ABSTRACT
The performance of authenticity pervades our popular culture and public arenas. In recent years “reality” television has proliferated not only because it is inexpensive to produce, but for its brazen attempts to capture “ordinary” people in unscripted moments of everyday life, warts and all (Grindstaff 2002). African American hip-hop music artists sell records on the basis of their ability to “keep it real” by remaining “true” to their neighborhood roots, even when they hail from middle-class suburbs (McLeod 1999). In American politics, highly stylized candidates perform authenticity to within an inch of their lives by emphasizing their working-class tastes, however manufactured. For example, during the early 1990s Tennessee Republican Fred Thompson’s senatorial campaign reinvented the wealthy lobbyist “as a good old boy: it leased a used red pickup truck for him to drive, dressed up in jeans and a work shirt, with a can of Red Man chewing tobacco on the front seat” (Krugman 2007). Media elites act no differently, going so far as to downgrade their résumés for fear of seeming inauthentic and out of touch with “common” people. Conservative talk-show host Bill O’Reilly has asserted that “I understand working-class Americans. I’m as lower-middle-class as they come,” even though he hails from the decidedly well-off neighborhood of Westbury, Long Island, and earned advanced degrees from Harvard and Boston University without financial aid (Murphy 2002). Authenticity can refer to a variety of desirable traits: credibility, originality, sincerity,
naturalness, genuineness, innateness, purity, or realness. Since the nineteenth century, the search for authenticity has been a bourgeois reaction to the ravages of industrial society and monopoly capitalism, whether expressed by Marx’s critique of alienated labor, or Walt Whitman’s and Henry David Thoreau’s pastoral retreats. In our postindustrial age of high-tech frivolity-online shopping malls and Botox, email scams and edge cities, Hollywood artifice and boy-band pop, MySpace and virtual reality-citizen-consumers nostalgically seek out the authenticity suggested by symbols of agrarian simplicity (organic beets, folk music), or else the gritty charms of proletarian life (Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, trucker hats). Like a badge of honor, authenticity connotes legitimacy and social value, but like
honor itself, authenticity is also a social construct with moral overtones, rather than an
objective and value-free appraisal. Given its socially constructed and thus elusive nature, authenticity itself can never be authentic, but must always be performed, staged, fabricated, crafted, or otherwise imagined (MacCannell 1976; Peterson 1997; Fine 2003; Grazian 2003). The performance of authenticity always requires a close conformity to the expectations set by the context in which it is situated. For instance, in American politics authenticity is marked by straight talk, plain speech, and working-class cultural sensibilities, whereas food writers measure the authenticity of ethnic cuisine by its closeness to national, local, or regional sources of tradition (Lu and Fine 1995; Johnston and Baumann 2007; Gaytan 2008). Audiences may employ a range of ambiguous criteria when evaluating the symbolic efficacy of such authenticity performances, which can lead to controversy. Examples include the ongoing debate among musicians and critics concerning the authenticity of jazz performed in Japan (Atkins 2000) and the contestation surrounding Columbian and Cuban salsa dance styles displayed in London nightclubs (Urquia 2004). Given the constructed nature of authenticity, sociologists of culture are uniquely
positioned to critically demystify its performance in popular culture and public life. The social construction and attribution of authenticity occur among culture-producing organizations, prestige-granting institutions, and other cultural authorities reliant on rhetorical and discursive strategies of classification, genre development, and reputation building (Bielby and Bielby 1994; Negus 1998; Fine 2003; Lena and Peterson 2008). Cultural producers from profit-seeking firms and entrepreneurs to artistic creators manufacture, stage, and promote authenticated artworks and entertainment within more extensive worlds of media and symbolic production (Hirsch 1972; Peterson 1997; Grazian 2003). Lastly, authenticity performances represent elaborate strategies of impression management, social interaction, and emotional control well suited for close dramaturgical analysis (Goffman 1959; Hochschild 1983). In what follows I will take each of these strategies in turn-assigning authenticity
through the production of discourse, staging authenticity as an integral part of the culture production process, and performing authenticity as an accomplishment of social interaction-in order to illustrate how the theoretical tools of cultural sociology can demystify the aura of authenticity surrounding the most hallowed of sacred cows and social myths. I conclude with a discussion of three emergent aesthetic practiceshybridity, irony, and transgression-that deconstruct or otherwise challenge the performance of authenticity as tradition-bound, pretentious, and essentialist.
