Page 32 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

AUTHENTICITY

grasped as a way of unifying cultural diversity. That is, national culture is a
discursive device that represents difference as unity or identity.
The notion of articulation is also deployed to discuss the relationship between
culture and political economy so that culture is said to be ‘articulated’ with 9
moments of production but not determined in any ‘necessary’ way by those
moments and vice versa. In this model, cultural meaning is produced and
embedded at each level of a ‘circuit of culture’ whose meaningful work is necessary,
but not sufficient for, or determining of, the next moment in the circuit. Each
moment–production, representation, identity, consumption and regulation–involves
the production of meaning which is articulated, linked to, the next moment
without determining what meanings will be taken up or produced at that level.

Links Circuit of culture, identity, national identity, post-Marxism, social formation

Authenticity To claim that a category is authentic is to argue that it is genuine, natural,
true and pure. For example, it might be claimed that the culture of a particular place
is authentic because uncontaminated by tourism, or that a youth culture is pure and
uncorrupted by consumer capitalism. In this sense, the concept of authenticity is
closely related to the notion of essentialism in that authenticity implies immaculate
origins. It follows then that the anti-essentialism of poststructuralism and
postmodernism rejects the idea of the authentic as such, replacing it with the
notion of ‘authenticity claims’. That is, nothing is authentic in a metaphysical
sense; rather, cultures construct certain places, activities, artefacts etc. as being
authentic.
The question of authenticity can be grasped through consideration of the study
of youth within the field. Here cultural studies has tended to explore the more
spectacular youth cultures; the visible, loud, different, avant-garde youth styles
which have stood out and demanded attention. These activities have commonly
been understood as an authentic expression of the resistance of young people to the
hegemony of consumer capitalism and arbitrary adult authority. Subcultures have
been seen as spaces for deviant cultures to re-negotiate their position or to ‘win
space’ for themselves. In particular, youth subcultures are marked, it is argued, by
the development of particular styles which, as the active enactment of resistance,
relied on a moment of originality, purity and authenticity.
However, the distinction between the media, the culture industries and an
oppositional and authentic youth subculture is problematic when the latter is
heavily influenced and shaped by the global leisure industry. If youth cultures are
thoroughly embroiled in surveillance, the mass media and the cultural industries,
then claims to authenticity by members and subculture theorists look dubious.
Style, it is now argued, involves bricolage without reference to the meanings of
originals and has no underlying message or ironic transformation. It is the look and
only the look, merely another mode of fashion, pastiche rather than parody.
The birth of youth fashion and style in the media does not necessarily reduce
style to meaninglessness. Thus the end of authenticity is not the death of
significance, for bricolage can involve the creative recombination of existing items