Peripathetic, p.2
Peripathetic, page 2
Like Kailash, I’ve also frequently felt that ‘immigration was the original sin’, that ‘someone owed me something’. Identity politicians may call this entitlement, but it could equally be construed as a sense of having being cheated. While migration can be liberating – and it has been for me, at least in terms of reclaiming the psycho-political un-freedoms I had been burdened with in the old country – it can simultaneously be a failed promise. People about to migrate, particularly those who don’t do so explicitly for work, usually do not stop to consider the losses that will arise; we are in the midst of escaping. Everything else can come later, and it may involve a reconstitution of priorities that results in this feeling of having been ripped off. A betrayal. I didn’t ask for this! Yet subconsciously I did. And I could, survivor’s guilt included. As with Kailash, this sentiment had ‘provided me with an exaggerated sense of identity’, giving me ‘permission to do anything I wanted’. Like many other migrants, I have been polishing a slate built around memories of past selves.
This is all true. None of this is true. People are storytellers. Seems like a no-brainer. I can recall the times I’d show up at focus groups, after being approved to participate for giving the correct answers to several preliminary questions. I kept up the pretense by memorising a script: I like drinking Big M strawberry milk, not Nippy’s or Dare or Oak. I’m an office administrator and I take public transport six times a day. I’m about to buy a house, maybe a two-storey duplex. I go to the gym regularly. I’m thinking of having a child. You have to build a character around it, then the rest comes easy. The other people there could have been doing the same schtick as well. But the truth is that we were all authentic in those thirty minutes because we were going to go away with a couple hundred bucks in cash. Other times we were asked to share our consumer narratives in exchange for a voucher, for the purposes of more consumerism at the supermarket. Thanks! I needed that, actually.
Think about how we each perform at work, in order to fulfil a role that ends up benefiting our quality of life. Or the ways in which performances materialise each time a new interaction occurs. Each performance assembles a specific character in the tunnels of your mind, driven by unconscious desires and repulsions. But the performance is the point, a piece in a puzzle that makes up something real. Photorealism personified. What did Lionel Trilling say? ‘The idea that somewhere under all the roles there is Me, that poor old ultimate actuality, who, when all the roles have been played, would like to murmur “Off, off, you lendings!” and settle down with his own original actual self.’ I am me when I’m not me, and not me when I’m me. That’s the truth.
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You may want to call the current reality a ‘hyper-reality’, but even that doesn’t quite get us there. In the 1976 text Symbolic Exchange and Death, Jean Baudrillard defined the hyper-real as a societal condition where simulacra trumps ideology. Citing ‘nature’ and ‘naturalness’ as an example, he saw it as an annoying malaise, and which the market law of value appropriates to render systems of reference imaginary – ‘a phantom reference, a puppet reference, a simulated reference’. He expanded on the concept four years later, noting in Simulacra and Simulation that a hyper-reality is one that mimics cloning, where copies exist without their origins in sight; ‘models of a real without reality’. The cultural theorist brings up An American Family – widely considered the first reality TV show in history – as replete with hyper-realistic qualities, a cinema verité experience that he described as ‘a frisson of vertiginous and phony exactitude, […] of simultaneous distancing and magnification, of distortion of scale, of an excessive transparency’. A precursor to the now-prevalent ‘day in the life’, the show featured seven members (complete with dogs) of a Californian upper-middle-class white family as a camera crew filmed them going about their quotidian lives for seven months in the early 1970s. During the twelve-episode run, Mum asks Dad to move out while their eldest son comes out as gay. It is, as the latter once said following the show’s popularity, ‘the middle-class dream that you can become famous for being just who you are’. This fame would trail him all the way until his death in 2001, which was broadcast as A Death in an American Family, billed at his request as a ‘final episode’ of sorts. His mum, who was initially agreeable and enthusiastic about the experience, went on the record not long after An American Family had aired to say that the director had made them look ‘like a bunch of freaks and monsters’. Decades later, a film was made about the making of the show, and the director of the original show never made another like it in its aftermath. Here it didn’t matter what was considered reality; audiences were eager to lap it up nonetheless, to be able to scrutinise how other people live, react, behave.
Since then there have been hundreds more of these shows around the world, with new and more alluring formats each time, some verging on the point of ridiculousness, a parody of itself. Throw a bunch of strangers together in a remote tropical location and see what happens as they form teams and fight for rewards amid high interpersonal drama! Throw a bunch of strangers in a specially constructed villa that’s under surveillance at all times and see how they go about living together without access to the outside world! If a contestant decides they need access to a doctor or psychological services, those are ready at hand. What about a series that puts two complete strangers together as they strive towards marital coupledom? Or we can follow a dozen women as they vie for a man’s heart. The winner receives a lovely rose. While audiences today are generally clued in to the mechanisms that sustain the reality TV industry, with most if not all being fully aware of the nature of the media they’re consuming and choosing to watch these shows with relative scepticism and even a schadenfreude-driven glee, a similar fascination remains. How dare she do that cuntish thing! Could he possibly win? He’s such a great outdoorsman, and really charismatic too. I wouldn’t do that if presented with the same situation; I can’t believe they’re that stupid. Whoa shit I sure didn’t expect her to make that decision. He’s so annoying I wish he’d just get kicked off. Who’d have thought he’d harbour that dumb opinion? It’s delightful to have the ability to possess a god’s-eye view over the narrative, cast the vote.
This is one way of conducting what David Foster Wallace considers ‘predatory human research’, as he describes it in his 1993 essay ‘E Unibus Pluram’. Of course, he was referring to television then – this was during a time when the medium had taken a postmodern turn, its programming (at least in the many anglophone cultures that respond to and thus uphold North American hegemony) gradually rife with qualities such as irony, reflexivity and self-referentiality; a pre-empted knowingness, if you like. We’re all in on the gag. We’re self-aware enough to reckon with multiple cognitive dissonances. If we can agree that a medium’s knowingness extends to an audience who are not in the dark about the manipulated reality they’re consuming, then it’s not at all a stretch to say that social media is currently working in tandem with mass media to achieve an aggregated hyper-real. Where reality TV was once the distant mirror, social media is the Do-It-Yourself equivalent. A day in the life of me? Let’s fucking go (viral).
In this sense, an updated definition of Guy Debord’s theory of the ‘spectacle’ might be more useful. In his 1967 text Society of the Spectacle, an addendum to the Situationist movement he helped build, he defined it as ‘capital accumulated to the point it becomes image’. But the Marxist philosopher himself continued to refine this thinking 21 years after the above was published, six years before his death by suicide; in Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Debord acknowledged that the two spectacles he had previously noted – one concentrated, the other diffuse – had merged. The former is characterised by the glorification of political figures through cults of personality (Mao, Stalin, Hoxha, Lee, et al.), while the latter features a kind of commodified thinking that places aesthetics front and centre (‘what appears is good; what is good appears’). A quarter of a century later, McKenzie Wark in The Spectacle of Disintegration pushed the concept further, particularly as Debord’s observations continued to accelerate in the real world. Referring to the integrated spectacle as she cast her gaze towards the adjacent poles of labour and desire, Wark observes: ‘In the separation between labour and desire lie the origins of the spectacle, which appears as the world of all that can be desired, or rather, of all the appropriate modes of desiring’.
Another decade has passed since then. Can the truth be found inside the spectacle? Or can the spectacle be found inside the truth? What can we make, for example, of Australian businessman Craig Wright’s claim of being the mysterious bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto, and then going so far as to sue for libel an anonymous Twitter account with a cat astronaut avatar? The real Nakamoto appears to be still be at large, whoever they may be. Within this context the basis of reality remains perpetually open to reinterpretation. A truer term might be ‘psyop realism’, particularly as more people in the world are becoming aware that we are living in a time when sources previously taken for granted as trustworthy, such as government and the media, are showing their cracks; in a time when it is tricky to ascertain if something is an advertisement. If propaganda can now be produced via artificial intelligence, then it’s not far-fetched to say that we are living in wartime, except that what we are experiencing is a psychological war. In this war the walls are invisible until you come up against them. You find yourself unable to move forward, yet baffled at your understanding of a reality that doesn’t quite seem to match up with what’s happening then and there. Parody, fact, exaggeration, delusion and fantasy come together in a spectacular headlong collision, and this is not taking into account what other people consider their realities. In a 2023 trend report, the advertising agency Think Forward observed:
Our cultural understanding of what’s ‘authentic’ has spanned the whole spectrum: from peak performativity to performative vulnerability, from full-throttle FaceTune to #nomakeup selfies. Having been through it all, there’s a sense that none of it feels real anymore. Now, to combat the sense that any form of self-presentation is disingenuous, authenticity has become a game of chicken: people are pushing further into the margins to separate those who are performing from those who truly believe. […] Deeply weird or chaotic energy is relatable, from the cult of Julia Fox, to mass identification with Goblin Mode, to the nearly four million views on ‘gross girl’ TikToks.
What if people are so desperate to capture the smallest kernel of authenticity that we are beginning to collapse the public and private? In an increasingly atomised world where the once-juvenile ‘trust no one’ turns into a reluctant maxim, it’s almost too easy for suspicion to take hold. Is this real? Nah, totally fake. Is this photo generated by AI? Can we fact-check this novel? How much work has this person done to their face? How historically accurate is the TV series The Crown? Is this artist as poor as they say they are? Am I actually Chinese if I don’t give a shit about Lunar New Year? Has that guy wearing the Extortion cap even listened to what the band has put out? If these $30 ‘dupe’ leggings look like the Lululemon ones and if this $11 ‘dupe’ face wash has qualities like the La Mer ones, then I can hardly be the one to judge – they work at duping me into believing that I’m wearing leggings from Lululemon and washing my face with La Mer. If I were to perform certain behaviours then I may be considered more authentic. One can aspire to be more authentic with every iteration of themselves.
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If something is repeated often enough, then it crystallises itself as truth in the cultural consciousness. The pursuit of authenticity can be considered ‘cruel optimism’, a postmodern feeling the late cultural theorist Lauren Berlant explores in their book of the same name. If authenticity is simultaneously unattainable and right there, striving towards it counts as a kind of masquerade, which Berlant defines as a ‘compromised position of possibility’ where its realisation is eventually found to be ‘impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic’. Authenticity is the feels when irony is made sincere.
In Amalia Ulman’s El Planeta, the artist and director casts her own mother Ale, who is neither an artist nor an actor, into the story. The film depicts a hustler mother–daughter duo who, as they struggle to make ends meet, indulge in delusions of grandeur. The end result is a tragedy. Here, the close dynamic evinced between Ulman and her mother is clear, yet the story itself is not true to their lives. When Ulman’s character, Leo, meets up with other people, she makes fantastical statements about herself that sound as if she is lying, but which the audience later finds out are actually true. In an interview with Vulture, Ulman tells the reporter that she gives star ratings to high-end bottled waters on her Instagram stories. It’s both a tongue-in-cheek dig at the ever-expanding absurdities of consumer culture and a serious interest of hers. She goes on to say that she plans on studying to become a water sommelier. It is difficult to discern what the performance is. ‘Nothing is work and nothing is life,’ Ulman explains. ‘It’s all just all the same.’
If authenticity is a social relation, then we can say that we are more authentic to others the closer we reach its ideal, one that is mostly attained through others’ perceptions. Populism, after all, is fuelled through public representations of the real. What is determined to be ‘fake’ or ‘false’ becomes a yardstick through which traits such as personality, charisma or intelligence hinge on. Reminds me of a role-playing game. Can something be considered a lie if there is popular consensus that then bolsters belief? Stories such as Ulman’s, or Sebald’s, could not possibly have been worthy of examination or interest if authenticity was not a desirous goal. Not of theirs, but of others.
We can also look to Gary Vaynerchuk, who, off a combination of savvy, loquaciousness and charisma, has managed to build a net worth of $200 million. An early observer of the parasocial impulse that has only accelerated through online mediums now, Vaynerchuk began building his personal brand through his dad’s business, a wine retailer, which led him to host a wildly popular YouTube channel. There, he began providing wine reviews, including tips on how to appreciate wine. Now a self-described ‘serial entrepreneur’ who posts videos of himself sharing tips on how to succeed at business, fans often describe him as ‘authentic’ due to how his videos never seem overly edited. His predilection for swear words is perceived as refreshing. It is ‘uncensored’, so to speak, not unlike some TikToks and the many ‘unfiltered’ videos that depict aspects of urban and rural life. Here I am, no filter, speaking at my phone, camera view front-facing. I’m right here, right now, as real as I can be; like the photograph, they are, in Sontag’s words, ‘imprisoning reality’. Young people were sounding off about their grandparents falling for scams orchestrated through phone calls and text messages, of their parents believing ‘anything they read on Facebook’, but the cycle only repeats itself through recuperated forms. If you can believe it, there’s an actual way to survive a plane crash. If you can’t convince me of your persona, then you’re not real to me.
When there is a proliferation of misinformation, reality destabilisation occurs. After all, they did call it ‘gaslighting’ – to pinpoint an origin story would be to construct a terrible truth, in which may lay a fantastic lie. And I can in fact speak from experience, having spent my most formative years living under an illiberal democracy where you – that is, if one chooses to do so – frequently have to learn how to disentangle the many layers of propaganda, a Jenga tower primed to fall at any minute, and where the discovery of a particular truth leads not necessarily to liberation but to complete and utter despair. We can see this most explicitly in ‘hasbara’, used as part of the Israeli ethnostate’s public relations efforts to explain away its crimes against the Palestinian people, alongside attempts to traffic in widespread fabrications that control and distort fact in order to advance its own preferred narratives. Paranoia, as Sianne Ngai has defined, is a ‘failure – on the part of subjects to grasp global capitalism’s social totality in formal or representational terms’. Here we begin to grapple with a kind of doublethink: it’s not easy to invoke or harbour paranoia without running the risk of being accused of delusion – a feeling that may require considerable time for it to be proven as fact, but which remains an uncontested reality for those who are living it. Are you following me here? I can’t help myself: I am paranoid, having lived in similarly eerie conditions. It is the Orwellian ‘logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it’. There are increasingly more parallels. I know what it looks like, what it feels like, my body acting as a container that retains past signals even if it is also made up of leakages. Everything appears uncannier and uncannier as the real becomes more desirous, and as the real becomes swallowed up.
The more authenticity can be extracted from something, the more reason there is to celebrate it. ‘Honest’, ‘unflinching’, ‘raw’: these are some adjectives that arise from this propensity. Based on a true story. So true, king! Authenticity makes one hell of a good story. I did enjoy Tiger King. Even if things end up becoming clichés after they are first brought to the surface, as quickly discarded as they are valued due to the sheer fact of their mere repetition, they often return via the lens of the nostalgic – which, as Svetlana Boym observes in The Future of Nostalgia, is a ‘historical emotion’. At its Greek root, the word refers to the pain of an old wound. We can keep picking at it until it bleeds, never having the opportunity to generate new skin. Authentic cultural narratives; an authentic social media identity; an authentic meal – the running theme here appears to be that they are almost always considered through the limits of someone else’s subjectivity. Authenticity is rarely my own. And yet it is a claim accorded to me.
