Authenticity

In Tuesday's section, we had a pretty heated set of conversations about how authenticity can be approached. I wanted to put forward another perspective, albeit one outside the auspices of this class.

In his article "Authenticity as Authentication," Allan Moore looks at folk and rock criticism to argue for three kinds of authenticity: first person authenticity, wherein the performer is recognized as being authentic to himself; third person authenticity, wherein a performer is identified as authentically representative of a third party or "Other" group; and 2nd person authenticity, which hinges on the experience of authenticity, particularly as that experience relates to performance and dance.

What I find useful about Moore's articulation is this: he shows the pitfalls of the two most common ways of understanding authenticity. He shows how "first person authenticity"--a performer being authentic to him or herself--is an undefensible or unarguable position. We cannot actually ever know whether or not someone is being true to their feelings, their identity, or their experience. They can tell us their opinion of their own authenticity, but as cultural critics (or social commentators, to alter Dyson's phrase) we cannot know, not for sure, if anyone is being authentic. This is hard to recognize because we want to know, and we want to be able to recognize this in artists--especially if that artist is speaking to an experience we identify with. Any performance is exactly that, and indeed, if we are to allow hip hop the performativity of social change, we must acknowledge its performative nature.

The second understanding of authenticity, third person authenticity--wherein an audience decides whether or not a cultural form is "true" to a set of individuals of which the audience has little or no knowledge--is equally clearly problematic. Moore uses the example of "the blues," a musical/generic (as in genre) category from the 20th century wherein an outsider (white Alan Lomax, who wanted to collect "real" American music) decided that this music, which he called "the blues," was authentic because it "really" expressed the "harsh realities" of an "Other," a kind of person who is like but not like--in this case, poor southern Black men. In contemporary hip hop, we can see the parallels to yesterday's video on hip hop masculinity, wherein a white girl talked about hip hop as a way to see into a reality which she will never experience. This dynamic is fraught expressly because of the power dynamic at play; Lomax has the power to decide what "is" the blues, which is why, as a category, the blues have always been played by men--for Lomax, the women who were singing at the time (and who displayed many of the musicological and formal elements of "the blues) were not the blues, and as such, we don't view them as the blues today--they're jazz singers, or somehow fall outside of the genre. What's important to remember is that acknowledging this power structure isn't the same thing as liberal humanistic self-flagellation or "white guilt"--the issue isn't how messed up things are, but instead the thoughtful consideration of power structures to provide analysis.

Moore's offering of a "second person authenticity", which puts emphasis on what he calls "the process of authentication" as opposed to an innate or essential category of an artist, is helpful for two reasons. One, it correctly implies that authenticity is invariably recognized by an audience, and the negotiation for authenticity always takes place with someone besides the performer. Any analysis of authenticity invariably implicates both the performer whose authenticity is up for debate and the debater.

Two, his argument hearkens back to the "embodiment" aspect of Osumare's Africanist aesthetic. Moore acknowledges that the process of authentication takes place in part in and on the body, so that dancing at a show is both indicative of authentication and also part of its process. As such, we can see the duality that Osumare recognizes in the Africanist aesthetic: it's not just about what the mind recognizes as authentic, but also what the body experiences as authentic.

There are limitations to Moore's argument, to be sure, but he highlights the crucial negotiation process by which authenticity is declared, contested, and reached. I'll upload the article to SmartSite.

Thoughts?