[FRA:] Adorno vs. authenticity

[Ralph Dumain]

Jay, Martin. “Taking On the Stigma of Inauthenticity: Adorno’s Critique of 
Genuineness,” New German Critique, no. 97, Winter 2006, pp. 15-30.

Jay commences with a quote from Marshall Berman’s The Politics of 
Authenticity (1970). While authenticity was held up as a virtue by 
intellectuals of the 20th century, especially in the United States, this 
alleged virtue has German roots, subjected to severe scrutiny by Theodor 
Adorno, inter alia in his critique of Heidegger, The Jargon of 
Authenticity. Adorno saw authenticity as an essentially conservative and 
conformist force and specifically German.  Later I shall return to Jay’s 
odd leap from America to Germany, and from 60s radicalism to German 
fascism, but first, we must follow Jay’s presentation of the German situation.

Jay’s analysis begins with Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of 
Mechanical Reproduction.” In the medieval period, authenticity would have 
been a meaningless concept.  As Jay quotes Eve Geulen on Benjamin’s position:
In the beginning was not the original, but the reproduction, which makes 
the concept of authenticity possible in the first place. Authenticity 
becomes ‘authentic’ only against the background of reproducibility. That 
means, however, that authenticity is compromised from the beginning, 
inauthentic from the start, for its origin lies not in itself,  but rather 
in its opposite, reproduction. (19)

Adorno expands on this position in aphorism 99, “Gold Assay”, of Minima 
Moralia. He sees “genuineness” as filling the vacuum of traditional 
religious and ethical standards. But while authenticity was the watchword 
of 19th century bourgeois intellectuals like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and 
Ibsen, in the 20th century it has found a home in fascism. (20) Adorno also 
draws on Benjamin’s view of mimesis and denies the existence of “a pure 
subject prior to mimetic behavior.” (21) Adorno also has some harsh words 
for Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.  As Jay puts it:
Because the self is always imbricated in the social, any attempt, like 
Kierkegaard’s, to retreat into naked existential interiority is 
complicitous with the isolation caused by society, not a protest against 
it. Nietzsche, despite all his insights into the workings of ideology, 
failed to see through the fallacy of authenticity, which betrayed his 
Lutheran roots and smacked of the very anti-Semitism he decried in Wagner. 
(21-22)

Adorno traces the contemporaneous jargon of authenticity to religious 
revivalists, dubbed sarcastically as “The Authentic Ones”, who pushed 
Kierkegaard in the 1920s. While the jargon, which Adorno characterizes as 
“the unending mumble of the liturgy of inwardness”, speaks of higher things 
but lacks the substance, it reeks of what Benjamin wrote about the “aura”.
To sum up, then, Adorno's multifarious charges against authenticity and the 
jargon around it are as follows: it provides a hollow substitute for lost 
religious belief in ultimate values; it is based on a mistaken search for 
proprietary origins that establish rights of the earliest settlers; it 
rests on a dubious ideal of self-possession and integrity, which fails to 
credit the mimetic moment in the creation of selfhood; it entails an 
ontological fiction of absoluteness that falsely sees itself as the 
antidote to the leveling equivalence of the exchange principle; it serves 
as an anti-intellectual evocation of concreteness and immediacy against the 
alleged depredations of abstract, intellectual thought; it can be 
understood as a variant of the cultish notion of aura, which itself is only 
a function of the reproductive technologies that it pretends to antedate; 
and, finally, it paradoxically gives too much power to the subject able to 
designate something as authentic and to the object after that designation 
has been made. All attempts to derive authentic meaning from etymological 
priority thus share with foundational philosophy a vain search for an 
Urgeschichte, which is little more than a nostalgic fantasy of primal 
wholeness before the Fall. (25)

It is unfortunate that Jay doesn’t connect this back to the USA at this 
point, for I have two immediate associations.  But first, on Marshall 
Berman: Berman is a ‘60s radical who more recently wrote books on modernity 
and Marxism. This should be kept in mind, as the heritage of existentialism 
in the USA is, in my view, dual. The key reference here is:

Cotkin, George. Existential America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 
Press, 2003.

Cotkin doesn’t draw the distinction I do, but it is plain that 
existentialism has served both reactionary and revolutionary aims in the 
USA. The Kierkegaard boom was essentially conservative (with notable 
exceptions such as its influence on Richard Wright), a doctrine of 
self-satisfied resignation to the status quo: you know the routine: man is 
sinful, and we can’t change society for the better. Cotkin repeatedly uses 
the word “chastened” to describe the mood of a significant sector of the 
intelligentsia.  This helps to explain, inadvertently, why C.L.R. James so 
hated American intellectuals--and existentialism--in the 1940s.

On the other hand, existentialism exerted quite a different influence on 
black intellectuals, from Richard Wright to Ralph Ellison to several 
activists of the civil rights movement to the New Left. In this case, one 
should review which authors were favored.  My recollection is dim, but I 
believe that, for the ‘60s generation, Camus and Sartre served as models; I 
don’t recall anything about Kierkegaard or Heidegger.

But now it occurs to me that the critique of authenticity in Germany might 
bear some application to the Beat poets of the USA, at least to some of 
them, Kerouac in particular. Ginsberg was a sweet-natured fellow who was 
not very discriminating in the company he kept. Kerouac, Cassady, 
Burroughs, not to mention the Hell’s Angels--riffraff! (But then, there are 
other Beat poets to be considered, not least, the leading black Beat 
poets--Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman--who, as is typical for this country, tend 
to be forgotten when the “Beats” are celebrated. LeRoi Jones /Amiri Baraka 
is less likely to be ignored, but then he is one of these questionable 
characters; cf., e.g. the book by Jerry Gafio Watts.)  But as a cultural 
phenomenon with Kerouac as the titular guru, there is something here to be 
questioned about authenticity and religiosity with dubious content.  An 
even better example of this phenomenon would be that consummate asshole Ken 
Kesey, subject of another hollow poseur, Tom Wolfe, in The Electric 
Kool-Aid Acid Test.

OK, back to Jay. He says that, in spite of all this, Adorno still maintains 
an alternative conception of authenticity, using the word “Authentizität” 
rather than “Eigenlichkeit”. (26) He has been criticized for this, wrongly 
by Douglas Kellner according to Jay. (27)

Jay sums up:
The ideological notion of authenticity, attacked in aphorism 99 and The 
Jargon of Authenticity, is based on a dangerous search for ultimate origins 
as legitimating fictions, a mistaken reification of the individual as a 
self-possessed monad and of the transfer of cultish notions of aura from 
religion to art, philosophy, and everyday human existence. It evokes the 
myth of autochthonous rootedness to denigrate the wanderers condemned to 
permanent exile.

Against this usage are two more defensible notions, which are variants of 
nonauratic authenticity. One involves the registering of modern life's 
historical disasters, the "scars of damage and disruption" that produce a 
shudder emblematic of the work's truth-content. Here authenticity means 
fidelity to the historical moment, with all its traumatic contradictions, 
rather than retreat to an allegedly prior state of plenitudinous wholeness 
before the fall into alienation. However vigorously he may have insisted on 
the value of aesthetic autonomy against the reduction of art to a function 
of something exterior to it, Adorno never failed to praise works that 
indirectly expressed the depredations of modern life. Indeed, only the 
works that resist the gravitational pull of the current order and yet do 
not pretend to have transcended it entirely--works that, as Max Paddison 
has pointed out, are "failures" and know themselves as such--can gain the 
breathing space to express its horrors."

The second defensible use harks back to Benjamin's celebration of the 
mimetic faculty, which is evident in the technologically reproduced mass 
culture that Adorno so often distrusted. In this context, authenticity 
paradoxically means accepting and even valorizing the necessary 
inauthenticity of the self, which is always dependent on the other, always 
in relation to the outside, always insufficiently integrated into a 
coherent and boundaried unit. (29)

Jay concludes: Adorno appropriated the ideas of others, and he also laid 
himself open regarding his own position in the scheme of things, not to 
claim “authenticity” for himself. (30)