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The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves, by Andrew Potter
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“A totally real, genuine, authentic book about why you shouldn’t believe any of those words. And it’s genuinely good.”
— Gregg Easterbrook, author of Sonic Boom
Exploring a number of trends in our popular culture—from Sarah Palin to Antiques Roadshow, organic food to the indignation over James Frey’s memoir—Andrew Potter follows his successful Nation of Rebels with a new book that argues that our pursuit of the authentic is fraught with irony and self-defeat. Readers of The Paradox of Choice or Bowling Alone will find many enlightening insights in The Authenticity Hoax, which is, in the words of Tom de Zengotita (Mediated), “the kind of criticism that changes minds.”
- Sales Rank: #700422 in eBooks
- Published on: 2010-03-27
- Released on: 2010-04-13
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
According to Potter (coauthor of Nation of Rebels), the cost of modernity's dismantling of traditional frameworks of truth and meaning has forced meaning and authenticity to become individual searches that are private and consumercentric. Potter's lively cultural analysis combines an astute analysis of foundational antimodernist thought (in particular Rousseau) with savvy surveys of mass culture to flag the pitfalls and ironies of the modern obsession with authenticity in its every incarnation (authentically punk, spiritual, environmentally conscious) from our jeans to our celebrities. Potter champions a mitigation of modernity's negative, alienating effects rather than a rejection of modernity, and his characterizations of antimodernists can be dismissive to the point of oversimplifying a large and varied spectrum of dissent from the status quo. But in redeeming modernity from primitivists, apocalyptic doom-mongers, and more subtle critics, the author offers a shrewd and lively discussion peppered with pop culture references and a stimulating reappraisal of the romantic strain in modern life. (Apr.)
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
We live, Potter argues, in a world dominated by the prepackaged and the artificial, the fraudulent and the fake. Growing out of this increasingly bleak cultural landscape is a movement centered on the notion of authenticity: the honest, the natural, the real. That’s all fine and good, Potter says, except for one thing: we don’t have a clue what we mean by authenticity, and even if we did, we wouldn’t know how to find it. That is, the quest for authenticity is a hoax—there is no such thing. Authenticity is an exclusionist notion, defined, by what it isn’t, not by what it is, and, for the most part, so-called authentic lifestyles are just as artificial and contrived as the rest of modern culture. It’s a fascinating approach to a fascinating subject, and Potter bolsters his argument with examples drawn from pop culture, history, and other sources. Written in a lively style that invites the reader to argue with the author, the book, at the very least, will turn the reader’s eye inward, and make us take a good, long look at the way we present ourselves to the world. --David Pitt
Review
“Unique insights on every page and breathtaking in scope... We’re not quite certain what is authentic but we know what it is not. Andrew Potter helps us sift through the confusion.”
Most helpful customer reviews
28 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
"Culture? That is something we do for tourists."
By Kevin Currie-Knight
The above quote is from this book's seventh chapter. Not only are we all multiculturalists now, but the idea of being 'authentic' is simply part of our every day vocabulary. Bestsellers like The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, Dilbert and The Office lampoon the inauthentic desk job, and a robust consumer market of 'authentic' everything (from jeans to organic produce) grows by the year.
So, why challenge it? Andrew Potter gives us several good reasons. First, he suggests that seeking for authenticity is as self-defeating as it is phony. It is self-defeating because when one quests for the authentic, one tends to get lost in the search (which is the opposite of focusing on any 'true self'). It is phony because, all too often, seeking the authentic - buying organic food, appreciating different cultural artifacts, etc - is every bit as much about appearing to be authentic to others as it is achieving authenticity for the self. The first several chapters (minus the first, which explores the emergence of authenticity as an ideal, explore these themes).
Next we come to some chapters that question the very distinction between authentic and inauthentic, on epistemic and ontological grounds. Ontologically, it is simply arbitrary to call x natural and y authentic when, in reality, they may be both made from the same stuff. What makes, say, an original painting authentic and a reproduction inauthentic? Now we get to the shaky epistemology. The original painting is real, says Potter, not because of anything about the painting, but EVERYTHING about our expectations of the painting. Several studies reviewed by Potter, for instance, show that one's appraisal of a thing is often wholly dependent on the background story it is presented with. (Tell everyone a wine is one of a kind, and the bottle of Yellow Tail just tastes better.)
In this sense, Potter suggests that authenticity is somewhat of a sham game. If the search for authenticity was REALLY about authenticity, after all, it would not matter for our enjoyment whether the painting is an original or a reproduction, or the wine is rare and old or common and new. Any search for authenticity that seeks eclecticism, uniqueness, non-conformity, for its own sake isn't a search for authenticity at all, but a drive to feel different, even if it means FORCING oneself to be what one isn't. Ironic, huh?
My favorite chapters are six (Vote for Me, I'm Authentic) and seven (Culture is for Tourists). In chapter six, Potter is skeptical about whether, despite the lip service, we really desire authenticity in politics. After all, while we like to talk about our desire for straight talk, we still devour the sound bites (especially the gaffes). We could say the media is responsible for this, but Potter reminds us that the only reason the media collects sound bites is because we watch 'em. Chapter seven points out the irony that while progressives used to be cosmopolitan, the age of globalization - a cosmopolitan's dream - has now turned many of them into communitarians. Similar to arguments made in Fish's article "Boutique Multiculturalism" (The Trouble with Principle, Potter makes the point that multiculturalism has somewhat become a caricature of itself: when culture is, as he puts it, treated as a museum piece rather than a way of life that one does rather than watches, it becomes a thin replica of itself. Once again, the quest for authenticity is more about appearances than realities.
Put simply, this is an interesting piece of contrarian writing. I am inclined to agree with most of it and despite minor flaws (I think his interpretation of Rousseau in chapter 1 is a bit off), would recommend it to anyone who wishes to see a dominant cultural assumption challenged a bit.
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Full of stuff, but missing stuff
By J. Miller
The Bad: Several of Potter's personal positions go unexamined throughout the writing. The writing itself often feels undirected (and unrelated to the core thesis) from chapter to chapter. And Potter often spends so much time explaining previous findings and other arguments that his actual point gets lost.
The Good: There's a huge amount of stuff in here linking a wide range of philosophers to particular societal behavioral patterns that have played out over the years. I suspect that this book would be more valuable for people than most 100-level philosophy college courses. Really, I loved how much large portions of this book shifted my perspectives so that I could think about things in different ways.
The Ugly: Potter seems to run the entire book without tapping either existentialism or absurdism, which is a bit of a problem as they're directly concerned with answering to what is real about humanity, starting with the basic premise that Existence Precedes Essence (a.k.a. You are as you do, not as you think) and, as Sartre wrote "Hell is other people" not because they don't get the real you, but because maybe they do. Also, Erich Fromm might have been mentioned in passing for his work in Escape From Freedom, but not nearly enough to appropriately reflect his body of work on this topic.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Authenticity Hoax Is Provocative and Lucid Yet Heavily Flawed
By M. JEFFREY MCMAHON
The Authenticity Hoax is worthy buying for the first 60 pages alone, a concise, exhilarating explanation of the birth of modernity: industrialization, individualism, consumerism and how these elements result in alienation. Some people, Potter point, try to reject modernity and find a romantic and nostalgic solution: reject the modern world and search for authenticity. He points to Rousseau whose works have been misinterpreted to this end.
The problem with Potter's argument is that he lumps all critics of modernity under the same label: "declinists." These are in Potter's mind crackpots. But fringe extremists should not be lumped with political leaders, such as Al Gore and others, under the declinist banner so that Potter can propel his conservative polemic.
I find this gross over simplification and faulty comparison both illogical and insidious propaganda lacking the intellectual rigor for serious debate. And I find it ironic that this kind of intellectual dishonesty (from a writer who knows better) is behind a book that purports to be interested in uncovering a "hoax."
My other criticism is that Potter has not clearly defined "authenticity." He uses the word in so many ways that it almost becomes meaningless; worse, a lot of the chapters have no logical connection to the other as the "authenticity" as a reaction to modernity has no relation to the "authenticity" between art and creativity as discussed in Chapter 3.
As a primer for the birth of modernity, this book is worth getting. But as a polemic that lumps all critics of modernity as charlatans and crackpots, this book fails. A far superior book on the subject of the quest of false authenticity (not even mentioned in Potter's polemic) is David Brooks' satirical Bobos in Paradise.
Final Thoughts:
This is one of the few book's I've recommended in spite of its heavy flaws. This just goes to show that a book that fails as a whole may be worthy because of its parts many of which are convincing as ideas on their own. Probably this book would work better as a collection of separate essays.
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