Page 95 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

DAVID C. CHANEY

in all areas of social life, not just dress, so those concerned to sell us images,
whether it is politicians, mass media executives, soft drink manufacturers, or
icons of adolescent rebellion will strive to find ever more effective ways of
manipulating audience values. In the reflexive consciousness of mass media-
dominated social formations the sorts of social categories that are being formed
and re-formed around cultural values and choices cannot be ‘innocent’. The
shifts of fashion are endlessly fascinating to social commentators in the media as
well as to marketing entrepreneurs, social policy managers, and those who are
both audiences and social actors.

Authenticity, sensibility
The significance of fashion as a process characteristic of lifestyle as social form
is twofold. In one respect it brings out how lifestyles are caught up in strategies
of manipulation. Although people invest their lifestyle with personal signifi-
cance, they should be aware that at the least they do not have complete control
over the terms that lifestyle employs. The second important aspect of fashion is
closely related to the first in that it concerns the authenticity of cultural objects
and actions. Because fashion is inherently unstable, being bound in with cycles
of change and arbitrary shifts in meaning, the elements of a fashionable system,
in whatever sphere it is, could be argued to have a tendency to lose any
intrinsic meaning or authenticity and be purely defined ‘externally’ through
the context of their use (that has been one of the lessons taken from Hebdige’s
classic study of youth culture fashions in Britain: 1979). I believe that the mean-
ing or authenticity of cultural choices in lifestyle politics is more complex than
such a view would allow.
I have noted that such a process of uprooting meanings (turning signs into
arbitrary signifiers) has been taken to be a defining characteristic of post-
modern sociality – whether condemned or celebrated. I do not want to be led
into the issue of periodizing cultural change, but the issue of whether authen-
ticity (in any respect) has become impossible or super fluous in the process of
the shifting meanings of culture that is our topic is important. Authenticity has
been one of the defining metaphors of traditional notions of culture. To be
authentic is to be true to (consistent with) tradition, or locale, or one’s self.
Thus something is authentic when it corresponds to how it would have been
in its original state or before it had been significantly affected by external
influences. One frequently speaks of a way of dancing or playing music as
authentic to a region or to the characteristics of a style. It follows that in-
authenticity is a way of being duplicitous so that, returning to the theme of
manipulation, organizations, such as food manufacturers and politicians – both
of whom we often intuitively feel to be very inauthentic – may use a rhetoric
of authenticity to make themselves more convincing.
Authenticity is important because it concerns the possibility of ethical
choices. If it was an implication of cultural change that an ethic of authenticity

84