Ralph Waldo Emerson

What Emerson Knew About Google

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

As a rule, I don’t think of myself as an Emersonian–rather the opposite, in fact. But while I usually find myself arguing with Emerson as I read him, I find it a profitable argument to join and Emerson’s voice a spirited counterpoint to my own intellectual tendencies. That said, here’s a passage from “Self-Reliance” that jumped out at me today:

“The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe, the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; [….]”

The Internet, of course, is our almanac.

The Question Regarding Authenticity

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Since writing Friday’s post and benefiting from the subsequent exchange with Nathan Jurgenson I’ve come across a handful of items that have kept me thinking about identity and authenticity.

I’m still thinking, but I thought I’d gather some of these items here and, in Linda Richman fashion, invite you to “discuss among yourselves.”

In a blog post at The American Scholar, William Deresiewicz makes a number of an interesting observations:

“Genuine, vintage, authentic: these are the words that signify spiritual value now for us, and constitute the tokens of our status competition. We hunger for the real to fill us up, and by the real we mean the old or the traditional: anything that isn’t us. The highest praise we can give that lamp or sideboard is that it looks like the kind of thing that’s been in someone’s family for generations, and that’s exactly the illusion that we pay for those objects to give us: the illusion of lineage, continuity, rootedness, memory. Modernity is constant movement, within lives and between generations, a constant shedding and forgetting. We value things that give us the sense of being embedded in space and time, even if we have to buy someone else’s memories, or visit other people’s histories, to get it.”

And …

“Buddy, if it’s a choice, it’s not an identity. Identity is not a suit of clothes you take on and off. It’s a skin; it sticks to you whether you like it or not. It’s what other people call you—people with the same identity, people with different ones—not what you decide to consider yourself. History gives it to you, not some kind of “search.” But identity now has become a matter not of belonging or community, both of which are gone, but of, precisely, authenticity.”

He concludes:

“So what’s the answer? Just assent to your life. You’re middle class? You’re white? You’re Western? So what? That’s just as real as anything else. ‘We seek other conditions,’ Montaigne said, ‘because we do not understand the use of our own.'”

Regarding community and tradition, consider the following observation by W. H. Auden:

“The old pre-industrial community and culture are gone and cannot be brought back. Nor is it desirable that they should be. They were too unjust, too squalid, and too custom-bound. Virtues which were once nursed unconsciously by the forces of nature must now be recovered and fostered by a deliberate effort of the will and the intelligence. In the future, societies will not grow of themselves. They will be either made consciously or decay.”

Is the question of authenticity correlated to the “deliberate effort” and conscious making Auden calls for?

Thanks to Alan Jacobs for both of those. And thanks to Rob Horning for the following from Simon Reynolds:

“You don’t have to be an antiquated Romantic or old-fashioned early 20th-century-style Modernist to find this input/output version of creativity unappealing. Surely the artist or writer is more than just a switch for the relay of information flows, the cross-referencing of sources and coordinates? What is missed out in the recreativity model is the body: the artist as a physical being, someone whose life and personal history has left them marked with a singular set of desires and aversions. There is also the little matter of will: bubbling up from within, that profoundly inegalitarian drive to stand out, to assert oneself in the face of anonymity and death. It’s this aspect of embodiment and ego that gets downgraded in digital culture, which tends to reduce us to the textual: a receiver/transmitter of data, a node in the network.”

Is the question of authenticity the revenge of the supposedly de-centered self?

Speaking of Romantics, or their near kin, here is Emerson:

“A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome.  He cumbers himself never about consequences, about  interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict.  You must court him: he does not court you.  But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this.”

Is authenticity just another word for the lost innocence of childhood?