches requiring discriminating appreciation. You might now click your remote for months, or perhaps four years between the Olympics, before catching a glimpse of authentic wrestling, formerly the glory of sport in Greek civilization. The fakery of bulked-up wrestlers in comic spectacles exploded in popularity in the 1980s and reached their apogee on TV in the late 1990s. Trump hosted two WrestleMania spectacles in Atlantic City before getting into the action himself. Impersonating a tough guy, he flung a wrestling promoter to the floor and pummeled him with fake punches. Three years before winning the presidency, Trump was inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame.

In contrast, nothing is more authentic than serious literature, Trilling said. It fosters personal autonomy. Those of us who were students in his audience may have been the last generation in America to accept without a flinch his claims of serious art as the model of authenticity and the artist as its personal example. Indifferent to commercial demands or audience approval, modern literature followed its own dictums. It challenged us. It tore away social masks of hypocrisy. It generated resistance. It offered nothing less than the meaning of life, the reason for existence. Modernism, with a big M, was subversive and adversarial. It was transformative. It threw rocks at the Establishment.

During the spring of Trilling’s lectures, Norman Mailer, the then-antiwar activist who defined his position as a writer in opposition to the corporate, technological establishment, came to Harvard to give a reading and referred to Trilling, who sat among us in the audience of 500 in Sanders Theatre. Extending his adversarial position beyond mainstream culture to those in the audience who protested the Vietnam War, Mailer said, “Revolutionaries have two options: one is to be militant, and the other is to think.” He went on, “Throwing bricks is good for some guys and bad for others. The main thing is to do it authentically.” A glimmer of approval brightened Trilling’s face.

The advent of modernism didn’t produce smiles everywhere. Even as the primary principle of authenticity waned during the Vietnam War, much modern writing was loathed for its propensity to shock and divert literature into the gutter. Every shift in cultural values is iconoclastic in its professed reaction to what came before it, while it silently continues some part of what it seemingly rejects. Early 20th-century writers who attacked romanticism in art and poetry now seem in retrospect incredibly romantic in sentiment and language. While traditionalists condemned modern writing and art negatively as degraded and even, in cases, obscene, deserving to be banned, writers and artists themselves celebrated individual creativity with religious intensity. “[T]he devotion now given to art,” Trilling said, meaning primarily literature, “is probably more fervent than ever before in the history of culture. This devotion takes the form of an extreme demand: now that art is no longer required to please, it is expected to provide the spiritual substance of life.”

The status of art’s salvific power quickly became outmoded, even to Trilling. On the cultural horizon he saw troubling signs of an easy acceptance of mass-produced art, rife with cultural commonplaces. Art no longer made demands on its audience or outraged its habitual sensibility. He noted an increasing conjunction of advanced art with popular and commercial art. The result was disturbing. To be authentic is to be singular not a copy. “Inferior art, commercial-popular art, has always been thought corrupting,” he said.

In 2008, the mass-produced commercial object merged with the anointed important work of art when the New York Guggenheim Museum devoted its spiral space to a comprehensive, 30-year retrospective celebrating Richard Prince as one of “contemporary art’s foremost innovators,” particularly for his series of “appropriation art” called Cowboys, which initiated his enormous art-world success when he began making blown-up photographic reproductions of cowboy scenes from Marlboro cigarette ads. “This was a famous campaign,” Prince has said. “If you’re going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank.” Prince set the auction record for photography when one of his photos of a Marlboro advertisement sold for $1.2 million. No original vintage photograph by an American master had previously sold for a million dollars. He later surpassed the record for the most expensive photograph sold at auction when another reproduction from his Marlboro cowboy series went for $3.4 million. The original photographers of the ads and the cowboy models received no credit or payment. “There’s not a pixel, there’s not a grain that’s different,” Jim Krantz, a commercial photographer, said about a photograph he had taken for a Marlboro ad and Prince’s enlarged duplication of it.

“Making art has never been a mystery to me,” Prince said. “It’s never been something that’s very difficult.” In reproducing stock images of mass media as his own autonomous work, Prince says he found a “reality that has the chances of looking real but a reality that doesn’t have any chances of being real.” Art always made him feel good, he told a Vanity Fair reporter. “Anything I do,” he added, “I hope it would make you feel good. It’s as simple as that.” In the process, authenticity is no longer to be considered an authentic value.

The term “postmodern” doesn’t appear in Trilling’s original lectures, but in their published version in 1972 he added a footnote — with hyphenated spelling that indicates the new usage of the coinage — describing “Post-Modern” as the current period when “the faculty of ‘taste’ has re-established itself at the centre of the experience of art.” The older adversarial position of modern art to its audience has become anachronistic. “At the present moment,” Trilling says, “art cannot be said to make exigent demands upon the audience. […] The audience likes or does not like, is pleased or not pleased.” This decade was momentous, according to the Native American writer Paul Chaat Smith in Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong, when truth ceased to matter “because television and popular culture rule the world.”

Now some 50 years later, Trilling’s intimation is full blown. “When watching a show such as American Idol (or, in the UK, Pop Idol), we can feel as though authenticity doesn’t matter any more,” Hugh Baker and Yuval Taylor propose in Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. What matters is an appeal to the likes and the dislikes of television viewers through a homogenization of music from the past to reach the widest possible audience. In Trilling’s beloved realm of literature, many memoirs with audience-appealing stories of degradation, recovery, and redemption have in recent years been exposed as inauthentic. None of these frauds, however, matched the uproar over the fabricated events in James Frey’s autobiographical account of his triumphant recovery from crime and drug addiction.

Frey’s best-selling book, A Million Little Pieces, was supposedly a true story. The problem was that America’s Queen of Sincerity, Oprah Winfrey, endorsed James Frey on TV (twice), and he’d lied to her. Modern autobiography, as Trilling tells us, is a carry-over from the age of sincerity when a new sense of the individual self came into being; the person depicted in Rousseau’s Confessions may repel us, but the writer in his impulse to reveal himself honestly demonstrates his likable sincerity. Writers may sincerely misremember or embellish some things, as memoirists habitually do, but they can’t outright lie, as Oprah accused Frey of doing when she publicly shamed him and his publisher. But nobody wanted this story, Frey claimed, when he presented it as a novel. Eighteen publishers turned it down. He blamed his agent, editor, and publisher for labeling his book a “memoir” that with Oprah’s blessing then rapidly sold two million copies. They, in turn, all claimed they were duped. Nevertheless, all managed to work together — author, agent, editor, publisher, and Oprah — to create a salable commodity that even as fiction is a sincerely inauthentic story. Frey’s role in this escapade merited him a $1.5 million contract for his next book, Bright Shiny Morning, published with jacket photographs by Richard Prince.

The cultural chasm since Trilling’s time is no better evident than in the replacement of the terms “serious novel” and “quality fiction” with the epithet “literary fiction,” a label congenial to a marketplace where novels of literary merit form just another genre based on audience taste, along with thrillers, romances, chick lit, and fantasy. Books are now only commodities, novelist Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in Harper’s, “and a ‘good book’ means a high gross.” Few today talk about quality fiction or serious novels as did old-timers like Le Guin and Mailer. In a National Book Award speech, Mailer echoed Trilling when he said the purpose of a great novel is not to kill time on an airplane trip but to enter and even alter a person’s life. “The good serious novel and most certainly, the rare great novel, is now inimical to the needs of this market place.”

Trilling claimed the organic principle of architecture is the chief criterion for what is authentic in art and life. Hemingway professed the same view in his theoretical statement about modern writing: “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.” The lack of organic design is also what the novelist Chitra Divakaruni detected in many of the 300 contemporary novels she read in a five-month period while judging the National Book Award. Many flagged after 50 pages to leave her wondering if “the novel was sold on the strength of its first few chapters, after which the writer slackened off and the editor didn’t care.” The successful novel in her view effects a shape, a design. Unlike the architectonic aesthetic of modernist writing, self-conscious prose and voice-driven fiction rely more on what B. R. Myers in The Atlantic called a “barrage of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right word.”

The Italian writer Italo Calvino would agree. “It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty — that is, the use of words,” he wrote in the lectures he was to deliver at Harvard 15 years after Trilling. “It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably. […] That’s why I try to talk as little as possible.” At least in writing, Calvino says, he can revise each sentence to the point of reduced dissatisfaction with his words. Lots of words, though, are what we’ve been getting since Calvino died in 1985 before he could deliver his lectures, more words than ever on radio call-in and TV talk shows, as well as on our computers and mobiles during the Big Bang of misinformation in posts, tweets, blogs, podcasts, and videos.

“Blog writing,” the cultural critic Sarah Boxer wrote in The New York Review of Books, “is Id writing — grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty,” all intending to say, “Hey, I’m here.” But who’s “I”? The self can hide behind aliases or anonymity or simply dissolve into another self and a virtual reality. Authenticity doesn’t matter; what matters is to be noticed with links on other blogs pointing toward your blog to achieve fame as a blog celebrity or, more precisely, a blogebrity. The blog Eschaton notes that the audio-and-visual media of YouTube began “the age when it is impossible to tell parody/irony/performance art from completely sincere product.”

What’s normal about inauthenticity today is its widespread acceptance. Thirty years ago the popular R&B singers Milli Vanilli had a Grammy revoked for lip-synching to the voices of others. Eight years ago, at the time of her death, the pop star Whitney Houston’s Super Bowl XXV performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was repeatedly shown on TV as one of the greatest national anthems in history and the highlight of Houston’s career. Before this year’s 2020 championship game Rolling Stone called it “the gold standard for all Super Bowl performances […] one of the most stunning moments in American sports history.” A TV commentator said, “Whitney sang her heart out into the mic.” He neglected to add how the microphone was turned off and Houston lip-synched to a prerecorded tape, albeit her own. Viewers of President Obama’s inauguration watched Yo-Yo Ma earnestly playing his cello while they actually heard a recording made two days earlier. Ma said he wanted the performance to be emotionally genuine.

“The secret of people who had class was that they remained accurate to the facts,” Mailer wrote some 40 years ago in The Executioner’s Song, a claim striking many today as anachronistic. Facts are prosaic, as Mailer shows, open to multiple interpretations, but they need to be confronted not dismissed as fantasy. With one foot fixed in the age of modernism Mailer stretches the other back to earlier writers like the novelist George Eliot, who best expresses this aesthetic when she said, “Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: — in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.” In almost a postmodern satirical performance of this aesthetic quest, Mailer tried to create the authentic sound of a fist hitting someone’s face for his movie Tough Guys Don’t Dance by punching himself. “The sounds of punches in movies are all phony,” he said. While a sound designer used a portable digital recorder, Mailer hit himself in the face and the chest again and again, at least 20 times, until he got the authentic sound he wanted. In contrast, the sound designer of the film No Country for Old Men used a pneumatic nail gun to reproduce the explosive bangs of an air-tank cattle gun when a psychotic killer shoots people. The soundman was looking for impact. “I wasn’t looking for authenticity,” he said, “so I didn’t even research cattle guns.”

“Fantasy from del Toro Wins Top Oscar” was online news after the 2018 Academy Award for Best Picture went to a love story between a mute woman and a mysterious, scaled creature ripped from Amazon waters. Fantasy and spectacle are what Hollywood knows best. This year’s 2020 Academy Award for Best Picture went to a technically skillful South Korean film passed off as a PC social message artistically dominated by fantasy and violence. Trump disparaged the film without seeing it or recognizing its Americanized allegiance to the fantasy and spectacle he called for: “Can we get, like, Gone with the Wind back, please?” Last year, the 2019 Best Picture Oscar went to a movie derided by The New York Times movie critic Wesley Morris as a “particularly perverse” example of a “racial reconciliation fantasy.” Films about environmental degradation of the Amazon or any other place received no attention. In the past two years, Oscars also went to three triumphant blockbusters about World Wars I and II, but none to films about the United States’s longest-running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At a Pennsylvania rally after the Oscars show a year ago, Trump fostered his own spectacle, racking up another half-dozen false and misleading statements to add to his growing record. He boasted of his appeal to women voters and taunted the TV celebrity, who, according to the Times that day is “a fantasy candidate for Democrats: Oprah Winfrey.” The previous day Winfrey herself opened a $250 million Walt Disney fantasy, starring as a celestial guide magically traversing space and time. As if invoking her supernatural powers, she told People magazine that she’d asked God to tell her if she should run for president, but she hadn’t heard back.

The posturing figure with the sweeping hair whose intellectual significance makes him an important precursor to our time is the playwright, novelist, and personality Oscar Wilde, who, in Trilling’s words, was “one of the great figures of Victoria’s reign.” In his attack on Philistine respectability and earnest sincerity, Wilde quipped, “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered.”

Fantasy, role-playing, and impersonation led to what Trilling feared is a loss of personal integrity and authenticity. “In our time,” he said, “the conception of the self has been undergoing a drastic revision, of which a notable element is the lessening of the value formerly assigned to individuation.” The result is a fake person following the herd to the point of scarcely being a self at all but rather a “reiterated impersonation.” To be authentic is to be original, individualistic, unlike anybody else. “Born Originals,” the 18th-century aesthetician Edward Young asked, “how comes it to pass that we die Copies?” Today even Trump’s propensities aren’t one of a kind. Populist demagogues thrive throughout the world.

Like most of us in his audience, Trilling missed what he discerned elsewhere when examining details that distinguish the morality of one age from another: change doesn’t consist simply in the loss of old status and privileges; “something is gained as well as lost — something is gained through the loss” — a new relation to art and a new awareness. A century after Wilde advised the young to be as artificial as possible, he might now say that their second duty is to be, as he was, aware of it.

Overt inauthenticity has appropriately made a comeback in recent years with a revival of the great performing arts of sincere inauthenticity like magic, ventriloquism, and impersonation. The ventriloquist Terry Fator with dummies that impersonate celebrity singers won a million-dollar prize on a primetime TV talent show and caused a delighted Oprah to fall out of her chair. He performs as a multimillion-dollar Las Vegas headliner at the Mirage, an inconceivable achievement in the era of Trilling when ventriloquism would have been considered unhip or old-fashioned, meaning inauthentic for the present time. Magic was then a moribund public art as well, but it’s now booming with several magicians appearing on Oprah and in primetime series. Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself set an off-Broadway New York theater record for a magic show with repeated extensions and sold-out audiences. In January 2020, magician Derren Brown culminated a string of sold-out performances on Broadway. In literature, magic and fantasy increasingly sell and win awards. In acknowledgment, the 2020 L.A. Times Book Prizes in October will offer for the first time a special prize to include fantasy and speculative fiction.

Impersonators on TV have moved from the wings to center stage. The comedians Whoopi Goldberg and Dave Chappelle, as paragons of outraged authenticity, once whipped a phony, hypocritical society with lacerating tough talk. They then gave way to comics who reveal social deceptions they work on themselves, like Sarah Silverman, who describes her funny self-impersonation as an earnest “asshole,” which in politer phrasing is to say she’s an inauthentic jerk but sincere in thinking otherwise. Impersonating a news anchor, the comedian Jon Stewart invested “fake news” with cultural authenticity before Trump as president appropriated and sullied the term. Trump himself engaged in impersonation to disguise the staging, shooting, reshooting, and editing that go into the accepted fakery of so-called TV reality shows. The importance of inauthenticity became increasingly apparent when in 2007 the impersonator of a conservative political pundit on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report was voted the Associated Press Celebrity of the Year for having the biggest impact on pop culture.

Self-aware manifestations of inauthenticity also dominate much popular writing and art. David Sedaris, described on Wikipedia as “the rock star of writers,” cheerfully writes, “Like most seasoned phonies, I roundly suspect that everyone is as disingenuous as I am.” The death of a friend left him unable to shake the mixed sincerity and inauthenticity of his mourning: “My grief was genuine, yet still, no matter how hard I fought, there was an element of showmanship to it. […] It was as if I’d learned to grieve by watching television.” In a review of the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective of the artist Cindy Sherman, titled “The Art of the Impersonator,” critic Sanford Schwartz sees as both limited and enthralling Sherman’s large self-photographs presented as fake paintings in cheesy frames; “the sheer human spectacle of someone continually transforming herself into one person after another has proved riveting.” The convicted art forger John Myatt, perpetrator of what has been called “the biggest art fraud of the 20th century,” is now out of prison and successfully selling his forgeries as “Genuine Fakes.”

In his final lecture, Trilling acknowledged that the modernist age was over and inauthenticity was on the rise. As if to punctuate his anxiety that April evening in 1970, the sound of sirens and the smell of tear gas entered the hall as he spoke. Many of us in the audience had attended a massive afternoon peace rally in Boston Common to protest the Vietnam War. A splinter group protesting the New Haven trials of Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers marched into Harvard Square with 1,500 demonstrators chanting, “Free Bobby Seale,” and, “One, two, three, four, we don’t want this fucking war.” Street fighting raged in the square for four hours as a growing number of demonstrators threw bricks, looted stores, torched police cars, and set fire to buildings. Twelve hundred cops swung nightsticks and shot tear-gas canisters. Two thousand National Guardsmen stood by. Charging police drove protestors onto Mount Auburn Street, where bystanders swelled the final crowd to nearly 3,000, including many from the Trilling lecture.

Today other wars flare on the horizon, joining domestic unrest and a global pestilence to mark what may be equally a turning point in an unnamed but so-called post-authentic, post-fact, post-truth, post-racial, post-gender, post-literary, post-historical, post-text, post-postmodern era. While Trilling felt uneasy about the shift away from the ideal of an integral authentic self, he recognized that the truth of the self can at times consist in its being not true to itself, in there being no self to be true to, or at best only a fragmented self composed of many selves. Poor Emma Bovary, the fictional heroine of Flaubert’s novel, has been castigated by readers and critics for the inauthenticity of her fantasies and self-corrupting impersonations. One of the most touching moments in Trilling’s lectures is his defense of Emma Bovary against the condescension of her harsher critics who see her inauthenticity in the “roles that she was continually playing for others and for herself and which were based on the most platitudinous of conventions.”

Trilling cautions us to understand that Madame Bovary is each one of us. We are all insincere. We are all inauthentic. Trilling revealed the fear underlying our reading of the original Madame Bovary. Uneasy laughter at today’s characters of sincere inauthenticity underscores a revelation no less distressing: we are all self-deluded to one degree or another. We are all self-deceived. But there are degrees. There’s no going back to modernism’s naïve view of authenticity. If awareness grants freedom, then recognition of our inauthenticity and self-deception may perhaps free us to become less so. Will 2020 reveal Trump as the apex and culmination of a 50-year shift in cultural values and the initiation of a new one? Will more heroes then emerge who don’t look like heroes? Today several young novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, painters, comedians, and magicians express in their art a poignant longing to bridge the gap between the magical and the prosaic. They may point to a future as we spiral deeper into the age of fantasy or finally out of it with greater awareness of the tragedy and necessity of human self-deception.

Four hundred years ago, the disgraced and vilified Parolles in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well admits he’s a liar. Trump doesn’t. Parolles gains some authenticity in his awareness. The question of Trump’s awareness remains. Whether or not he escapes electoral defeat or later indictment, he’s still an iconic figure of our time, a conjurer of magical cloud pictures as opposed to prosaic facts. Trump and his shifting self-creations manifest what Trilling called a “cultural mutation” that has evolved into a 50-year merger of sincerity and inauthenticity. Social media from Facebook to TikTok buzz in response to a global pandemic with news about washing hands, elbow bumps, the Wuhan Shake, government plots, secret labs, and magical cures. Statistics show that false news stories travel faster on Twitter than factual ones. Inauthenticity is “liked.”

Our Age of Sincere Inauthenticity. By Frank Bergon. Los Angeles Review of Books,  April 12, 2020

Postmodernism and Donald Trump

I was watching CNN’s Reliable Sources a couple of weeks ago and was struck by an exchange between host Brian Stelter and Andrew Marantz, author of Antisocial, a new book about online extremism.

They were discussing the false narratives surrounding President Trump and why they’re so difficult to cut through. As long as Trump has a right-wing media ecosystem to spin and protect and lie for him, the argument went, it’s just not clear that the “facts” matter all that much.

“People focus on the underlying facts,” Marantz told Stelter, “but the underlying facts are not the things that matter in terms of narrative-shaping ... narrative-shaping happens on Fox News, in Congress, on the internet.”

That facts don’t seem to matter anymore is hardly a new observation. But it’s all the more urgent now, as we trudge into an impeachment process that will almost certainly lead to an unsatisfying conclusion in which no one version of the truth is likely to come out and be held by the public. In the 21st-century media ecosystem, “alternative facts” — as Kellyanne Conway’s famous formulation goes — can reign supreme, or at the very least blot out the truth.

But what really struck me about Stelter and Marantz’s conversation is how its insights about the death of facts and the profusion of narratives sprouted from a philosophical movement that began almost four decades ago but has since been blamed for the nihilism of the Trump era.

That movement is called “postmodernism,” and its legacy, while mixed, is very much worth revisiting. Postmodernism isn’t any one thing. It refers to a host of ideas and literary movements and even architectural styles. But what its critics fixate on is its purported attack on the idea of capital-T truth. Some key postmodern thinkers reveled in the idea’s destabilizing power and opened the door to questioning the very notion of objective knowledge. To hear critics tell it, the postmoderns created the post-truth future.

There is some truth to the critique. A version of postmodernism that questioned objective truth and promoted relativism was fashionable, even celebrated, in the academy in the 1980s and 1990s. But did the scribblings of obscure French philosophers really impel us into the age of Trump?

More likely, the changes that brought us that world were already underway when Jean Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition — the book that coined the term — dropped in 1979. Forty years later, it’s more useful and accurate to view Lyotard and his fellow postmoderns’ work as a diagnosis of a world that was then already being fractured by mass media and technology.

Postmodernism didn’t set us on our path toward information dystopia. At its core, it identified a crisis that was brewing in its time — and that has reached a boil in our benighted present.

Postmodernism has been a favorite scapegoat for our ills for decades now. The conventional critique of postmodernism is that it’s nihilistic, a knock that you hear from critics on the left and the right.

In the Trump era, the critique has deepened — not just nihilistic, critics say, but the source of our era’s woes. Liberals like the former chief book critic for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, argue that postmodernism spilled out of the academy and seeped into the broader culture, devaluing the very concept of objectivity. She lays the fact-averse both-sideism of the Trump age at the feet of postmodernism, which she believes cemented the idea that no “perspective” can be privileged over another.

The psychologist and pop-philosopher Jordan Peterson believes postmodernism’s obsession with marginalization and cultural appropriation kicked off our current political correctness “crisis.” As he describes it in a blog post, postmodernism was the brainchild of a handful of leftist academics in the ’70s and ’80s who argued that “since there are an innumerable number of ways in which the world can be interpreted and perceived ... no canonical manner of interpretation can be reliably derived.”

For Peterson, postmodernism’s skepticism of capital-T truth unleashed the menace of identity politics and placed race and identity at the center of the struggle for power. There are a few problems with that logic, but if you buy Peterson’s premise, then his conclusion more or less follows.

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist and author of Enlightenment Now, has expressed what is probably the most common complaint about postmodernism. He thinks of it as a progressive phantasm that has destroyed the liberal arts. “The humanities,” he says, “have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political correctness.”

On Pinker’s view, postmodernism threatens the progress of science (by questioning the possibility of objective truth) and is also a poison pill for liberal democracies because it replaces the pursuit of shared truth with a leftist culture war over power and identity.

These sorts of takes — and there are enough to fill a library — are all united in their hostility to a school of philosophy they consider gleefully anti-truth.

Responding to critics of postmodernism can be exhausting because it’s never clear what they mean by the term — or, in many cases, because they’re attacking a cartoon version of it.

As Aaron Hanlon, an English professor at Colby College, explained last year in an excellent Washington Post column, postmodernism is “a contested series of assertions by many different people from several disciplines, hardly a monolithic philosophy.” And many philosophers widely considered “postmodern” rejected the label, preferring terms like “post-structuralist” instead.

But the postmodernism most people have in mind has its roots in a school of French philosophy that emerged in the 1970s.

The basic idea, popularized by Lyotard’s 1979 book The Postmodern Condition, was that we had reached the end of what he called “meta-narratives.” That meant there was no longer any single dominant account of the world, like historical Marxism or really any theory that attempted to explain human life in terms of absolute universal values.

It’s not so much that these accounts previously explained the world and then suddenly they didn’t; his point was that the world had become too fragmented and pluralistic to support anything like a moral or social consensus. None of our stories about history and justice — and for Lyotard, all ideologies were stories — could make any claim to superiority over the others.

Lyotard’s book is the first genuine work of postmodernism and probably still the clearest and most relevant. Lyotard — and I can’t stress this point enough — wasn’t saying that objective truth was impossible; instead, he argued that what passes for truth in postindustrial society is often a reflection of who holds power, and to forget that is to risk being manipulated.

He was making this claim against the backdrop of a society that lacked the basis for a common project. We were, instead, an atomized “consumer society” defined almost exclusively by commercial interests. At the same time, the institutions charged with discovering and disseminating truth — the government, media, the academy — were increasingly beholden to capital.

Lyotard believed that capitalism and technological changes resulted in the “mercantilization” of knowledge, which is a fancy way of saying that knowledge had become a commodity to be bought and sold like anything else. All of this, he insisted, would be intensified by the digital revolution (though he preferred the phrase “computerization”). He even suggested that in the future the great battle would be over who gets to control information.

Lyotard was too pessimistic about the reliability of science under capitalism, but his book isn’t — in any sense — a rejection of truth. His book was a warning, not a celebration. It wasn’t a call to nihilism or defense of relativism. He was identifying a crisis that was already underway. And his argument was less about the possibility of truth and more about how what we take to be true is often a reflection of unseen cultural and economic forces.

One of the reasons postmodernism has gotten such a bad rap is that other theorists — like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, all French philosophers writing before and after Lyotard — took the movement in a different, more relativistic direction. And the writing itself became more dense and indecipherable.

Over time, as Hanlon told me, thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Judith Butler, the celebrated American philosopher, emerged as the faces of postmodernism and “stole the show from Lyotard’s diagnosis and distorted the legacy of that book.”

The postmodern writer who took Lyotard’s work seriously and pushed it into the digital age is Jean Baudrillard, another French academic. Baudrillard began his career studying the impact of consumerism on everyday life. Like Lyotard, he believed postmodernity was defined in large measure by “consumer society.” He also shared Lyotard’s view that new media technologies would become a massively disruptive force that would “scramble” our grand narratives.

But Baudrillard became singularly focused on media. He published arguably his most famous book, Simulacra and Simulation, in 1981, in which he explored the consequences of living in a heavily mediated world. The individual, he argued, had become submerged in content, symbols, and ads — and we can now add misinformation and clickbait to that list.

Baudrillard was one of the first postmodern philosophers to sound the alarm about the political implications of these transformations. Like a lot of postmoderns, he emerged out of the Marxist tradition. But he quickly realized that, in the late Cold War era, political resistance was getting harder and harder. Citizens were shape-shifting into consumers and actively participating in their own marginalization.

It’s crucial to remember that Baudrillard was thinking all of this through with Lyotard’s argument about the end of meta-narratives in the background. In Baudrillard’s mind, the triumph of liberal democracy, and the collapse of the Soviet model had paved the way for sterile consumerist politics. The future, he warned, would be shaped by markets and brands and an oversaturated media landscape.

For postmoderns like Baudrillard, television and now the internet immersed people in their own private realities. The constant battle for our attention means that we can experience whatever version of reality we prefer, whenever we prefer. Even worse, because media platforms are competing to win audiences, the incentives will always push them in the direction of catering to our worst impulses. After a while, we’re just awash in self-curated content.

Baudrillard popularized the world “simulacra” to describe the unreality this puts us in. Twitter, as Jonathan Chait recently suggested, is a kind of simulacrum. Spend enough time on it and your picture of reality becomes predictably warped. The content you consume is easily mistaken for the real world.

Baudrillard warned, almost three decades ago, that representations had become their own reality — far more real than actual reality. And that was before Twitter or Facebook were even conceivable.

The American postmodernist, Frederic Jameson, made very similar arguments in his 1991 book, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism. Jameson, like Baudrillard, thought we were witnessing the rise of a “mass culture” in which media and capitalism color our experience of reality. Jameson was thinking less about “narratives” and more about how market ideology flattened culture and obliterated distinctions between high and low art. But he echoed Baudrillard’s warnings about the loss of a shared reality.

Thinkers like Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Jameson hold up pretty well, but there’s no denying the relativistic outgrowths of postmodernism. Many postmoderns held that truth was socially constructed, though not all of them argued that all truth claims were valid. But some of them did go that far.

This is the part of the critique of postmodernism that can be hard to rebut. As Michael Lynch, a philosopher at the University of Connecticut told me, postmodernism had its strengths and weaknesses. “Its crucial insight is that power in all its dark forms is what often determines what passes for truth in our culture and ignoring that makes you vulnerable to manipulation,” Lynch says.

But the big error, Lynch added, “is to infer from this that truth itself was determined by those in power. That collapses what passes for truth with truth itself, which is just a mistake, both politically and logically.”

Lynch, of course, is right. Some of the postmoderns took this initial insight from Lyotard — that power often dictates what we take to be true — and extended it to mean that there is no truth as such.

In other words, postmodernism, like any body of thought, is shot through with bad ideas, absurd claims, and shoddy thinkers. But if we look past the excesses and focus on the things it got right, it actually explains quite a lot about what we’re living through.

Moreover, any argument that says postmodernism “killed truth” implies that a small cadre of (mostly French) theorists writing obscure books and journal articles somehow transformed the world. If the world has changed, it has more to do structural changes in the information space — namely the explosion of digital technology — than with the works of Derrida or Foucault or any other writer.

Postmodernism doesn’t explain everything about our current moment, but it absolutely explains some of it — like, for example, the “narratives” problem Stelter and Marantz lamented on CNN.

For the postmoderns, discrete facts weren’t all that valuable to most people. What really mattered were the narratives we relied on to make sense of all those facts. Think of narratives as a device for connecting the dots, a way of mapping our experience of the world. This process of connecting the dots has never been immune from bias or distortion.

The postmoderns made a simple point: Technology and globalization were making the world infinitely more complicated and that meant more information to process, more dots to connect. And one way to manage this chaos is to lean more and more on narratives that strip the world of its complexity — and often reinforce our biases at the same time.

In that sense, it’s not exactly new that people are constructing fact-free narratives about the world around them. What is new, and what the postmoderns were warning about decades ago, is the volume of narratives and the proliferation of media technologies designed to flood our consciousnesses with as much content as possible. This has changed the game and, to borrow Lyotard’s phrase, “scrambled” our perceptions of reality.

The best postmodern thinkers, in other words, anticipated where we were heading as a society. They could see how innovations in technology, capitalism, and media were distorting our shared sense of truth. And none of them — not even the most pessimistic — could’ve imagined the epistemic anarchy unleashed by Facebook or YouTube algorithms.

We’re now, as philosopher Thomas De Zengotita told me, “the authors of our own universes.” We’ve combined the puerility of televisual culture with the self-centeredness of digital culture. The result is the total triumph of the mediated self, where everyone can create, perform, and affirm their identity and their truth and the marketplace will oblige them at every step.

“And this whole technology thing,” De Zengotita wrote in 2005, “is only just getting started.” The media technologies that define our worlds are getting more sophisticated and more immersive every day. All of which is to say, the crisis signaled by postmodernity will only deepen.

But there is some value in at least understanding how we got here and why we can’t go back.

The post-truth prophets. By Sean Illing. Vox, November 11, 2019.

Ever since Donald Trump won, an odd idea has repeatedly bubbled to the surface of political media: that it takes volumes of dense and complicated philosophy to explain one of the stupidest people to ever live. A whole genre of thinkpiece implies that Trump and his rise to power are either the result of, or explicable by, “postmodernism.” For those whose faith in the institutions of the American republic has been challenged by the boorishness of its current president, it may be comforting to search for a deeper meaning. It is tempting to imagine that contemporary turns of phrase like “alternative facts” and “truth isn’t truth” are expressions of a widespread shift in the human relationship to reality, rather than the gibberish of idiots who are telling lies.

It has been three years, and we are still stuck in this endless struggle with the definition of postmodernism and What It Means. Yesterday, a Vox piece by Sean Illing attempted, in the Vox style, to explain the whole thing once and for all. The article does correct some of the prevailing errors that often accompany media treatments of the subject. There is no strange assertion that postmodernism is a Marxist conspiracy, for example, and a distinction is recognized between a school of thought and the study of it. But the fundamental problem remains: this has nothing to do with anything.

The article, titled “The Post-Truth Prophets,” properly pushes back against claims that “postmodernism spilled out of the academy and seeped into the broader culture.” In the process, however, it makes some assumptions: that there is or was a movement or idea of postmodernism, that there are “postmodernists” or “postmoderns,” and that there is something postmodern about the Trump administration. “Some key postmodern thinkers reveled in the idea’s destabilizing power and opened the door to questioning the very notion of objective knowledge,” Illing writes.

The article is accompanied by a collage displaying Trump standing in front of a microphone, accompanied by two French philosophers: Jacques Derrida, leering over a chair, and Michel Foucault, shouting into a bullhorn. Derrida and Foucault are the two primary villains for many opponents of so-called postmodernism — Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychology professor adored by the right, has called them “the two architects of the postmodernist movement.”

But even the very idea that there was or is a “postmodernist movement” is questionable. In 1983, Foucault was asked in an interview with the scholarly journal Telos to elaborate on the postmodern aspects of his work. “What are we calling postmodernity?” he replied. “I’m not up to date.”

To its credit, the Vox piece avoids this conflation, instead looking for a documented point of origin. That origin is properly located in Jean-François Lyotard, author of the 1979 book The Postmodern Condition, based on a study commissioned by the Council of Universities of the Government of Quebec originally titled “The Problems of Knowledge in the Most Developed Industrial Societies.” It dealt with the way we interpret reality in the context of mass media, the reproduction of cultural commodities that starts with the printing press. But it may be overstating the case to say, as Illing does, that “Lyotard’s book is the first genuine work of postmodernism.” The term had already been used in cultural criticism, as in literary critic Ihab Hassan’s 1971 study The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, and architectural historian Charles Jencks’s 1977 book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. It necessarily denotes quite different things when pertaining to science, literature, and architecture — their unification requires an interpretive leap.

For Lyotard, it described an “incredulity towards metanarratives” — the latter word naming the story underlying every other story, like a religious doctrine or a philosophy of history. Illing is cautious about this, attributing Lyotard’s assessment not to an endorsement, but “a diagnosis of a world that was then already being fractured by mass media and technology.” But one of the problems with the claim that a “postmodern movement” exists is the question of what was there before the fracture.

There is not a great deal of agreement on the definition of modernity itself, either the time in which it occurred, or the forms of thought, culture, and political organization aligned with it. Again, these answers vary depending on whether we’re talking about literature, architecture, science, or whatever else. There is not even consensus over whether modernity is over yet. Another French philosopher, Bruno Latour, went as far as to write a book claiming We Have Never Been Modern.

The urge to group these thinkers together is not unreasonable, but it doesn’t hold up — and it leads to some unenlightening errors. It is in the attempt to chart a coherent arc that the cracks in the foundation start to show, as when Illing tries to account for the subsequent reputation of Lyotard’s ideas:

“One of the reasons postmodernism has gotten such a bad rap is that other theorists — like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, all French philosophers writing before and after Lyotard — took the movement in a different, more relativistic direction. And the writing itself became more dense and indecipherable.”

It is hard to argue that Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan took a “movement” initiated by Lyotard in a different direction (the above quoted text corrects an earlier published version, which claimed the other authors “followed” Lyotard). All three wrote their best-known work before The Postmodern Condition was published in 1979 — Lacan, in fact, died shortly after, in 1981. Besides, none of these thinkers dealt primarily with technology or contemporary media; Derrida concerned himself with the interpretation of the canon of Western philosophy, Foucault with historical research, and Lacan with various and sundry topics like sex and knots.

The thinker who dealt most closely with the subjects Illing cites as endemic to postmodernism was Jean Baudrillard, whose major role in the popular consciousness is as an inspiration for The Matrix. Illing sees Baudrillard’s contribution as a kind of media criticism, an exploration of “the consequences of living in a heavily mediated world” — a fair description of much of his work. This, Illing says, has consequences for public opinion.

“Baudrillard popularized the world “simulacra” to describe the unreality this puts us in. Twitter, as Jonathan Chait recently suggested, is a kind of simulacrum. Spend enough time on it and your picture of reality becomes predictably warped. The content you consume is easily mistaken for the real world.”

This is the very state of affairs that has led to Explainers. “We live in a world of too much information and too little context,” says Vox’s website. “Too much noise and too little insight. That's where Vox's explainers come in.” But Baudrillard’s critique ran deeper than that. The problem was not merely that representations of reality might be inaccurate — it was that a corresponding reality was not accessible. A simulacrum is not a distorted representation, but a representation for which no original exists. Simulacra and Simulation invokes Disneyland, with its reproduction of the archetypal American town. “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation,” Baudrillard wrote. The “real” town is also pretending to be a town.

Illing doesn’t quite deal with these more complex questions, concluding that postmodernism is a decent idea taken too far. “Some of the postmoderns took this initial insight from Lyotard — that power often dictates what we take to be true — and extended it to mean that there is no truth as such,” he argues. But philosophy consists of literally millennia of debate on the nature of truth. As for the question of how to understand Donald Trump, we may well be aided by a study of how information is distributed and exchanged in contemporary society. But the phenomenon he represents is fairly simple, one that has existed for as long as philosophy has: a very stupid man has more power than he deserves, and he is going to abuse it until someone stops him.

Postmodernism, explained and explained and explained again. By Shuja Haider.  The Outline, November 12, 2019. 

Three years into Donald Trump’s presidency, the moral panic over “fake news” and “post-truth” has not abated. If anything, it has now blossomed into a full-blown culture war. Conservatives insist that their views are suppressed by Facebook and Twitter; progressives accuse the same platforms of not doing enough to crack down on hate speech and foreign manipulation of elections.

Mark Zuckerberg’s recent testimony in US Congress – where politicians competed to deal him the lethal rhetorical blow – doesn’t bode well for Silicon Valley. The Valley’s only savior, at this point, is the Communist Party of China. Only indefinite trade war with China will prevent US lawmakers from regulating the “strategic” tech sector; to break up the industry would weaken Washington’s global standing. The Trump administration is not blind to these risks.

Invoking the Chinese threat has bought the tech companies some time but it won’t work forever. The impending tech bubble is only going to increase everyone’s hatred of Silicon Valley; the calls for action will grow louder. The public humiliations of WeWork and Uber, the former darlings of tech investors, are signs that public tolerance of highfalutin technology platforms (and their leaders) is already running short. More government regulation is, indeed, likely to follow – and stemming the tide of “fake news” would be one of the highest priorities.

But just how strong is that tide? What remains unexamined – in the public debate but also in many academic discussions of “post-truth” – is the background assumption that ours is the time of postmodernism on steroids: a time where no firm truths hold and no single narrative can survive the assault of radically different worldviews grounded in diverse material, cultural, and racial experiences.

To deny that something like this is happening – facilitated by the business models of digital platforms, their algorithmic nudges, and the filter bubbles that result thereof – would be disingenuous. But the fragmentation of truth is only one – and perhaps not the most important part – of the story.

One unappreciated paradox of today’s “digital condition” is that it celebrates post-truth and hyper-truth simultaneously. As narratives get fragmented, allowing competing truths to proliferate, there’s also a concurrent effort to deploy bots, ledgers, and algorithms to produce a singular, objective, and eternal truth.

The first stage of this “objectification” began with Wikipedia. Although the platform could be used to provide multiple readings and interpretations of any subject or phenomenon, a decision was taken that a “community” of editors and writers, armed with trustworthy and reliable sources, would converge upon a single interpretation of history.

While the critics of Wikipedia zeroed in on the fact that it was, in a truly radical manner, democratizing the production of knowledge – everyone could contribute! – they missed a more fundamental, conservative side of the project: while many controversial topics featured lengthy and often bitter discussions among the editors, the front-end presentation often gave no explicit sign of internal disagreement. The controversy and disagreement were, thus, hidden from the average viewer.

Instead, the proliferation of editorial and citational guidelines and regulations on Wikipedia ensured that those rules were presumed to have more say in determining the content of a page than the information supplied by the very subject of the entry. Hence the many curious cases of people complaining that Wikipedia has wrong information about them but they cannot change it as they are not presumed to be “authoritative” sources about themselves. This adherence to rationality and rules is the true modernist part of Wikipedia that has, so far, befuddled many of its observers.

The second stage of the “objectification” of narrative began with the rapid explosion of the blockchain technology. It created the illusion that everything can be embedded in digits and eventually presented, in an unalterable manner, on the “ledger”: the final truth, set in stone, not to be altered by anyone.

Applied to the narrow world of commercial transactions or computer events, this assumption appears harmless. Applied, however, to the more substantial issues – politics, arts, journalism – this “epistemology of the blockchain” creates the rather perverse expectation that, unless and until something has been packaged in a blockchain-friendly way, it must be corrupted by subjectivity, venality, or bias. Subjectivity is the enemy; opacity is sinful.

In other words, we’re starting to see an irony of the “post-truth” world: the democratization of knowledge has been matched by the intensification of the bureaucratic model. This time, however, the human side of bureaucracy is presented as archaic and uncool, to be replaced by “objective” algorithms and ledgers. The one true utopia of this mode of thinking – already glimpsed in places like Singapore or Estonia – is a fully-automated bureaucratic system enforcing the rules with Prussian efficiency.

The digital culture that ensues makes for a very odd beast. Not surprisingly, it’s conducive to the kind of cognitive dissonance feeding the alt-right. On the one hand, in a populist manner reminiscent of Wikipedia, it dispenses with expertise, as everyone is assumed to be equal to everyone else, much like the nodes on the blockchain network (another myth). On the other hand, it intensifies the modernist faith in rules and regulations – and the possibility of finding, by some quantitative means, the single truth, which can then be made available to all, without any intermediation by forces other than technology. If one had to come up with a label for this ideology, “populist modernism” would be quite appropriate.

The contradictions of such a bizarre ideological mix are quite apparent: in dispensing with the experts, it replaces them with faith in “technology” and “progress”. But since such accounts usually lack any meaningful discussion of the political economy of technology (let alone that of progress), they have nowhere to fall back upon to explain historical change. What, after all, drives and shapes all that technology around us?

In such accounts, “technology” is usually just a euphemism for a class of uber-human technologists and scientists, who, in their spare time, are ostensibly saving the world, mostly by inventing new apps and products. The experts, thus, are brought in through the back door, but without any formal acknowledgement (or possibility of democratic contestation). These experts – whether Wikipedia editors or blockchain engineers - are presented as mere appendages to the sheer force of technology and progress, when in reality they’re often its drivers.

This is hardly the sort of secure, reliable foundation on which democratic culture can flourish. It’s one thing, in a typical postmodernist move, to celebrate “situated knowledges” and “multiple epistemes”, refuting any appeals to the one and only truth; a visit to a grad school seminar in humanities will confirm that this kind of language is still very much alive in academia. It’s quite another to do it while also building a system to algorithmically enforce the truth through the zealous application of bureaucratic rules and regulations that would make Otto von Bismarck look like a carefree bricoleur.

Facebook, which is built on the populist assumption that horizontal communication among users trumps vertical preaching by experts, exemplifies this dilemma: for all its populism, it now faces the enviable task of using its algorithms to fight “fake news.” This, however, cannot be done without accepting the virtues of expertise and grounding one’s approach in a singular, coherent worldview.

The problem with Facebook is that it doesn’t even know that it has this problem: it will, thus, most likely continue its schizophrenic efforts of groping in the dark, erecting the sort of expert-led bureaucracy that it was supposed to demolish.

Nothing good will come out of such efforts, but they do highlight a fundamental truth that we seem to have forgotten: both fake news and its opposite, the excessive quest for hyper-rationalization, are the consequences – not causes! – of our problems. Postmodernism did not begin in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room.

Can the US government stem the tide of ‘fake news’ in a postmodern world? By Evgeny Morozov. The Guardian, October 31, 2019.

‘Subtext we know. But what do you call the message or meaning that’s right there on the surface, completely open and obvious? They never talk about that.’ Fred, the expat PR in Whit Stillman’s comedy Barcelona (1994), living in the early years of post-Franco Spain, can clock hidden meanings but not surface truths. His friend enlightens him. What’s above the subtext? ‘It’s the text, Fred.’

It’s largely an inheritance of literary theory from the 1980s and ’90s that we speak of ‘subtexts’ at all. Poststructuralism, which flowered on US campuses during this era, did to ‘grand narratives’ (truth, justice, freedom, the Enlightenment) what US President William Howard Taft did to unions: busted them. In a nutshell, deconstructionists liked to examine works of art rhetorically, showing how hidden meanings and surface truths exist in tension with one another. What I say, in other words, is not always what I am saying.

Semiology, the study of signs, was a topic du jour in the late 1980s, when Peter Thiel, then a philosophy student at Stanford University, walked into a literature seminar. The professor, a maddeningly contrarian émigré named René Girard, was an autodidact and lifelong Catholic apologist who had, in his youth, visited Pablo Picasso in his studio and once reportedly punctured a hole in a Henri Matisse painting during a botched curatorial gig. In 1966, at the start of his long academic career, Girard invited Jacques Derrida to speak at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore – a talk widely seen as the birth of deconstruction in the US.

Girard’s own writing linked the human impulses to desire and to imitate. Why do we like the things we do? Our responses are not only intrinsic: we click ‘like’ on our social-media feeds because other people have also done so. Desire is fundamentally imitative. As Hermia says in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595–96), we ‘choose love by another’s eyes’. When two people desire the same thing, they engage in ‘mimetic rivalry’ and they fight. Girard’s account of society is one of individuals warring with one another for resources they desire, imitatively, but cannot share. Peace is reached only after a mob declares a loser, who is scapegoated (in Girardian terms, ‘lynched’). Communities are inherently conflictual.

‘I suspect that when the history of the 20th century is written, in 2100, Girard will be seen as one of the great intellectuals,’ said Thiel in an interview he gave in September with the Hoover Institution, a public policy think-tank based at Stanford. A few years after graduating from university, Thiel co-authored a screed against diversity and multi-culturalism on campus, titled The Diversity Myth (1995). Today, some 25 years later and two billion dollars richer, he is better-known as the co-founder of PayPal, the backer of Facebook and founder of, among others, Palantir, which provides surveillance software to the US government. He consistently cites Girard in lectures, presentations and his own writings.

The Thiel-Girard brotherhood emblematizes the ways in which postmodern theories became ossified, as infrastructures of knowledge, and the way in which many were usurped by the political right. Thiel today is the brains behind another organization – with a name straight from a Philip K. Dick sci-fi novel – Imitatio. The sole aim of Imitatio is to support research and publishing about mimetic theory and Girard. It’s chilling to think that Girard’s most famous disciple – and, arguably, one of the most powerful people in the world – is shaping our reality guided by theories of radical division, scapegoating and violence. Connect the dots.

  

This autumn, Thiel is back at Stanford, co-teaching a course in the university’s German department. Students in ‘Sovereignty and the Limits of Globalization and Technology’ are reading Girard alongside the influential Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, the 2006 Regensburg lecture by Pope Benedict XVI and a book by William Rees-Mogg. Father of Jacob (current UK Leader of the House of Commons), former editor of The Times newspaper and a lifelong Eurosceptic, Rees-Mogg is known for the bestselling The Sovereign Individual (with James Dale Davidson, 1997) – a book whose original, opportunistic, subtitle is: ‘How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State.’

An investment guide for the end-times, the purpose of this book is to teach readers how to make money from the collapse of the world as we know it. This collapse, for Rees-Mogg, is imminent when we transition from an industrial to an information society. ‘Violence will become more random and localized,’ Rees-Mogg argues. ‘Incomes will become more unequal within jurisdictions and more equal between them.’ Smells like opportunity, to some.

Like the climate, many of our institutions – cultural, political, commercial – are quaking under various pressures. Looking to infrastructure, the focus of this issue of frieze, means addressing the changes affecting the deepest reaches of what we take for granted: environment, society, cultural establishments, communication networks, the media. To comprehend what the ramifications will be for the arts, we need to look beyond the usual places: to artists working on the Mexico-US border, to those mapping our changing landscape, or to the emergence of a ‘new sublime’, which architect Rem Koolhaas identifies in the world’s rural areas. We must also recognize that Thiel, Girard and Rees-Mogg are instances of what the urbanist Keller Easterling, writing in these pages, terms a ‘superbug’: a structure that seeds misinformation and plays on ambiguity and conflict, rousing division and inciting forms of resistance that too often come up short. The writing’s on the wall: we need a new activism. For that, though, we must look well beyond the subtext.

Has Silicon Valley Hijacked Postmodernism?  By  Pablo Larios.   Frieze, October 31,  2019 

There still remains much confusion over what postmodernity actually means, so take this sentence as only one attempt, courtesy of Urban Dictionary: “A term that you keep on hearing about in college and have to look up on Wikipedia. Basically says “fuck it” to the search for any intellectual conclusions.” Or, with less hostility from the same website: “The idea that there is no objective meaning, only subjective meaning, the meaning one brings to a thing, irrespective of the intent of the author, or of the Author, or of reality.”

Intellectuals who have fundamentally misunderstood postmodernism have claimed that it represents nothing—that the only purpose of said philosophy is to evade conclusion and remain aloof from the material condition of the common man. Criticisms of postmodernism intrude from both the left and right. From the right-wing, postmodernity may be associated with cultural Marxism—which is a way of both dismissing Marx and liberalism at once, and perhaps more importantly to link them in their same shared safe space of victimhood that will never be taken seriously by the right precisely because if the right were to see hierarchy, power, oppression, or privilege, it would no longer be able to look in the mirror.

More troubling is the critique of postmodernism from the left, where leftists may associate this grand theory with neoliberalism’s ethos of immorality and individualism. In short, the left is getting postmodernism completely backward when one thinks of it this way. Postmodernism is actually a way to build on Marxism, rather than replace it or distract from it. Any other conclusion would be buying the false divide between intersectional forms of liberation.

What postmodernity claims is that there is no truth precisely because the individual subject has a cultural/historical context—which seems directly in line with Marx’s radical humanism that treated human beings as actors and victims of a system, rather than competitive and unworthy figures.

To claim that subjectivity is nothing would be not dissimilar to Mr. Trump’s claim that all news is fake. Critics of postmodernity see it as the other way around. They assume that denying the existence of objective truth is denying truth altogether. Even Michel Foucalt, perhaps the most famous quote on quote postmodernist rejected the label because he wanted to be seen as someone who questioned the system. Mr. Foucalt should have embraced the label because the claim that there is no objectivity not only naturally favors the unheard (class and otherwise), we see that it fundamentally rejects the authoritarianism of even its own voice.

Even the best of critics of the corporate distribution of information and art in today’s neoliberal global economy find themselves in a position of totalitarianism. This is because they undergo the following process, which is the same as Mr. Trump’s analysis, even if far more accurate in its attempt at objectivity. Step 1 is to take what is accepted as the objective truth (accepted mainstream history, news, art, etc.) and point to its corruption (primarily financial but also could be ethnic or any other type of supposed imperfection, or a linkage, such as Jewish owned media smears). Once the objective truth of the “ruling class” is accepted by the consumer as merely subjective propaganda, we find the next step is to insert one’s own subjective interpretation of reality as objective truth, rather than, as a normal person might do, offering up your ideas as subjective alternatives. Now we find that there is new authority in the rogue subject and truth comes to gain meaning not through proof, but through the authority of the actor involved.

So, when postmodern folks claim subjectivity it is not that they are saying nothing, it is that they are acknowledging both their own flaws and the need for constant interrogation of the facts laid out before us. The idea that one must come to a conclusion in order to find truth is actually the definition of fascism. If a dictionary must appear in its final form, who says the human race must not also? And how would such a society deal with change—specifically that of cultural migration and economic unease.

So, hopefully, this at least establishes the urgent need to abandon the very concept of objective truth. Objective truth is anti-democratic. There is no such thing as an unbiased statement that has not been shaped by elements of power or hierarchy. There is no such thing as a random statement, and there is no such thing as a true statement. In fact, a random statement and a true statement amount to the same thing, and it is only by connecting them that we can give meaning to either.

I can hear the grumbles now. Saying truth is the same as randomness is actually saying nothing! Really? Then why on earth react to it at all? If this statement really said nothing, wouldn’t a more adequate response be: ‘what do you think?’ or even, just in case ‘can you speak up?’ No, but truth, in how we arrive at its exact conclusions, can only retain any meaning if we acknowledge how arbitrary it is to get to that exact spot of perfection. It is only then that we can begin to unpack the biases that got us to that spot, which of course aren’t random at all, and link throughout history, sociology, geography, physics and biology. It is only after we unmask the assumption that is in authority that we can dethrone it and restore democracy.

Now, there is nothing true about democracy either. Each person operates within their own distance from the truth but at least, to borrow Marx, implies ownership of the production of truth, rather than the blind following of it. Does such a philosophy naturally imply the free market, rather than Marxism? Not necessarily. The distribution of goods, the control over the means of production, those sorts of things are not the same as ideas, let alone people. It could be very possible to have a centralized form of economics that thrived for diverse ideas and people. In fact, such a neutral form of economics—pure in its democracy and lack of discrimination—would imply absolute blindness to differences and a replacement of this hierarchy of difference with universal human rights. That doesn’t mean that each difference wouldn’t get a say, it is to say that each would have a right, no matter their say.

It is fairly obvious that an economy that has no such tools to guarantee human rights would naturally create hierarchies to (re) order distribution and create profits. The idea that one must have an objective idea of truth to reject neoliberalism implies that the neoliberalism was a cultural, not an economic counter-revolution. This seems to apply a backward order of operations. Even though the neoliberal has assaulted the cultural and the personal, it a truly perplexing leap for Marxists to make the claim that as soon as the economic theory of their “objective” choice falls out of favor, we suddenly are not talking about economics anymore, but culture that drives the economy. Just dead wrong.

The goal of the lie of objective truth is to establish power for a certain group of people, so that they can therefore profit from and exploit the people whose truth does not fit the proper definition of normality. That’s why Foucalt saw prisons so clearly. What is a prison? And who decides it?

The corporate class accomplishes their goal by constructing the terms “left-wing” and “right-wing” and then implying that the world runs on a war of ideas (culture) rather than a war of resources (economics). Let’s look at the origin of the terms left and right, which like Mr. Foucalt, must be excused (more like celebrated) as French!

During the French Revolution, the terms left and right merely referred to which side along a row one sat. The rich noble folk were on the right, the working class challengers on the left. It was simply a geographical distinction of interests (I was going to say class but that is not even exact, as we’ll discuss in a moment). The key point here is that people didn’t have different ideas about what was most “effective” in politics, the sides simply had different goals.

In fact, one doesn’t ever have an idea if it does not fit the goal they have in mind. It is said that the only people who believe in love are rich men and pretty women because why else would they get married? Now, if one gets the joke there it is simply that one can come to believe an ideology because it is convenient for them to do so. If one runs an oil company, it is convenient to believe climate change is not real. If this oil executive has an ocean front property, perhaps the more convenient idea becomes that poor people are lazy and deserve to die, seeing that denying climate change would lose them their home. Now, not everything is self-interested as I describe above, I would like to think most things aren’t, but it is all goal-oriented, many times altruistic.

But a pure all-knowing form of truth? Impossible! Fascist! And above all arrogant and blasphemous.

So when one sees a framing such a debate between left and right we must expose it. Firstly, such framing trivializes matter to personal preference, rather than material existence. The truth is that politics decides who lives, who dies, who cries, and who laughs. It is not enough to say people have an ideological disagreement. Do some people really favor death? And some sadness? While the other half of people favor life and happiness? Seems unlikely.

An idea is only seen as “working” by the corporate-controlled media if it gains profit. The truth is that the more a company neglects their consumers and workers, the more profit they will gain, and the more this company will grow. So a company that loses money is most likely “good” for most people, just not for their CEO. This is why there should be no private companies, only government ones that lose boatloads of money and provide for consumers and workers alike.

In a previous article, I argued that we should replace ideology with class but I have since come to recognize that class itself is just one of many material conditions (even if it is, as Marxists say, the defining one). Ultimately the role that class plays in the argument we have outlined is no different a role than any other group and therefore in political terms should exist not as a passive condition but an active group in which to organize common interests.

This is why it is astounding that many on the left and right agree that identity politics is bad or “gone too far” or something. Class, as the lettered John Helmeke points out, is an identity. This is not just superficially, obviously, but materially. Which is true for all identity politics, and this is why the materialist left should be pro-identity politics.

The argument against postmodernism is that it takes what was once concrete class and labor-based criticism and obscures it into liberal cultural nonsense. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that culture has multiplied and thus so should criticism? It surely is true that labor and class in the corporate media is the last thing to get talked about, and in that sense cultural radicalism will always be taken more seriously than economic radicalism in these spaces.

Still, should resentment of this fact really drive any discussion? Should we really be so keen on the objective, measurable role of wealth inequality that we reject all nuance and democratic possibility in our discourse?

This is not to say that the postmodern tilt to inaction and uncertainty is not in many ways perfect for the corporate bottom line. However, what we must begin to understand is that the tyranny of intolerance comes from the consolidation of ideas and diversification of economics. What the anti-modern subject of today argues is that the ideas have become too astray from their everyday lives while economics have become too centralized in a few hands.

This seems to be a backwards critique. Competition of economics is naturally bad for it allows companies to compete for the lowest price, thus the worst working conditions or the most environmental exploitation. If there was a government monopoly with no interest in price, this would never happen, barring corruption, which is cited as an inevitable form of communism. Surely that is true, but corruption is exactly where capitalism starts, so if communism was to end there, we’d find ourselves no worse in trying. On the other hand, anti-modern folks find that the diversity of ideas, the decentralizing of traditional social structures and the increasing intelligence of the average person must be alienating from the natural human way.

Here we find the great blind spot in an objective reality that is so resistant to change, or ironically, to truth. Postmodernity may be ahead spin but isn’t that the point of any worthy idea? To improve, rather than dull the masses? Would babying people under the guise of anti-intellectualism be anything more than privileged and condescending reductive assumptions about the so-called common man?

The greatest artists leave the viewer with a question, with a hunger to learn more, with possibility, with uncertainty, and with joy in the process. It is past time to reclaim postmodernism as the future of humanity. We have come too far to limit ourselves to concrete truths when the everyday concrete struggle for water, food, shelter, health care and peace remain so allusive. Why limit our thoughts in the same way we limit resources? Why can’t our ideas be bold enough to expand, to multiply, to breathe?

If the postmodern critics throw stones out of insecurity and shame for their lack of understanding, let me assure them that there is no need. No one understands it, and that is the beauty of every important idea, and the beauty of every stranger. To react with so much intolerance to ideas that challenge makes one wonder about the durability of tolerance for the Other, which will be the central question of our times as the old becomes uprooted and often dropped at our doorsteps, challenging the welcome mat, or even the 2nd amendment warning on the door.

It is true that every objective truth, ever marker of grand civilization, has been built on the back of the common man (especially common woman) and common beast. To ask the subjective truth its thoughts on such a matter naturally invites the Other in, and reminds us not that there is no objective truth, but there are always many sides unheard in its effects. Until every side, at every time is heard, by everyone, can the truth ever be known, or can it only be thrived for? The only lie is to say that truth has already been found. Such is the tyranny of Mr. Trump has he attempts to replace democratic education with the adoration of authority.

Killing Ideology: A Defense of Postmodernism. By Nick Pemberton . CounterPunch, September  6, 2019.