The Tyranny of Authenticity: Rebellion and the Question of “Right Life”

When confronted with subcultures that understand themselves to be rebellious and define themselves around a particular aesthetic movement, anyone who has spent time reading Adorno cannot but find him- or herself confronted with a particular array of questions and concerns: Can any kind of potent, critical labor be actualized by an aesthetic movement that does not attend to the material conditions of its emergence? Furthermore, do all attempts at rebellion necessarily fall into the trap of replicating the patterns of social life against which they are reacting? Finally, do all “failed” attempts at rebellion necessarily amount to precisely that, exhaustive failures? Are we in fact, as Ian MacKaye put it in 1982, just screaming at a wall—but a wall that will never fall? Or might there be a certain kind of rebellion through art—in this case, certain varieties of punk rock—that, as Adorno says, “is true insofar as what is speaking out of it and it itself is conflicting and unreconciled” (1997, 168)? In other words, is there a kind of failed attempt at rebellion that, in recognizing the necessity of its failure, simultaneously serves as an exposé of certain ideological overdetermination and frees us up for thinking anew? And what might this thinking otherwise look like?

In light of these concerns, the objective of this essay is to investigate the relationship between a model autonomous subjectivity, the certain trope of authenticity, and social movements—particularly the culture that surrounds punk rock—that posit and understand themselves as rebellious. To that end, this article will take place in four sections. First, I discuss the connection between authenticity and punk rock, that is, punk rock’s critique of the “mainstream.” Second, I turn to investigate the model of individuality that lies as the subject of predication for the adjectives authentic or inauthentic—in doing so I hope to connect this model of the individual to a certain understanding of political sovereignty, the very model punk rock generally wants to reject. Third, I will show that this model of the individual is not only problematic but also untenable via a discussion of the problem with reactionary rebellion. Finally, through Adorno’s famous quote from Minima Moralia, “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen,” that is, “There is no right life in a false life” (1980, 43), we will attempt to see what the limits of any critical activity based in a reductive concept of authenticity might be. My claim is that insofar as punk rock reinstantiates the same pattern of life—that is, the falsehood or false life that Adorno points to in this aphorism—in its model of authenticity, its alleged subversions do nothing but reinforce what it is attempting to escape. That is to say, that insofar as subversive subcultures do nothing but replicate that which they are attempting to critique, they lack the possibility of authenticity thought robustly, because all possibility of propriety is lost. The generation of a nontyrannical model of authenticity requires a transformation of the structure, what Adorno calls the constellation or force field, itself—not swapping which position one fills within it. This whole may be false, but we must wonder if all forms of life lead to such tyranny. My conclusion, tentatively stated, is no.

I. “I’m More Punk than You”

Let me begin the article with a quotation from Milan Kundera’s Immortality, which is to serve as our entryway into a discussion of the individual and authenticity. He writes: “In our world, where there are more and more faces, more and more alike, it is difficult for an individual to reinforce the originality of the self and to become convinced of its inimitable uniqueness. There are two methods for cultivating the uniqueness of the self: the method of addition and the method of subtraction. Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura’s method is precisely the opposite: in order to make her self ever more...