What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead trees give no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water
– T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
I had a professor who used to say there was an exact moment when modernism arrived in English poetry, and it was the third line of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” This is when Eliot, in a sudden and disturbing image, describes the evening sky as “Like a patient etherised upon a table.” The simile still carries a punch today, but this is just an echo of what it signified on publication in 1915. Drawing heavily on the jaundiced outlook of French symbolism, Eliot was making poetry confront the emotional register of modern life, with its lurking anxieties and peculiar sense of estrangement.
But the awkward young émigré from St Louis, Missouri, did not end his contribution to modernist poetry there. Seven years later, in 1922, he published what is widely seen as its landmark work. The Waste Land, written while Eliot was recuperating from a nervous breakdown, is a five-poem sequence which considers from a mythological perspective the febrile and traumatised civilisation that had barely emerged from the First World War. Using an innovative collage technique, it splices together desolate scenes of ordinary life with references to cultures distant in time and space. It thus portrays a world haunted by the wellsprings of meaning from which it has experienced a terminal rupture.
At the heart of the poem, thematically speaking, is the “waste land” itself – a series of barren terrains whose most prominent features are absence, infertility and confusion:
The river’s tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Around this void-like centre are layered a multitude of different voices or perspectives, all expressing the same anxieties, but isolated from one another by the poem’s abrupt, fragmented structure. Hence the “waste land” is echoed not just in the mundane suffering of individuals (“He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you / To get yourself some teeth”) and at the level of civilisational uncertainty (“Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal”), but also in the impossibility of piecing it all together. And strewn throughout, we find an eclectic array of characters and quotations from world literature, including Plutarch, Ovid, St Augustine, Dante, Spencer, and the Buddha.
Of course neither abstruse experimentation nor pessimism were unusual in interwar literature. But even so, The Waste Land is remarkable for its over-wrought intensity. Eliot himself made light of this when asked for some explanatory notes to help baffled readers, producing an index of intellectual arcana that discusses everything from ancient vegetation ceremonies to the price of raisins. Indeed, it’s difficult to pin down exactly how much conviction Eliot had in his more apocalyptic pronouncements, and ultimately, whether you find the poem a compelling diagnosis of the modern condition or something akin to intellectual masturbation will probably depend on your own demeanour.
However there is one area where The Waste Land has undoubtedly proved prophetic, and that is in the arts themselves. I was reminded of this recently by an exhibition at the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate, called “Journeys with The Waste Land,” which explores how Eliot’s poem has resonated with visual art across the last century. The show is worth discussing, because it does indeed manage to illustrate some of The Waste Land’s most prescient insights – only, not in the way it actually intends to.
The exhibition is enormous. With almost a hundred artworks, and too many big names to list here, there is bound to be something you will enjoy (for me this was Kathe Kollwitz, Paula Rego, Tacita Dean, and four huge paintings by the Eliot-inspired abstract expressionist Cy Twombly). It is also stimulating to see how non-Western artists, despite very different contexts, have echoed The Waste Land’s vision of modernity. But ultimately, these brief insights are diminished by the exhibition’s sprawling incoherence. Besides being curated around big baggy topics like identity, myth, and technology, it presents such a smorgasbord of concepts and of media – from painting, photography and textiles to installation, printmaking and video – you eventually feel like you’re winding through an enormous out-of-town supermarket.
There are also unconvincing attempts to assign to The Waste Land the preoccupations of the 21st-century art world. In the first room, we read that the “key themes of the poem” are “gender, myth and journeying” – I must have read it fifty times and never has its concern for gender struck me as anything but incidental. Later, The Waste Land is portrayed as an eco-poem, “reminding us of our interference with and damage to cycles of nature.” It’s fitting, then, that the show occupies the same beach where Eliot wrote the lines “On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.” With its aimless approach, connecting nothing with nothing is exactly what this show has done.
But inadvertently, “Journeys with The Waste Land” does illustrate something important about art over the last century, and to greater and lesser degrees, about many areas of contemporary culture. For what we see reflected in the exhibition’s radical diversity of expression, and in the tenuous attempts to glue it all together, is the absence of any stable or enduring framework for artistic value. It is a labyrinth of niches and paradigms which, though perfectly capable of aspiring to value on their own terms, can only be appreciated together if one adopts a detached, scholarly relativism. By failing to make this explicit, the curators have missed a trick; for here is a situation to which TheWaste Land really is pertinent.
As we have seen, Eliot’s “waste land” is an allegorical landscape, a disorientation at once cultural, spiritual, and psychological. Yet underpinning this, and in a sense embodied by the poem itself, is also a treatment of the uncertain purpose and meaning of art in modern society. When Eliot asks, in a crucial passage, “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?” the question is partly self-referential. For as is suggested by the poem’s ephemeral, obscure and disjointed allusions to lapsed literary traditions, art can no longer be part of some holistic cultural and religious whole. This must be true because culture itself has become a shattered prism without any central axis.
This realisation, in turn, casts a revealing light on the poem’s own experiments in form, structure, and idiom. Such innovations, however dazzling, are of only conditional value insofar as they do not issue from the roots and branches of a coherent metaphysical structure, but from its breakdown. Indeed, if The Waste Land is anything to go by, all that remains for the artist at this point is sifting through “a heap of broken images,” and seeking a new way of establishing continuity between them. Presumably, any attempt to invent new purpose will end up in the same position as the poem’s various characters: isolated and plagued by anxieties over their impermanence.
Eliot’s contemporaries could not miss this message, for in the first two decades of the 20th century, the same atmosphere of social and cultural unraveling which inspired The Waste Land had caused something to snap in the realm of artistic production. This was the heyday of movement-based art, with its multitude of “isms:” Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Constructivism, Suprematism, and so on. These inter-disciplinary, avant-garde networks advanced not just new formal approaches but, more fundamentally, new and conflicting ideas about art’s purpose and value. Gone was the rigid art world of the late 19th century, in which a single curmudgeonly critic (John Ruskin) attacking a single painter (James Whistler) could produce a scandalous libel case.
Within these new milieus, art was being variously imagined as a vehicle for revolutionary politics, as a specialist branch of aesthetic experimentation and contemplation, as a celebration of technology, and as a channel for the unhindered (and often unhinged) expression of the individual psyche. Such divergence, moreover, was self-perpetuating, since it dramatically accelerated the withdrawal of the arts into a separate sphere of discourse, detached from culture at large. This only heightened the nagging uncertainty about what artistic products are actually for, and whether they had anything of real use or relevance to offer society – questions which in turn guaranteed a further profusion of answers.
Nor was Eliot a remote observer of these developments. Like so many authors of the period, he owed his breakthrough to Ezra Pound, the flamboyant and fanatical cultural broker who personally initiated a string of movements such as Imagism and Vorticism. In fact, Pound was so instrumental in crafting the iconic structure of The Waste Land that he should probably be credited as co-author. In the manuscript we see him stripping away any semblance of convention, with comments like “verse [i.e. traditional poetic form] not interesting enough as verse to warrant so much of it.”
But it is precisely The Waste Land’s unflinchingly avant-garde posture that makes its recognition of the crisis of artistic value so compelling. Eliot was disdainful of nostalgia; remember his earlier “Prufrock” was partly responsible for dragging poetry out of the corpse of Victorian romanticism. Moreover, as he pointed out in his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” artistic genealogies are always in a kind of flux, as each new addition forces a fresh perspective on what has gone before. Eliot simply acknowledged that the modern perspective was defined by a kind of radical disjuncture, and wanted to explore the implications of that. This meant confronting the insecurity inherent to the modern artist’s task of, as it were, inventing his own values.
Most forms of artistic production have been insulated from the full force of this dilemma by simple practicalities: novels, plays, music, film and architecture have limited materials to make use of and specific markets to target. I would argue these natural boundaries allow us to appreciate the creative freedom that modern culture has brought, without being too concerned that as a consequence, there is something arbitrary about the goals instantiated in any particular work. This is why the best illustration of The Waste Land’s insights can today be found in art galleries and magazines. Having been subject to ever-fewer conventional constraints and popular expectations, this expanding ragbag of purposes and practices has come to embody the profound uncertainties that entered culture a century ago.
Before Jacob Zuma resigned the presidency last Thursday, South Africa was in the news for an altogether less promising reason. The British journalist Katie Hopkins went there two weeks ago, saying it was time to bring to the world’s attention the ongoing murder of white farmers. She and her supporters claim the mainstream media have ignored the subject, because violence against whites does not “fit the narrative” imposed on a nation still synonymous with apartheid.
As a South African expat – and one who has relatives among those murdered on the farms – seeing the antagonistic, egomaniacal Hopkins take up this story was somewhat nightmarish. I don’t know if there is, as Hopkins says, some conspiracy of silence surrounding these crimes, but this much seems clear: she has no idea of the complex and volatile political landscape in which she has chosen to meddle. The episode is worth examining, though, because it highlights the wider danger of a culture-wars style of politics being exported from first-world countries to South Africa. This, if it continues, would be a disaster.
The farm murders are difficult to discuss objectively, since the government doesn’t keep relevant statistics, and consequently estimates can be politicised and based on unreliable data. But the Transvaal Agricultural Union – the only organisation with continuous statistics since 1990 – gives a high estimate of around 2,000 killings on farms and smallholdings in that time, not all of which involve white farmers. Then again, numbers are not really the main issue; there are dozens of poverty-stricken communities throughout South Africa with a higher murder rate (the national average, again unreliable, is 34 per 100,000). Rather, what makes the farm murders noteworthy is the nature of the killings, as well as the apparent complicity of police and, perhaps, elected politicians.
The issue of rural land ownership is a deeply acrimonious one in South Africa. For centuries, farming has been synonymous with the culture of the Afrikaners – the descendants of mostly Dutch colonists who, via the National Party, implemented apartheid from 1948-1991. “Boer,” the colloquial term for an Afrikaner, literally means farmer. In the post-apartheid era, the fact that much farmland has remained in the possession of Afrikaners, and of whites generally, has become a political ulcer for the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party.
Groups such as Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters advocate the confiscation of white-owned property, and ANC politicians right up to former president Zuma have echoed their incitements to violence. The new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has already stated his intention to expropriate land from whites.
It’s not without justification, then, that Hopkins speaks about politicians creating “a frame of reference” for attackers, and for the police to turn a blind eye. Political or racial motivation seems especially possible given that, while many of the farm murders are professional executions to facilitate the theft of firearms and cars, many others are gruesome torture-killings accompanied by rape. One of Hopkins’ sources claims the police have actually organised and armed attackers, and frankly, given the levels of police corruption in South Africa it would be surprising if this was not the case.
Hopkins’ reporting, however, is a stream of cheap sensationalism. In one video, titled “Shots Ring Out,” she is interrupted mid-broadcast and sent sprinting back to her jeep as her security detail begins firing their handguns into a nearby verge. Only at the end of the two-minute clip are we told this was merely a drill. Bad timing I suppose. While in South Africa, Hopkins also chose to reveal on Twitter that she is taking ketamine for medical reasons, allowing her to then scold the media for being interested in her drug use rather than her stories.
Much worse than this, however, is that Hopkins focuses on the race angle to a dangerous degree. Her framing of the situation on the farms – and of herself as a crusading “little white woman” – flirts with the suggestion that we should sympathise with the farmers because they are whites. Only in one instance does she give any indication that the farm murders are taking place within a complex web of social and political tensions, and that is when she considers the servile conditions many of the black agricultural labourers continue to endure.
But to understand why Hopkins’ intervention is not just stupid but in fact reckless, we need some more context. South Africa is currently at a crossroads of sorts, arrived at by the ebbing-away of Nelson Mandela’s post-apartheid policy of reconciliation. Mandela managed, at least rhetorically, to insist that progress be measured by the material circumstances of the population at large, rather than as a competition between groups. In a nation with eleven official languages, long carved into four racial categories by apartheid bureaucracy, this was quite an achievement. Nor was its value simply to forgive whites: no one benefits if the government can evade responsibility by deflecting blame onto the old oppressors (consider former president Zuma dismissing the notion of corruption as “a Western paradigm”).
But the promised material improvements have not been forthcoming – especially not under Zuma’s crony regime. A huge part of the African and Coloured populations continue to live without basic sanitation, education, or law and order, while South Africa maintains the highest levels of inequality in the entire world. Unemployment stands at 27%, with youth unemployment double that, and a large majority of managerial positions are still held by whites. The much-vaunted black middle class remains vanishingly small.
In these circumstances, inviting the world’s excess anger and resentment to be aimed vicariously at South Africa is something akin to playing with matches at a petrol station. The last thing the country needs is for its tensions to be compounded by foreign ideological agendas. This process is already underway at the other end of the spectrum, where the university-educated population has begun to adopt ideas from American seminar rooms. There have been demonstrations over offensive historical monuments, discussions about whether white men should have the vote, and all the standard linguistic nitpicking and Foucauldian sermons on power.
The farm murders are a travesty, and they deserve to be recognised as such. By all means let them be brought to the world’s attention. But it really does matter how this is done, and even who is doing it; encouraging South Africa’s politics to become focussed on racial and cultural identity will not be good for farmers, for the millions with urgent economic needs, nor for anyone else. Those pursuing culture wars in secure Western countries, whether from the right or the left, would do better staying out of it.
One of my favourite moments in cinema comes from Paolo Sorrentino’s film The Great Beauty. The scene is a fashionable get-together on a summer evening, and as the guests gossip over aperitifs, we catch a woman uttering: “Everybody knows Ethiopian jazz is the only kind worth listening to.” The brilliance of this line is not just that it shows the speaker to be a pretentious fool. More than that, it manages to demonstrate the slipperiness of a particular ideal. For what this character is implying, with her reference to Ethiopian jazz, is that she and her tastes are authentic. She appreciates artistic integrity, meaningful expression, and maybe a certain virtuous naivety. And the irony, of course, is that by setting out to be authentic she has merely stumbled into cliché.
I find myself recalling this dilemma when I pass through the many parts of London that seem to be suffering an epidemic of authenticity today. Over the past decade or so, life here and in many other cities has become crammed with nostalgic, sentimental objects and experiences. We’ve seen retro décor in cocktail bars and diners, the return of analogue formats like vinyl and film photography, and a fetishism of the vintage and the hand-made in everything from fashion to crockery. Meanwhile restaurants, bookshops, and social media feeds offer a similarly quaint take on customs from around the globe.
Whether looking back to a 1920s Chicago of leather banquettes and Old Fashioned cocktails, or the wholesome cuisine of a traditional Balkan home, these are so many tokens of an idealised past – attempts to signify that simple integrity which, paradoxically, is the mark of cosmopolitan sophistication. These motifs have long since passed into cliché themselves. Yet the generic bars and coffee shops keep appearing, the LPs are still being reissued, and urban neighborhoods continue being regenerated to look like snapshots of times and places that never quite existed.
The Discount Suit Company, one of London’s many “Prohibition-style cocktail dens” according to TimeOut
There is something jarring about this marriage of the authentic with the commercial and trendy, just as there is when someone announces their love of Ethiopian jazz to burnish their social credentials. We understand there is more to authenticity than just an aura of uniqueness, a vague sense of being true to something, which a product or experience might successfully capture. Authenticity is also defined by what it isn’t: shallow conformity. Whether we find it in the charmingly traditional or in the unusual and eccentric, authenticity implies a defiance of those aspects of our culture that strike us as superficial or contrived.
Unsurprisingly then, most commentators have concluded that what surrounds us today is not authenticity at all. Rather, in these “ready-made generic spaces,” what we see is no less than “the triumph of hive mind aesthetics to the expense of spirit and of soul.” The authentic has become a mere pretense, a façade behind which a homogenized, soulless modernity has consolidated its hold. And this says something about us of course. To partake in such a fake culture suggests we are either unfortunate dupes or, perhaps, something worse. As one critic rather dramatically puts it: “In cultural markets that are all too disappointingly accessible to the masses, the authenticity fetish disguises and renders socially acceptable a raw hunger for hierarchy and power.”
These responses echo a line of criticism going back to the 1970s, which sees the twin ideals of the authentic self and the authentic product as mere euphemisms for the narcissistic consumer and the passing fad. And who can doubt that the prerogative of realising our unique selves has proved susceptible to less-than-unique commercial formulas? This cosmetic notion of authenticity is also applied easily to cultures as a whole. As such, it is well suited to an age of sentimental relativism, when all are encouraged to be tourists superficially sampling the delights of world.
And yet, if we are too sceptical, we risk accepting the same anaemic understanding of authenticity that the advertisers and trendsetters foist on us. Is there really no value in authenticity beyond the affirmation it gives us as consumers? Is there no sense in which we can live up to this ideal? Does modern culture offer us nothing apart from illusions? If we try to grasp where our understanding of authenticity comes from, and how it governs our relationship with culture, we might find that for all its fallibility it remains something that is worth aiming for. More importantly perhaps, we’ll see that for better or for worse, it’s not a concept we can be rid of any time soon.
Authenticity vs. mass culture
In the narrowest sense of the word, authenticity applies to things like banknotes and paintings by Van Gogh: it describes whether they are genuine or fake. What do we mean, though, when we say that an outfit, a meal, or a way of life is authentic? Maybe it’s still a question of provenance and veracity – where they originate and whether they are what they claim – but now these properties have taken on a quasi-spiritual character. Our aesthetic intuitions have lured us into much deeper waters, where we grope at values like integrity, humility, and self-expression.
Clearly authenticity in this wider sense cannot be determined by an expert with a magnifying glass. In fact, if we want to grasp how such values can seem to be embodied in our cultural environment – and how this relates to the notion of being an authentic person – we should take a step back. The most basic answers can be found in the context from which the ideal of authenticity emerged, and in which it continues to operate today: Western mass culture.
That phrase – mass culture – might strike you as modern sounding, recalling as it does a world of consumerism, Hollywood and TV ads. But it simply means a culture in which beliefs and habits are shaped by exposure to the same products and media, rather than by person-to-person interaction. In Europe and elsewhere, this was clearly emerging in the 18th and 19th centuries, in the form of mass media (journals and novels), mass-produced goods, and a middle class seeking novelties and entertainments. During the industrial revolution especially, information and commodities began to circulate at a distinctly modern tempo and scale.
Gradually, these changes heralded a new and somewhat paradoxical experience. On the one hand, the content of this culture – whether business periodicals, novels and plays, or department store window displays – inspired people to see themselves as individuals with their own ambitions and desires. Yet those individuals also felt compelled to keep up with the latest news, fashions and opinions. Ensconced in a technologically driven, commercially-minded society, culture became the site of constant change, behind which loomed an inscrutable mass of people. The result was an anxiety which has remained a feature of art and literature ever since: that of the unique subject being pulled along, puppet-like, by social expectations, or caught up in the gears of an anonymous system.
And one product of that anxiety was the ideal of authenticity. Philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century, Søren Kierkegaard in the 19th, and Martin Heidegger in the 20th, developed ideas of what it meant to be an authentic individual. Very broadly speaking, they were interested in the distinction between the person who conforms unthinkingly, and the person who approaches life on his or her own terms. This was never a question of satisfying the desire for uniqueness vis-à-vis the crowd, but an insistence that there were higher concepts and goals in relation to which individuals, and perhaps societies, could realise themselves.
John Ruskin’s illustrations of Gothic architecture, published in The Stones of Venice (1851)
Others, though, approached the problem from the opposite angle. The way to achieve an authentic way of being, they thought, was collectively, through culture. They emphasised the need for shared values that are not merely instrumental – values more meaningful than making money, saving time, or seeking social status. The most famous figures to attempt this in the 19th century were John Ruskin and William Morris, and the way they went about it was very telling indeed. They turned to the past and, drawing a direct link between aesthetics and morality, sought forms of creativity and production that seemed to embody a more harmonious existence among individuals.
For Morris, the answer was a return to small-scale, pre-industrial crafts. For Ruskin, medieval Gothic architecture was the model to be emulated. Although their visions of the ideal society differed greatly, both men praised loving craftsmanship, poetic expressiveness, imperfection and integrity – and viewed them as social as well as artistic virtues. The contrast with the identical commodities coming off factory production lines could hardly be more emphatic. In Ruskin’s words, whereas cheap wholesale goods forced workers “to make cogs and compasses of themselves,” the contours of the Gothic cathedral showed “the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone.”
The authentic dilemma
In Ruskin and Morris we can see the outlines of our own understanding of authenticity today. Few of us share their moral and social vision (Morris was a utopian socialist, Ruskin a paternalist Christian), but they were among the first to articulate a particular intuition that arises from the experience of mass culture – one that leads us to idealise certain products and pastimes as embodiments of a more free-spirited and nourishing, often bygone world. Our basic sense of what it means to be an authentic individual is rooted in this same ground: a defiance of the superficial and materialistic considerations that the world seems to impose on us.
Thanks to ongoing technological change, mass culture has impressed each new generation with these same tensions. The latest installment, of course, has been the digital revolution. Many of us find something impersonal in cultural products that exist only as binary code and appear only on a screen – a coldness somehow worsened by their convenience. The innocuous branding of digital publishing companies, with cuddly names like Spotify and Kindle, struggles to hide the bloodless efficiency of the algorithm. This is stereotypically contrasted with the soulful pleasures of, say, the authentic music fan, pouring over the sleeve notes of his vinyl record on the top deck of the bus.
But this hackneyed image immediately recalls the dilemma we started with, whereby authenticity itself gets caught-up in the web of fashion and consumerist desire. So when did ideals become marketing tools? The prevailing narrative emphasises the commodification of leisure in the early 20th century, the expansion of mass media into radio and cinema, and the development of modern advertising techniques. Yet, on a far more basic level, authenticity was vulnerable to this contradiction from the very beginning.
Ideals are less clear-cut in practice than they are in the page. For Ruskin and Morris, the authenticity of certain products and aesthetics stemmed from their association with a whole other system of values and beliefs. To appreciate them was effectively to discard the imperatives of mass culture and commit yourself to a different way of being. But no such clear separation exists in reality. We are quite capable of recognizing and appreciating authenticity when it is served to us by mass culture itself – and we can do so without even questioning our less authentic motives and desires.
Hi-tech Victorian entertainment: the Panorama. (Source: Wikimedia commons)
Thus, by the time Ruskin published “On the Nature of Gothic” in 1851, Britain had long been in the grip of a mass phenomenon known as the Gothic Revival – a fascination with Europe’s Christian heritage manifest in everything from painting and poetry to fashion and architecture. Its most famous monument would be the building from which the new industrial society was managed and directed: the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. Likewise, nodding along to Ruskin’s noble sentiments did not prevent bourgeois readers from enjoying modern conveniences and entertainments, and merely justified their disdain for mass-produced goods as cheap and common.
From then until now, to be “cultured” has to some degree implied a mingling of nostalgia and novelty, efficiency and sentimentality. Today’s middle-classes might resent their cultural pursuits becoming generic trends, but also know that their own behavior mirrors this duplicity. The artisanal plate of food is shared on Facebook, a yoga session begins a day of materialistic ambition, and the Macbook-toting creative expresses in their fashion an air of old-fashioned simplicity. It’s little wonder boutique coffee shops the world over look depressingly similar, seeing as most of their customers happily share the same environment on their screens.
Given this tendency to pursue conflicting values simultaneously, there is really nothing to stop authentic products and ideas becoming fashionable in their own right. And once they do so, of course, they have started their inevitable descent into cliché. But crucially, this does not mean that authenticity is indistinguishable from conformity and status seeking itself. In fact, it can remain meaningful even alongside these tendencies.
Performing the authentic
A few years ago, I came across a new, elaborately designed series of Penguin books. With their ornate frontispieces and tactile covers, these “Clothbound Classics” seemed to be recalling the kind volume that John Ruskin himself might have read. On closer inspection, though, these objects really reflected the desires of the present. The antique design elements were balanced with modern ones, so as to produce a carefully crafted simulacrum: a copy for which no original has ever existed. Deftly straddling the nostalgia market and the world of contemporary visuals, these were books for people who now did most of their reading from screens.
Volumes from Penguin’s “Clothbound Classics” series
As we’ve seen, to be authentic is to aspire to a value more profound than mere expediency – one that we often situate in the obsolete forms of the past. This same sentimental quality, however, also makes for a very good commodity. We often find that things are only old or useless insofar as this allows them to be used as novelties or fashion statements. And such appropriation is only too easy when the aura of authenticity can be summoned, almost magically, by the manipulation of symbols: the right typeface on a menu, the right degree of saturation in a photograph, the right pattern on a book cover.
This is where our self-deceiving relationship with culture comes into closer focus. How is it we can be fooled by what are clearly just token gestures towards authenticity, couched in alterior motives like making money or grabbing our attention? The reason is that, in our everyday interactions with culture, we are not going around as judges but as imaginative social beings who appreciate such gestures. We recognise that they have a value simply as reminders of ideals that we hold in common, or that we identify with personally. Indeed, buying into hints and suggestions is how ideals remain alive in amidst the disappointments and limitations of lived reality.
In his essay “A is for Authentic,” Design Museum curator Deyan Sudjic expands this idea by portraying culture as a series of choreographed rituals and routines, which demonstrate not so much authenticity as our aspirations towards it. From the homes we inhabit to the places we shop and the clothes we wear, Sudjic suggests, “we live much of our lives on a sequence of stage sets, modeled on dreamlike evocations of the world that we would like to live in rather than the world as it is.”
This role-play takes us away from the realities of profit and loss, necessity and compromise, and into a realm where those other notions like humility and integrity have the place they deserve. For Sudjic, the authentic charm of a period-themed restaurant, for instance, allows us to “toy with the idea that the rituals of everyday life have more significance than, in truth, we suspect that they really do.” We know we are not going to find anything like pure, undiluted authenticity, free from all pretense. But we can settle for something that acknowledges the value of authenticity in a compelling way – something “authentic in its artistic sincerity.” That is enough for us to play along.
Steven Poole makes a similar point about the ideal of being an authentic person, responding to the uncompromising stance that Jean Paul Satre takes on this issue. In Satre’s Being and Nothingness, there is a humorous vignette in which he caricatures the mannerisms of a waiter in a café. In Satre’s eyes, this man’s contrived behavior shows that he is performing a role rather than being his authentic self. But Poole suggests that, “far from being deluded that he really is a waiter,” maybe Satre’s dupe is aware that he is acting, and is just enjoying it.
Social life is circumscribed by performance and gesture to the extent that, were we to dig down in an effort to find some authentic bedrock, we would simply be taking up another role. Our surroundings and possessions are part of that drama too – products like books and Gothic cathedrals are ultimately just props we use to signal towards a hypothetical ideal. So yes, authenticity is a fiction. But insofar as it allows us to express our appreciation of values we regard as important, it can be a useful one.
Between thought and expression
Regardless of the benefits, though, our willingness to relax judgment for the sake of gesture has obvious shortcomings. The recent craze for the authentic, with its countless generic trends, has demonstrated them clearly. Carried away by the rituals of consumerism, we can end up embracing little more than a pastiche of authenticity, apparently losing sight of the bigger picture of sterile conformity in which those interactions are taking place. Again, the suspicion arises that authenticity itself is a sham. For how can it be an effective moral standard if, when it comes to actually consuming culture, we simply accept whatever is served up to us?
I don’t think this picture is entirely right, though. Like most of our ideals, authenticity has no clear and permanent outline, but exists somewhere between critical thought and social conventions. Yet these two worlds are not cut off from each other. We do still possess some awareness when we are immersed in everyday life, and the distinctions we make from a more detached perspective can, gradually and unevenly, sharpen that awareness. Indeed, even the most aggressive criticism of authenticity today is, at least implicitly, grounded in this possibility.
One writer, for instance, describes the vernacular of “reclaimed wood, Edison bulbs, and refurbished industrial lighting” which has become so ubiquitous in modern cities, calling it “a hipster reduction obsessed with a superficial sense of history and the remnants of industrial machinery that once occupied the neighbourhoods they take over.” The pretense of authenticity has allowed the emergence of zombie-like cultural forms: deracinated, fake, and sinister in their social implications. “From Bangkok to Beijing, Seoul to San Francisco,” he writes, this “tired style” is catering to “a wealthy, mobile elite, who want to feel like they’re visiting somewhere ‘authentic’ while they travel.”
This is an effective line of attack because it clarifies a vague unease that many will already feel in these surroundings. But crucially, it can only do this by appealing to a higher standard of authenticity. Like most recent critiques of this kind, it combines aesthetic revulsion at a soulless, monotonous landscape, with moral condemnation of the social forces responsible, and thus reads exactly like an updated version of John Ruskin’s arguments. In other words, the same intuitions that lead consumers, however erroneously, to find certain gestures and symbols appealing, are being leveraged here to clarify those intuitions.
This is the fundamental thing to understand about authenticity: it is so deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking about culture, and in our worldview generally, that it is both highly corruptible and impossible to dispense with. Since our basic desire for authenticity doesn’t come from advertisers or philosophers, but from the experience of mass culture itself, we can manipulate and refine that desire but we can’t suppress it. And almost regardless of what we do, it will continue to find expression in any number of ways.
A portrait posted by socialite Kendall Jenner on Instagram in 2015, typical of the new mannerist, sentimental style
This has been vividly demonstrated, for instance, in the relatively new domain of social media. Here the tensions of mass culture have, in a sense, risen afresh, with person-to-person interaction taking place within the same apparatus that circulates mass media and social trends. Thus a paradigm of authentic expression has emerged which in some places verges on outright romanticism: consider the phenomenon of baring your soul to strangers on Facebook, or the mannerist yet sentimental style of portrait that is so popular on Instagram. Yet this paradigm still functions precisely along the lines we identified earlier. Everybody knows it is ultimately a performance, but are willing to go along with it.
Authenticity has also become “the stardust of this political age.” The sprouting of a whole crop of unorthodox, anti-establishment politicians on both sides of the Atlantic is taken to mean that people crave conviction and a human touch. Yet even here it seems we are dealing not so much with authentic personas as with authentic products. For their followers, such leaders are an ideal standard against which culture can be judged, as well as symbolic objects that embody an ideology – much as handcrafted goods were for William Morris’ socialism, or Gothic architecture was for Ruskin’s Christianity.
Moreover, where these figures have broadened their appeal beyond their immediate factions, it is again because mass culture has allowed them to circulate as recognisable and indeed fashionable symbols of authenticity. One of the most intriguing objects I’ve come across recently is a “bootlegged” Nike t-shirt, made by the anonymous group Bristol Street Wear in support of the politician Jeremy Corbyn. Deliberately or not, their use of one of the most iconic commercial designs in history is an interesting comment on that trade-off between popularity and integrity which is such a feature of authenticity in general.
The bootleg t-shirt produced by Bristol Street Wear during the 2017 General Election campaign. Photograph: Victoria & Albert Museum, London
These are just cursory observations; my point is that the ideal of authenticity is pervasive, and that for this very reason, any expression of it risks being caught-up in the same system of superficial motives and ephemeral trends that it seeks to oppose. This does not make authenticity an empty concept. But it does mean that, ultimately, it should be seen as a form of aspiration, rather than a goal which can be fully realised.
First published online by Apollo Magazine on 17 August 2017
Today we can’t help but see the Weimar Republic in terms of its tragic denouement: the rise of Hitler and all that followed. But for those living there, the present was already insecure, often brutal, and as the historian Eric Hobsbawm would later recall, ‘unbelievably exciting, sophisticated, intellectually and politically explosive’. And it demanded new forms of expression.
These included, most famously, the plays of Bertolt Brecht, German Expressionist film, Dada, cabaret, and Marlene Dietrich. But there was another tendency that emerged at this moment, just as revolutionary in its way. It was known loosely as the Neue Sachlichkeit, meaning ‘New Objectivity’ or ‘New Sobriety’. Artists under its sway aimed to understand their time through its people – staring the zeitgeist right in the face, as it were. And, as an impressive exhibition at Tate Liverpool shows, they’ve left us with a remarkable window on to the era too.
‘Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919–1933’ tells the story of the Weimar Republic through the work of just two artists: the photographer August Sander, and the painter and printmaker Otto Dix. It’s a fantastic one-two punch. Though very different in both medium and temperament, they shared a determination to seek out and represent every recess of German society, and thereby to expose some deeper truth.
The first half of the show is devoted to Sander’s astonishing photographic project, ‘People of the Twentieth Century’. Over four decades, Sander set out to document and classify the entire social structure, accumulating thousands of images. 140 of them are on show here. In stark focus, surrounded by the paraphernalia of their daily lives, the subjects gaze passively from the centre of each portrait. They have no names, only labels placing them in Sander’s taxonomy of ‘archetypes’. Descriptors such as ‘Village Schoolteacher’, ‘Working Class Mother’, and ‘Beggar’ are assigned to the categories ‘Classes and Professions’, ‘The Woman’, and ‘The Last People.’
Running alongside these photographs, which wind around three rooms, the curators have supplied a timeline of Weimar Germany. You suspect Sander would have approved, since this adds to the impression of mere individuals lost in the maelstrom of history. It’s doubtful, however, that this sangfroid brought the photographer any comfort when that history bore down on him. In 1933 his son Erich, a Communist, was sent to prison, where he would eventually die. At this point Sander’s portraits begin to feel despairingly muted, as they receive labels like ‘National Socialist’ and ‘Victim of Persecution’.
This brings us to the second half of the show: the paintings, drawings and etchings of Otto Dix. If Sander has given us all the background we could ask for, Dix now gives us the foreground, in vivid and often disturbing detail. His was a different sort of ‘objectivity’, an amoral fascination with the beauty and potential of a society in tumult. His mission, most stunningly expressed in his lurid, crystalline style of portraiture, was ‘to expose ugliness and life undiluted’.
As Susanne Meyer-Büser points out in the exhibition catalogue, Dix returned from the First World War as a man on the make and no doubt ambition played a part in his self-styling as ‘proletarian rebel and big-city dandy.’ At any rate, he soon made a name for himself as a nihilistic observer of the demi-monde, as shown by the titles of some etchings Dix sent to an art dealer in 1920: War Cripples, Match Dealer, Sex Murderer, Lady in the Café, Card Players, and Butcher Shop.
In the following years, this cast grew to include bourgeois patrons, intellectuals, and performers, as Dix began churning out his dazzling portraits. He was profoundly inspired by the Old Masters, reviving both their compositional style and painting techniques. This meant placing his subjects proudly in the front and centre of the picture plane, giving them a confrontational air. It also led to his method of ‘glazing,’ a practice involving layers of thin oil paint and tempera, which produced unparalleled lustre and immediacy.
This visual splendour, however, was always for Dix a means of gazing into the souls of his subjects. Whether capturing the woollen texture of a suit in his Portrait of the Photographer Hugo Erfurt with Dog (1926), or rendering, with a painfully delicate brush, each pubic hair of his Nude Girl on a Fur (1932), his paintings show a flair for characterisation that any novelist could admire.
It’s possible to see Sander and Dix as the yin and yang of European modernism in this period. Sander sought to understand the world by imposing order, Dix by flirting with chaos. Both remind us of an actor who we tend to forget is on the stage during these frantic episodes in history: the detached observer, committed only to showing things as they are. I should add that, with over 300 works and many metres of wall text, this exhibition is heavy going. But rarely will you see a period of turmoil and flux brought to life with such depth and lucidity.
“Opinions,” Walter Benjamin wrote, “are to the gigantic apparatus of social life what oil is to machines. No one goes up to an engine and douses it in machine oil; one applies a little to the hidden spindles and joints one has to know.” Those defending free speech today may recoil from this advice. The idea of society as a machine, which came naturally to the Marxist Benjamin, is a long way from the ideal of free and creative individuals that many of them cherish. Nonetheless, it strikes me as a useful metaphor, if only because of the image it brings to mind of the era we’ve now entered: an engine drowning in so much oil that it has begun violently shaking, sputtering and threatening to collapse.
It wouldn’t be misleading to say that the greatest threat to free speech today comes from free speech itself. In particular, it comes from the sheer volume and chaotic nature of that speech. The current polarization of politics is rooted in an endless, sprawling argument about values taking place online – an argument that is now spilling over into demonstrations, acts of violence, and other culturally charged spectacles. While it is important to resist the calls for censorship coming from campuses, boardrooms, and the op-ed pages of newspapers, it’s also important to realize that these, too, are symptoms of that explosion in public discourse. For it is precisely the sensation of shaking and sputtering that makes people long for society to be handled like a carefully engineered machine.
Countering this need for order is the real challenge facing advocates of free speech, and their conventional manual isn’t offering much help. It demands that the right to express unpopular, or even anti-social opinions must be defended – but given the Internet’s steady drumbeat of racism and misogyny, this stance is easily portrayed as anti-social in itself. Likewise, it’s difficult to argue that toxic ideas are best heard and examined, or that speech is the final bulwark against violence, when men appear on our screens with a swastika in one hand and a protest permit in the other.
In this desperate position, free speech defenders have come to sound like the resentful father who scolds his son for being too soft. “They’re just words!” they insist, “Learn to argue back! This is about facts, not feelings!” These jibes are aimed particularly at the cultural left, whose attempts to remold science, language and thought carries the unmistakable whiff of puritanism. However, the popularity of this agenda reflects a wider desire, especially among young people, for a Hobbesian authority to step in with a clearly defined notion of what is true and what is right. Nor is this surprising, in an atmosphere of pernicious skepticism that makes meaningful consensus impossible.
Therein, I think, lies the ultimate weakness of the free speech position today. It is similarly anchored in a delusional vision of society: that of the rational, truth-seeking forum for debate. The suggestion that there has ever been such a debate – or worse, a golden age where everyone started with the same facts – appears to be a case of liberals drinking their own bathwater. Before the Internet, as one recent blog put it, “exposure to awkward political views were limited to tense exchanges at Thanksgiving or Christmas, when relatives shared their strongheld offensive opinions over the punch bowl.” The business of public discourse, meanwhile, was handled by established institutions, such as the press and media, popular arts and entertainment, politics and academia.
The way these institutions facilitated discussion is worth considering. Since everyone needed access to them, they developed certain norms – or informal rules and rituals, if you prefer – which provided the common ground for different perspectives to meet on equal terms. Thus, adopting the language and trappings of a print magazine, or of popular cinema, or an academic paper, gave an air of familiarity to even radical views. These norms also included unwarranted prejudices and taboos, of course, so discursive institutions have always had a problem with exclusivity. However, since they enabled a measure of free discussion, they could be reformed. There’s a reason we measure social progress by how successfully our institutions have incorporated new voices.
It is the case that everywhere we can argue and disagree without causing lasting hostility – in pubs, at dinner parties, and in families – there are norms regulating our behavior. On a wider, societal level, these become more like moral and aesthetic frameworks, the likes of which were essential in husbanding the growth of public discourse to begin with. Larry Siedentop has detailed how the principles of reason, equality and freedom of conscience could only emerge as a result of the Catholic Church’s firm grip on medieval Europe. Likewise in the 18th century, when The Spectator was bragging that it had “brought philosophy out of closets and libraries… to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables, and coffee houses,” a new fad was being promoted to make this reading public manageable. It was called “politeness.”
It’s true that social media has its own norms, but they are rather fragile, and generally operate within groups of more or less like-minded people. Indeed, it’s natural that rifts should appear in a space with radically diverse views, and none of the overarching norms that might have made them palatable. In the absence of such common ground, principles like granting your opponent the possession of reason and a free conscience are being eroded. Thus we see a good deal of amateur psychology, with large groups of people being suspected of confirmation bias or motivated reasoning. Even worse, we see paranoia emerging whereby individuals subside into categories of race, gender or social class—and it’s imagined that forces are advancing sinister agendas through ideologically possessed puppets.
Indeed, unfamiliarity and estrangement is the very essence of that machine-like view of society that is so hostile to freedom of expression. Yet there’s little that promoting free speech can do to solve this dilemma, and potentially a great deal it can do to make it worse. John Stuart Mill argued that the whole point of free speech is to interrogate our norms from as many angles as possible, so as to expose any erroneous ideas they might be sheltering. Not all free speech advocates subscribe to this rationalistic ethos, but in the present circumstances, they could end up there by default. At the very least, a commitment to free speech means being skeptical towards normative boundaries, since they are likely to prevent certain viewpoints from being heard. That said, as those viewpoints multiply, you will eventually run out of boundaries to draw.
Ultimately this brings us to a broader problem faced by secular liberalism, whose emphasis on the rights and interests of individuals tends to undermine social solidarity. There have been recent attempts to square this circle, notably by Jonathan Haidt. In The Righteous Mind, Haidt asked those who see society in individualistic terms to “recognise that human flourishing requires social order and embeddedness,” and suggested they acknowledge the “binding” value of beliefs related to sanctity and loyalty. But as the philosopher Thomas Nagel commented, the interesting thing about this theory is where it falls short. Nagel points out that you can’t adopt beliefs simply because they are useful – they are only useful if you really believe them.
There are really no simple answers here. Liberal conventions such as free speech undermine the very social frameworks that they depend upon. But equally, you can’t impose a sense of community on a society from the top down. I’m inclined to agree with Karl Popper, then, when he emphasizes “the effort which life in an open and partially abstract society continually demands from us… to be rational, to forgo at least some of our emotional social needs, to look after ourselves, to accept responsibilities.” In the long run, maintaining freedom of speech will depend on persuading people to make that effort. But it will be a tough sell, and needs to be done carefully.
The article was first published by Quillette magazine on 19 October 2017
In the afternoon our house settles into a decadent air. My sisters’ children are asleep, there is the lingering smell of coffee, the corridors are in shade with leaves moving silently outside the windows. In my room light still pours in from the electric blue sky of the Eastern Cape. There is a view of the town, St Francis Bay, clustered picturesquely in the orthodox Dutch style, thatched roofs and gleaming whitewashed walls hugging the turquoise of the Indian Ocean.
This town, as I hear people say, is not really like South Africa. Most of its occupants are down over Christmas from the northern Highveld cities. During these three weeks the town’s population quadruples, the shopping centres, bars and beaches filling with more or less wealthy holidaymakers. They are white South Africans – English and Afrikaans-speaking – a few African millionaires, and recently, a number of integrated middle-class Africans too. The younger generations are Americanised, dressing like it was Orange County. There are fun runs and triathlons on an almost daily basis, and dance music drifts across the town every night.
But each year it requires a stronger act of imagination, or repression, to ignore the realities of the continent to which this place is attached. Already, the first world ends at the roadside, where families of pigs and goats tear open trash bags containing health foods and House and Leisure. Holidaymakers stock up on mineral water at the vast Spar supermarket, no longer trusting their taps. At night, the darkness of power cuts is met with the reliable whirring of generators.
And from where I sit at my desk I can make out, along the worn-out roads, impoverished African men loping in twos or threes towards the margins of town after their day of construction work, or of simply waiting at the street corner to be picked up for odd jobs. Most of them are headed to Sea Vista, or KwaNomzamo, third-world townships like those that gather around all of South Africa’s towns and cities, like the faded edges of a photograph.
When I visited South Africa as a child, this ragged frontier seemed normal, even romantic. Then, as I grew used to gazing at the world from London, my African insights became a source of tension. The situation felt rotten, unaccountable. But if responsibility comes from proximity, how can the judgment that demands it come from somewhere far removed? And who is being judged, anyway? In a place where the only truly shared experience is instability, judicial words like ‘inequality’ must become injudicious ones like ‘headfuck’. That is what South Africa is to an outsider: an uncanny dream where you feel implicated yet detached, unable to ignore or to understand.
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Ethics is an inherently privileged pursuit, requiring objectivity, critical distance from a predicament. If, as Thomas Nagel says, objective judgment is ‘a set of concentric spheres, progressively revealed as we detach from the contingencies of the self,’ then ethics assume the right to reside in some detached outer sphere, a non-person looking down at the human nuclei trapped in their lesser orbits.
In his memoir Lost and Found in Johannesburg, Mark Gevisser uses another aerial view, a 1970s street guide, to recollect the divisions of apartheid South Africa. Areas designated for different races are placed on separate pages, or the offending reality of a black settlement is simply left blank. These omissions represented the outer limits of ethical awareness, as sanctioned by the state.
Gevisser, raised as a liberal, English-speaking South African, had at least some of the detachment implied by his map. Apartheid was the creation of the Afrikaner people, whose insular philosophy became bureaucratic reality in 1948, by virtue of their being just over half of South Africa’s white voters. My parents grew up within its inner circle, a world with no television and no loose talk at parties, tightly embraced by the National Party and by God himself through his Dutch Reformed church.
It was a prison of memory – the Afrikaners had never escaped their roots as the hopeless dregs of Western Europe that had coalesced on the tip of Africa in the 17th century. Later, the British colonists would call them ‘rock spiders’. They always respected a leader who snubbed the outside world, like Paul Kruger, who in the late 19th century called someone a liar for claiming to have sailed around the earth, which of course was flat. Their formation of choice was the laager, a circular fort of settlers’ wagons, with guns trained at the outside.
By the time my father bought the house in St Francis in 1987, the world’s opinions had long been flooding in. Apartheid’s collapse was under way, brought about, ironically, by dependence on African labour and international trade. My family lived in Pretoria, where they kept a revolver in the glove compartment. We left seven years later, when I was three, part of the first wave of a great diaspora of white South Africans to the English-speaking world.
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From my half-detached perspective, the rhythms of South African history appear deep and unbending. The crude patchwork of apartheid dissolved only to reform as a new set of boundaries, distinct spheres of experience sliding past each other. Even as places like St Francis boomed, the deprived rural population suddenly found itself part of a global economy, and flooded into peripheral townships and squatter camps. During the year, when there is no work in St Francis, these are the ghosts who break into empty mansions to steal taps, kettles, and whatever shred of copper they can find.
This is how Patricia and her family moved to KwaNomzamo, near the poor town of Humansdorp, about 20 minutes’ drive from St Francis. Patricia is our cleaner, a young woman with bright eyes. She is Coloured, an ethnicity unique to South Africa, which draws its genes from African and Malay slaves, the indigenous San and Khoikhoi people of the Cape, and the Afrikaners, whose language they share. This is the deferential language of the past – ‘ja Mevrou,’ Patricia says in her lilting accent.
I have two images of Patricia. The first is a mental one of her home in KwaNomzamo, one of the tin boxes they call ‘disaster housing’, planted neatly in rows beside the sprawl of the apartheid-era ‘location’. This image is dominated by Patricia’s disabled mother, who spends her days here, mute and motionless like a character from an absurdist drama. Beside this is the actual photograph Patricia asked us to take at her boyfriend’s house, where they assumed a Madonna-like pose with their three-month-old child.
These memories drive apart the different perspectives in me like nothing else. The relationships between middle-class South Africans and their domestic staff today are a genuine strand of solidarity in an otherwise confusing picture. But from my European viewpoint, always aware of history and privilege, even empathy is just another measure of injustice, of difference. This mindset is calibrated from a distance: someone who brings it to actual relationships is not an attractive prospect, nor an ethical one. Self-aware is never far from self-absorbed.
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The danger usually emphasised by ethics is becoming trapped in a subjective viewpoint, seeing the world from too narrow an angle. But another problem is the philosophical shrinking act sometimes known as false objectivity. If you already have a detached perspective, the most difficult part of forming a judgment is understanding the personal motives of those involved. ‘Reasons for action,’ as Nagel says, ‘have to be reasons for individuals’. The paradox is that a truly objective judgment has to be acceptable from any viewpoint, otherwise it is just another subjective judgment.
In Britain, hardship seems to exist for our own judicial satisfaction. Ethics are a spectator sport mediated by screens, a televised catharsis implying moral certainty. War, natural disasters, the boats crossing the Mediterranean – there’s not much we can offer these images apart from such Manichean responses as blind sympathy or outrage, and these we offer largely to our consciences. Looking out becomes another way of looking in.
The journalist R.W. Johnson noted that after liberation, foreign papers lost interest in commissioning stories about South Africa. Just as well, since it soon became a morass of competing anxieties, the idealism of the ‘rainbow nation’ corroded by grotesque feats of violence and corruption: I am not unusual in having relatives who have been murdered. Against this background, the pigs and potholes among the mansions of St Francis are like blood coughed into a silk handkerchief, signs of a hidden atrophy already far progressed.
Alison and Tim are the sort of young South Africans – and there remain many – whose optimism has always been the antidote to all this. They are Johannesburgers proud of their cosmopolitan city. One evening last Christmas, I sat with Tim in a St Francis bar that served craft beer and staged an indie band in the corner. This is not really like South Africa, he said, pointing to the entirely white crowd. Then he told me he, too, is thinking of leaving.
South Africa’s currency, the Rand, crashed in December after President Jacob Zuma fired his Finance Minister on a whim. You could not go anywhere without hearing about this. Everyone is looking for something to export, Tim said, a way to earn foreign currency before it becomes impossible to leave. He has a family to think of – and yes, he admitted several drinks later, it bothers him that you could wake any night with a gun to your head.
‘More often in the first world / one wakes from not to the nightmare’, writes the American poet Kathy Fagan. There is such as thing as a shared dream, but even nightmares that grow from the same source tend to grow apart. They are personal, invisible from outside.
This article was first published by The Junket on 29 Feb 2016
This article was first published by Quillette in February 2017
In 2009, the primatologist Frans de Waal published a bestseller called The Age of Empathy, in which he suggested that humanity might be rediscovering its propensity for cooperation and kindness. No longer would we be fooled by the myths of politicians and economists about our apparently selfish nature. He cited as evidence for this the recent election of a man who seemed to speak about empathy more than any other, Barack Obama. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!” How much older and sadder the West seems today — its conversations about politics and ethics bitter and polarized, all basis for rational disagreement evaporating before our eyes.
And yet, de Waal’s claim that we are “pre-programmed to reach out” has not been dispensed with — in fact, many continue to believe that the world is awash with empathy. Only there is now a growing suspicion that this might actually bear some responsibility for our discord. In 2012, a collection of papers entitled Pathological Altruism signalled the start of a new trend of skepticism towards empathy and compassion. Behind it lay the claim, as radical as it was blindingly obvious, that precisely because empathy is an evolved mechanism, it might have unintended consequences in the modern world.
Since then, psychologists and sociologists have been exploring the dark side of altruistic behavior, especially with regards to political and cultural tribalism. Jordan Peterson and Christine Brophy have discovered that so-called ‘Social Justice Warriors’ tend to be high in empathy towards the vulnerable, but draconian towards those perceived to be a threat. Similarly, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning have pointed out that partisanship flourishes in a “victimhood culture,” because people respond to appeals from those they identify with socially.
These seem like lessons for the left especially, but as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign showed, the right has its own sinister uses for empathy. Nationalists have long used the propaganda of victimization to foster in-group mindsets, and to motivate, in Jonathan Sacks’s phrase, “altruistic evil” towards outsiders and scapegoats.
Be all this as it may, the notion that what the world really needs is less empathy still strikes most people as absurd. Are these not cases of too little, rather than too much empathy? Is the cardinal definition of empathy not to “place yourself in somebody else’s shoes”? How would our close relationships function without it? And above all, without the capacity to be moved by another’s suffering, how is good supposed to come into the world?
These questions point, more than anything, to an almighty confusion about how phenomena like empathy, compassion, and altruism work and relate to one another. For this reason alone, we should welcome the most direct assault on empathy to date, Paul Bloom’s much-discussed recent book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Let’s take that adage about “placing yourself in someone else’s shoes.” As Bloom points out, it confuses two things that don’t necessarily go together. One is cognitive empathy, or “social intelligence,” which means the basic ability to grasp someone else’s point of view. This is rightly valued. Bloom’s adversary, however, is what he sees as empathy proper: feeling another’s pain as though it were your own.
This kind of emotional or “affective” empathy is not voluntary, of course, but according to Bloom, nor is it a good basis on which to act in public life. This claim is based on two main observations. First, to embrace empathy is often to abandon perspective and rational judgment, meaning that “our interests fail to coincide with any reasonable assessment of where help is needed most.” And second, echoing some of the research I cited earlier, empathy is actually quite picky about which shoes it enters. It conforms to our existing prejudices, and leads people to seek harsher punishments for perceived enemies, finding some of its purest expressions in “us versus them” situations.
That empathy can be divisive should scarcely be surprising. How often do partisans seek “single identifiable victims” — whether mistreated welfare claimants or destitute veterans — to frame a particular agenda in emotional terms? Once a debate has become suffused with empathy, all appeals to the bigger picture are easily dismissed as callous. And worse, the consequences can reverberate far beyond the debate itself.
Arguably the great moral fiasco of our day, the Western response to the migrant and refugee crises in southern Europe, has shown all the shortcomings of empathy that Bloom describes. An image of a dead child washed ashore achieves a greater response than five years of mass-casualty shipwrecks, not to mention figures showing the displaced climbing into the millions. Since this is how we’ve learned to understand suffering, the urgency of the problem ebbs and flows with photogenic tragedies and compassion fatigue, leaving governments unsure of how they should act.
When action did come, it was grand, magnanimous — and shortsighted. Germany’s open invitation to refugees travelling through the Balkans was a balm for Europe’s conscience, but first-come first-served is hardly an effective policy for helping the most vulnerable. Moreover, the episode pushed the entire continent’s politics to the right, meaning that as the German government backtracks, refugees pile up in Greece where they can least afford to be helped. And through all of this, anyone suggesting we discriminate on the basis of need has been met with a bizarre insistence that it’s cruel to distinguish, for instance, between migrants and refugees. It’s almost as if good intentions are worth more than good outcomes.
This last point, however, gets at a deeper problem with the role of empathy in our culture — one that Bloom’s book misses altogether. His critique deals with empathy in and of itself, and makes only passing reference to substantive issues, like police shootings or the caprices of media coverage, that underscore particular points. But there is no such thing as empathy per se. Like any human phenomenon, it doesn’t exist outside of concrete cultural and historical situations. Bloom would not have much material if Westerners did not watch TV, possess more resources than Africans, feel guilt in certain situations, or recognize the worth of people they have never met.
Deep-rooted problems like culture wars and a failure to think practically imply that vicarious suffering, more than ever, is welcomed not as a motivation for good actions, but as an end in itself. In other words, empathy is jealously defended because of its value to the empathizer. This, in turn, might point to an atomized, morally perplexed society, much of whose emotional sustenance comes from an ephemeral stream of online media. The feeling of helplessness that arises from passively consuming distant events is now central to the relationship of the individual to the world. In this situation, expressions of empathy and disgust, with their attendant comforts of tribal solidarity, are often all that stand between you and moral estrangement from reality.
Bloom admits that empathy is probably okay in personal relationships, but harmful in the public sphere. How workable is this distinction when politics is personal, and the ideology is the new family? Before we even start to think about how something like “rational compassion” might translate into a meaningful system of values, we need to consider why empathy is in such high demand.
This article was first published online by Apollo magazine on 15 March 2016
You could call it the ‘Van Gogh factor’ – the aura that clings to a distinctive artist who was unrecognised during their lifetime. There is romance in this, and a chance to feel we are setting the record straight. It is curatorial gold – something apparently confirmed by the praise heaped on the Serpentine’s new exhibition of work by Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), only the second in Britain to date.
Hilma af Klint was an impressionist landscape painter by profession, but is known today for creating a series of cosmically-inspired abstract works that predate the early experiments in non-representation by more famous ‘pioneers’ such as Wassily Kandinsky and Robert Delaunay. Unlike the long-suffering Van Gogh, af Klint kept these endeavours resolutely hidden. The artist extended a moratorium on exhibiting The Paintings for the Temple – her main body of abstract works – for 20 years after her death: the paintings were not actually shown until 1986.
It’s not hard to see why af Klint was reticent about her experimental side. Her works have a pagan intensity, symbolic and monumental, that can be simply baffling. This is the case with a series of paintings from 1907 known as The Ten Largest, which, as the title suggests, are enormous – three metres tall – and present crowded conflagrations of organic and geometric shapes against pastel backgrounds. Other works more explicitly reveal her background as an esoteric spiritualist, who conducted séances with other female artists and saw her work as a ‘commission’ from the ‘High Masters’ of another dimension. The 193 Paintings for the Temple, which come in series such as Primordial Chaos(1906–07) and Evolution (1908), were largely an attempt to outline her cosmology through an immense variety of symbols, from swans and doves to letters and colours.
The clandestine nature of af Klint’s work is a helpful get-out clause for a critic, since her eccentric style is more or less impossible to pin down with conventional vocabulary or value judgements. She strikes me as a wonderful colourist on occasion, although her paintings are often convoluted. But what is the point of saying even this? Like William Blake, af Klint was not answering to any worldly authority. All you can do is marvel at the energy.
There are pitfalls to bringing overlooked artists into the spotlight. They tend to be remade in the image of our present desires; appropriated for political ends, caricatured with phrases like ‘rebel par excellence’. The Serpentine has admirably avoided this with a measured collection of essays. Here we learn, for instance, that some of the more famous abstract painters were also interested in spiritualism, that af Klint herself was equally interested in science, and that Sweden was – comparatively speaking – accepting of female artists during her lifetime.
Ultimately, though, the greatest value of art-historical anomalies like af Klint does not stem from their elusiveness, nor from their canon-defying dates (already I see people claiming that Georgiana Houghton, whose work goes on show at the Courtauld later this year, predates af Klint in the abstraction stakes). It is that their work tends to make us abandon the generic lenses we habitually apply to art. To call af Klint abstract, for instance, is a category error, since she was independent of this discourse. Such perspective must be a good thing, even if it leaves us without much to say.
This article was first published online by Wallpaper* on Feb 15 2016
‘The Final Project’ is a great title, capturing the unsettling combination of humour and honesty with which photographer Jo Spence (1934–1992), with her long-term collaborator Terry Dennett, documented her death from leukemia over two years in 1991–92. As a selection now being shown at London’s Richard Saltoun gallery demonstrates, the scope of the project was unflinching and ambitious – testament to an artist with nothing to lose.
‘The Final Project’ has a few different strands, which echo both the deterioration of Spence’s health and the stages of emotional trauma. An early part involved photographing comical assemblages in a graveyard, including joke-shop skeletons, flowers and bushy blond wigs, recalling the adage that sometimes the only response to tragedy one can muster is laughter.
In another equally mischievous, though more analytical series, the feminist Spence contrasted Western obsessions with beauty and youth with the celebration of death in Mexican and Egyptian traditions. And finally, as she grew weaker, Spence fell back on the prodigious archive of images she had amassed during her career, and created new works by overlaying them in a technique called ‘slide-sandwiching’.
These beautiful montages, with Spence’s body floating above a stream or a field, have a serene atmosphere of acceptance. Using older images of herself was also a way around what Spence called her ‘crisis of representation’, whereby she felt her emaciated body to be totally estranged from her spirit. Ultimately, though, she overcame this challenge as well. In a series of self-portraits from her deathbed, she manages with a peaceful stare to confound mortality itself.
