occupy the authentic

Its a complete distortion and perversion of some very profound thinking by the likes of Viktor Frankl and his will to meaning. The experiences of a holocaust death camp survivor filtered through the maze of pop culture into a reified fetish for the authentic translated into status induced euphoria of consumption. As Viktor Frankl asserted, boredom is the most pronounced symptom and this near hysterical need to “do something” to relieve it, generally an aggressive act. A middle class phenomenon they have bought into to attain the “feeling” that their individual lives have meaning. Whether this is through local market bought produce, organic food, etc. Authenticity at any cost. Authenticity is a much maligned word especially since real authenticity does not exist; its a construction, a virtual good, a mythological trademark. Although it seems new, the quest for authenticity and the process of intensification has been around at least since Veblen and Walt Whitman ( see Addendum), but the mediatization, and information technology has brought the issue to heretofore unimaginable levels.

Susan Pinker:The irony, of course, is that this counter-culture stance is now the mainstream. The more people who seek fulfilment via the so-called “anti-corporate” subculture among their panoply of options (the skater-urban punk aesthetic, the $6 carton of organic milk, the political identification with the pre-modern cultural underdog), the more competitive and commercial these choices become. Thinking of adopting the 100-mile diet? There’s now a 50-mile diet that creates a smaller footprint. Or, better still, spend a year eating only what you’ve grown in your back garden, like novelist Barbara Kingsolver or writer Laura Ingalls Wilder, of Little House on the Prairie fame. She baked the bread, churned the butter, fed the woodstove, tended the apple orchard and raised the chickens that provided the food her family ate.

Sound familiar? If this lifestyle sounds like a Michael Pollan-style idyll, it’s also a form of slavery your ancestors worked their butts off to leave behind.Paradoxically (and this book is full of paradoxes), Potter shows us that it’s precisely the largesse and the freedoms engendered by free-market, industrialized democracies that allow us to scoff at the excesses of these societies and romanticize everything that came before. Read More:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/article1529312.ece

On another simpler level; the Occupy Wall Street style protests are just plain fun. In another ten years, it could be the rage to have Woodstock style spats of who was and was not there. Even participation, in a commodified sense, represents the transition from conspicuous consumption to conspicuous authenticity.After all, realistically, as Joseph Heath has pointed out, the protestors cannot really stop banks from being greedy. Ultimately, you have to ask whether the Occupy movement is actually a revolution, or simply an elaborate parlor game , part of the Society of the Spectacle. You have  Michael Moore descending on Oakland almost like MacDonalds at natural disasters handing out free coffee. Here, its leftist media fest with the likes of Sean Penn and the ever present Naomi Klein burnishing their brands and doing the standard blindsiding hatchet job that the entertainment complex is so ingenious at, while being supported by the likes of Paul Krugman, BOC head Mark Carney and even a nod from Ben Bernanke. Talk about co-opting an agenda. In general A bunch of infantile delinquents, the loudest white dudes and dudettes getting their squeaky wheels greased which entitles them to spread their kaka on the walls of public space and were supposed to say “how cute, how prodigal!”

Pinker:One of the delights of this book is discovering how the pervasive search for authenticity makes for strange political bedfellows. In his pitiless juxtapositions, Potter connects the dots between Sarah Palin-style authenticity (“Mother … Moose hunter … Maverick”), Reverend Al Sharpton’s questioning whether Obama is authentically black (“Just because you’re our colour, doesn’t make you our kind”) and Beauty Myth author Naomi Wolf’s description of an “authentic” female individuality, one that weirdly endorses the requirement that Muslim women cover up.

Pulling on the traditional dress and head-scarf while travelling in Morocco, Potter says, Wolf described how, in making her body and her long flowing hair invisible, “I felt a novel sense of calm and serenity. I felt, yes, in certain ways, free.” Potter gleefully calls this “authenticity tourism,” and riffs that Wolf’s cloaked jaunt through a Moroccan bazaar is like a Western visitor to the Lithuanian theme park called Survival Drama in a Soviet Bunker; by trying on “authentic” Muslim dress, Wolf learns about as much about the strictures of a Muslim woman as tourists learn about being a prisoner of the KGB.( ibid.)

There is an undeniable intensity to the idea of a genuinely populist mass movement challenging the global political-economic status quo. Disillusioned American progressives like Chris Hedges, author of Death of the Liberal Class, seem to be intoxicated by it. “There are no excuses left,” says Hedges. “Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. “Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil.”Princeton professor and civil-rights activist Cornel

threw his weight behind the protest early on, attributing to it a rainbow-coalition sort of legitimacy. “It’s a democratic process, it’s a non-violent process,” says West, “but it is a revolution. … I tell you, it is sublime to see all the different colours, all the different genders, all the different sexual orientations and different cultures, all together here in Liberty Plaza.”…

…Canadian No Logo author and anti-globalization activist Naomi Klein was another early adopter. “We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet,” Klein told activists on Oct. 6. “That’s frightening. And as this movement grows from strength to strength, it will get more frightening. … Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is the most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is.”

Permanent urban encampments of angry, unemployed Americans recall the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression. Not since the Dirty Thirties, in fact, have Americans mobilized en masse to protest economic policy. Read More:http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Game+changer+just+games/5552935/story.html

What Occupy movements show, is that what we are seeing is not  so much the decline of imperialist  power, but an intensification and ebbing into a new form of power and control. It does seem they are worried in the least about the movement succeeding. In fact, its existence is being used to reinforce existing tendencies, a few inconsequential reforms, but the authoritative and punitive power of imperialism  doesn’t stop, but is forced to work differently and take a new tack; transnational capital flows unimpeded, and where the theory of  postmodern capitalism- now market capitalism- no longer adheres  principally according to the old logic  of exclusion, othering and  purity.This logic of intensification is a kind of virtual space, a virtual state,where the individual is overlaid like a collage with the logic of globalization. An example is Canada’s Bank of Nova Scotia buying into the Colombia market. Investment is secondary. Its about frequency, intensity and velocity of the capital flows. Dodd-Frank and its imitators: forget it, go to where the sun never sets. Like the 10cc song,” up yours, up mine, up everyone’s…. that takes time.” Its coming. The Colombia advantage fund, the Latin American growth fund etc. etc. The real underground and hidden economy are the opaque financial transactions among large multinationals, transactions that drift in and off the books; nomadic finance.

Individualism, the American loner defying the herd mentality and living to their own code, heroic confrontations, are now linked to this new space of extensive imperialism, where subjective experience has a fixed relationship to the monetary and political logic of the globalization agenda. Power is “good” since their is pleasure and advantage in striking a bargain with it, returning to Frankl’s will to power….and the direct linkage of the “bargain hunter” and their subjective intensities, a nice package of commodified  culturization of the political and economic sphere, all nicely presented as authentic and new.
ADDENDUM:

Whitman’s struggle to understand and narrate the reality of an experience without parallel in his lifetime, the Civil War. In the course of this struggle, however, Whitman also delves into the complex issue of “authenticity,” and in so doing helps to usher in a major shift in American culture, one in which he is later joined by writers and thinkers such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Thorstein Veblen, and Henry Adams. The concern with authenticity, while timeless in many respects, was especially marked in late nineteenth-century America, when much of the population came to believe that existence had become unreal or illusory. The quest for the authentic took many forms: the valorization of the photographic image, the production of realist fiction that described people and events previously not acknowledged, the obsession with facts and statistics, and the attempt to” [recover] intense experience” through any means available, one example of which was the period’s celebration and imitation of the martial idea. In The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940, Miles Orvell describes an ideological shift in the nation during this period, from a culture of imitation (which has never completely disappeared) to a culture of authenticity. Whereas the years immediately following the Civil War saw the celebration of the reproduction, the facsimile, and the copy, beginning in the 1880s there “was a reaction against the earlier aesthetic, an effort to get beyond mere imitation, beyond the manufacturing of illusions, to the creation of more ‘authentic’ works that were themselves real things.”
Whitman is an intrinsic part of this development.Read More:http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1568&context
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Andrew Potter:There is something pleasantly democratic in the knowledge that Bill Gates eats the same Big Macs as the rest of us, that the cans of Cherry Coke that Buffett scarfs by the caseload taste the same as the ones anyone can purchase in the corner store down the street. The general point holds even for many so-called luxury goods: as the economist Will Wilkinson puts it, ‘Despite a vast difference in price, the difference between driving a used Hyundai Elantra and a new Jaguar XJ is practically undetectable compared to the difference between motoring and hoofing it.’

Given this, it is tempting to conclude that income inequality is not a big deal. As long as everyone is doing better in absolute terms, what does it matter if a miniscule fraction of the population is enjoying exploding wealth?

But this emphasis on absolute levels of wellbeing only goes so far. Whatever else it indicates, income is a measure of your relative status, and plenty of very real benefits accrue to those who are higher up the income ladder from seemingly superficial things such as increased reputation and prestige to better opportunities for dating and marriage to — perhaps most important — superior access to top-notch education and health care.

The value of relative income becomes apparent when we recognize that a great deal of consumption by the ultra-rich consists of a bidding war for goods such as penthouse apartments, high-end artworks and ocean-front villas. These positional goods get their value precisely from the fact that, unlike Big Macs or Cherry Cokes, not everyone can have them. This sort of competitive consumption is nothing more than a widespread arms race for status goods, and like all arms races, it is just a tremendous waste of resources that could be better spent, and thus a form of economic inefficiency that’s growing rapidly. Read More:http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article/9391–why-the-growing-wealth-inequality-matters