"His words have not been scripted or prepared for the press; he speaks from the heart".
"It’s now clear to every voter that [he] is nothing but himself".
"No Bullshit. Unvarnished opinion and beliefs".
Each of these statements have recently been made about Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and Donald Trump. Which statement belongs to which politician or would-be politician? It’s impossible to tell, of course. Why? Because they all refer to a single quality, taken by many to be a great asset in political life - all of these candidates are taken to be authentic. Read this article from The Conversation by Maiken Umbach and Mathew Humphrey.
This article builds on our joint research on authenticity as a political resource in different historical and contemporary settings. Here is a short summary of our co-authored article, currently in peer review with the American Historical Review.
Invoking authenticity is a ubiquitous practice, but one that we feel is poorly understood. In this article we seek to change the parameters in which the idea of authenticity is debate. Unlike other political buzzwords, authenticity has rarely been the subject of sustained critical analysis; scholars have mostly confined themselves to 'unmasking' invocations of authenticity as inherently contradictory: if identities are imagined, then so are their alleged authentic expressions. But real or not: if people believe in authenticity, it matters, and had and has real political consequences.
We pay particular attention to interplay between political intentions and vernacular re-codings of representations and practices of authenticity, across long historical time-spans. To understand these, we combine different genres of evidence, from political manifestos to quotidian practices, from paintings to mundane objects, which are typically studied in distinct academic disciplines. We focus upon authenticity claims across three distinct spheres.
The first of these is nature. Because we understand invocations of authenticity as a strategy to naturalise ideas, nature, understood as 'wilderness' (seemingly) free from human manipulation, is a prominent motif in this story. The desire to 'live in integrity' with nature forms a key part of the ideational language of authenticity. For a range of historical actors, authenticity has represented an antithesis to the alienating effects of civilisation, which offers a space where human beings can reconnect with their own authentic selves. But to serve this purpose, nature needs to be 'framed' to make it legible as a repository of authenticity, and our first section traces the history of such framings, uncovering some of the aesthetic, theological and ideological subtexts of landscapes.
The second dimension we explore is that of production. This moves the discussion from authenticity as place to authenticity as process. In many historical invocations of authenticity, the work of the individual craftsman epitomises the transference of an authentic human essence onto the object of labour. Notions of authenticity are not, however, absent from discourses about mass production either. In the imaginations of various modernists, the world of arts and crafts became a sphere of outmoded kitsch, while genuinely modern industrial products embodied the authenticity of the new times. Moreover, objects can be bearers of authenticity not only because of their production, but also because of the way in which they are consumed.
The process of consumption is the third strand that we investigate in this article. While consumerism has often been denounced as the apogee of inauthenticity, historically, appeals to authenticity have also served to legitimate particular modes of mass consumption, and contrast them with illegitimate forms of consumption characteristic of social or national outsiders.
Posted on Wednesday 17th February 2016