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Abstract
Scholarly engagement with authenticity has been revitalized by recent efforts to theorize the value-ladenness of authenticity claims. Yet, these approaches are restricted by the lack of available conceptual tools necessary to explain variations in the meaning of authenticity between different cultural forms and social groups. In this paper, I draw from Boltanski and Thevenot’s pragmatic hermeneutics to develop an approach to authenticity in popular culture that conceptualizes it as a form of worth. I apply this new model to an analysis of the meanings of authenticity found in the discourse of fans of indie music and country music. I find that in the indie genre, authenticity involves an inspirational form of worth; in the country genre, it involves a domestic form of worth. I trace these differences back to the matched relationship between the primary groups of fans of each genre and the genres themselves that led both sides to find an interest in these types of authenticity. I conclude by sketching the relevance of this approach for explaining overarching concerns for authenticity in late modern societies.
Acknowledgments
I thank Lyn Spillman, Omar Lizardo, Katie Spencer, and the anonymous reviewers for their criticism and advice on earlier versions of this paper. I take full responsibility for the errors, tedium, confusion and sheer banality of it.
Notes
1. Frith himself appeals to Fiske’s (Citation1991) seminal treatment of “popular discrimination” to orientate his approach. The core problem involves trying to capture the basis of meaning for the unpredictable set of judgments applied by fans to carefully fabricated cultural commodities, particularly those that fail despite all the anticipation and preparation determining precisely what they’ll mean.
2. The more ontologically rigorous outcome of tests involves a “justification for existing” that is determined relative to performance. I’ll keep my focus on worth.
3. I draw these characteristics from Boltanski and Thevenot’s discussion of inspiration and domesticity as two “worlds of worth” (Citation2006, pp. 159–178).
4. Indeed, perhaps the primary problem Frith’s approach suffers from, and which the worth-based framework avoids, is the inability to specif exactly who attributes these kinds of worth. Frith credits a vacuous abstraction – “people” – with bringing “similar [evaluative] questions” to cultural objects (Citation1998, p. 19). But there is no effort to distinguish which people tend to make which kinds of value-based assessments. Frith can’t draw a conclusion about this because he provides no real way of accounting for how an object can be endowed with a specific value. While it makes intuitive sense that indie embody “art” values and country “folk” values, more tools are required to make that connection.
5. Wilco, and the alt-country scene more generally, appear most distinctive for how they mix these two forms of worth. While the production focus is shaped by indie values, the content of the music itself is skewed toward country (Kot, Citation2008). A more general argument could apply to the values found in the contemporary folk and bluegrass revival. The cross-genre success of Mumford and Sons and Old Crow Medicine Show is a prime example.
6. Ultimately, the problem is one that involves the poststructuralist problem of arbitrary meaning. Arbitrariness concerns the relationship between signifier (authenticity) and signified (musician or song). The usage of “authenticity” has a binding character, even despite its lack of necessary connection to the object to which it refers. But because Saussure nowhere theorized the nature of reference, the problem was simply fused (in structuralism) with the idea that meaning is constituted through difference. However, poststructuralism emerged, at least partially, from a recovery of this problem, with Bourdieu and Foucault enthusiastically dismantling the structuralist edifice and using practice theories to develop frameworks for non-arbitrary meaning (see Giddens, Citation1979, chapter 1).
7. Indeed, commercial worth is specified as follows: “wealth endows [someone] with worth, since it is the expression of the unsatisfied desires of others” (Boltanski & Thevenot, Citation2006, p. 46). Thus, worth from a purely commercial standpoint is defined by “the unsatisfied desires of others.” This negates any traits apparently possessive of the objects themselves and makes them only the expression of relative demand. The massifying effect of the application of this form of worth is obvious. This is not to mention the purely exchange-value portion of music.
8. In particular, see Eliasoph’s (Citation1998) discussion of the role country music plays in facilitating a dense and cohesive, but non-political, “group style” in honkey-tonk bars.
9. In this way, indie music appreciation strongly resembles other forms of consumer appreciation that treat commodities as having transcendent value. Thus, Podolny and Hill-Popper (Citation2004) mention a similar form of “scholarly” engagement among fans of indie films and foodies, where in all cases the presumed transcendent (as opposed to “hedonic”) value of films and foods requires that genuine consumers possess the cultural capital necessary to display a scholarly attunement (as opposed to naïve or passive consumption orientation) to them.
10. In this sense, the approach is similar to Barbara Hernstein Smith’s (Citation1988, p. 16) notion of “contingent value” as determined by an “experience of the work in relation to the total economy of our existence.” However, once again, the mechanisms (test, worth) found in the more pragmatic approach to value helps capture a range of variation in these evaluations that is missed by her model and the broad conditions and variables it emphasizes.
11. Bourdieu here presents an argument against the ideological rendering of pop culture found largely among Marxist and neo-Marxist critics, involving co-optation and controlled predetermination of meaning by industry, as well as reception-oriented studies that privilege popular discrimination, and agentic-based meanings, above all else. Drawing together both sides, the goal is to reconstruct the conditions of possibility for the instances of tight coupling that appear in the relationship between genres and primary groups of fans.
12. Indicative of this regionalization (and thus marginalization) of the honky tonk origins of country music is that many of the characteristics that constitute this vein of authenticity are captured in W.J. Cash’s forgotten classic The Mind of the South and his summary view of “the South at its best: proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal” (Citation1941, pp. 439–440). In the same sense, all are suggestive of domestic worth.
13. Most of the performers form the old honky-tonk days vanished into obscurity in connection with the rise of Nashville Sound. But the two arguably most famous and authentic musicians in country music history managed to make the transition between the two styles in tact: Hank Williams and Patsy Cline.
14. Although, ironically, the devaluation of the same aspects of ideal-typical, rural American life are part of what has fueled what at least appears to be a “southernization of American culture” with the elevation of NASCAR, college football, cultural conservativism, and country music from principally regional to national significance (see Packer, Citation2013).
15. The “testing” mechanism included in the worth-based model of authenticity seems historically apposite given its fit with this latent suspicion for poseurs and hipsters who could easily appropriate the signifiers of a desired culture without really investing in them.