Originally Posted by Ed Smith
In The King’s English, Kingsley Amis’s sparkling guide to English usage, the author described some words as “rendered unusable”. These words, he argued, are so debased by voguish laziness and approximation that the careful writer ought to avoid them completely.
In his new volume Authenticity Is a Con, Peter York writes that it is time to add a new word to Amis’s “rendered unusable” list. He argues that, far from a state of guileless integrity, authenticity is now a marketing stance. Anything and everything, from foods to places, can be given the authenticity treatment, like a sepia tint.
If York has a single target in mind, a sweet spot in his Venn diagram of overlapping aspects of “authenticity”, it would be this: an extravagantly bearded young man (“Edwardian Explorer Poet”, only with access to lots of moisturiser), wearing selvedge denim (everything so lustrously matte and unflashy that it becomes more ruinously expensive than the bling it mocks), wandering through Shoreditch in east London en route to a paleo-diet brunch with some other creative types, set to a backdrop of exposed brick walls.
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A certain type of professional sportsman turns authenticity into his house style. In the documentary Keane and Vieira, Roy Keane never missed an opportunity to describe the burgeoning hatred and violence that simmered inside him every week. Football, he said, even when winning, gave him little or no pleasure, let alone joy. There wasn’t time: he was too busy filling his mind with hatred to be ready for the next week’s warfare.
It is impossible to prove otherwise, to know what Keane really thinks. Let’s not make windows into midfielders’ souls, as Elizabeth I almost said. There was, however, a note of self-mythology in Keane’s narrative. An authentic hard man, too full of hatred to enjoy a second of glory? Perhaps. Or a man who knows how to cultivate a sense of difference from the flashy superficiality of his more conspicuous peers? Arguably, it is Ronaldo, with his wet-look hair gel and second career as an underwear model, who has a better claim to be the authentic modern footballer.
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What, then, explains this outpouring of staged authenticity? Partly, it is the collapse of trust, the sense that the game is rigged, the system isn’t working, that the old establishment has let everyone down. “The idea of authenticity, of people levelling with you,” York argues, “appeals precisely because people feel they’ve been lied to.”
I cannot follow York all the way to his conclusion. He thinks the idea is actively counterproductive: “The idea of the authentic self . . . doesn’t allow for people developing, feeling and believing radically different things in the course of their lives, being open to change and debate.”
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