Authenticity In Affirmative Culture

1016 Words3 Pages

In addition to it's commodification, authenticity is also indicative of the split found in affirmative culture. Affirmative culture can be defined as a bourgeois separation of the mental and spiritual world from the rest of civilization; this other world is independent and superior to civilization.40 Both concepts agree in that they do not posit a form of higher social existence or of any sense of solidarity.41 Like in affirmative culture, the subject universalized from it's social context to deal with the harshness of social relations.42 Like great bourgeois art, authenticity makes suffering eternal, universal forces; effortless resignation follows.43 There exists little distinction between looking at paintings in the Louvre and joining a suburban gardening club; both are helpful for avoiding the fact that one is a worker than must sell one's labour power.44 Authenticity represents the split between the mental world from the world of civilizaiton. …show more content…

In affirmative culture and authenticity. the individual learns to love his isolation; factual isolation is sublimated into metaphysical isolation and inner abundance substitutes for physical hardship.45 Affirmative culture prides itself by inner fulfilment in the place of outer limitations, the soul becomes the last area of refuge from attack.46 Since authenticity requires a facticity in which an entirely free self is contrasted with an entirely dynamic world, it encapsulates this inner freedom perfectly.47 Authenticity perfectly demonstrates the value of individualistic withdrawal against the reifying forces of civilization; it does not matter what occurs externally, as long as one's internal choices are "authentic". Every authentic individual exists without material or spiritual limitations; this is exactly what affirmative culture demands.48 Through it's withdrawal, authenticity encapsulates affirmative

Show More
Related

  • Affirmative Action Rhetorical Analysis

    744 Words  | 2 Pages

    Media plays an essential role in shaping the opinions of society. Writers tend to be selective in the information they provide, manipulating the truth in order to support their own perspective. By placing any given topic under certain light, writers have the power to control the audience’s response and lead them to form an opinion based on their experience with the information. On the other hand, readers have a tendency to readily and automatically accept this information without much thought, despite the possibility that the information they are absorbing is false or biased. Thus, the cycle of perpetuation of misinformation continues; the media feeds the masses false information, and they eat it up.This problem is evident in the topic of affirmative

    Read More

  • Affirmative Action Case Study

    1133 Words  | 3 Pages

    Affirmative Action Question: Newton and Wasserstrom seem to disagree about whether affirmative action is a form of reverse discrimination. Explain how each arrives at their position about whether or not affirmative action is similar to or different from discriminatory laws of the Jim Crow era

    Read More

  • Biracial Identity Development

    1212 Words  | 3 Pages

    It has been said that the physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social one that humans put on them. Society has placed stigmas on race dating all the way back to the 1600s. Still in the 21st century the American society is still trying to work through racial boundaries. With such stigmas being placed on them, biracial individuals often self-identify or be identified by others differently, depending on the social context. A biracial individual’s racial identity development is contingent upon many factors, both internal and external. With the dramatic increase in the number of individuals with a bi or multiracial background it is important for us to recognize the complexity of the racial identity development of this culture. It is critical to understand the hardships as well as the advantages of being biracial, to help them avoid any negative behaviors which could yield lifelong consequences. The healthy development of one’s racial identity is imperative for a biracial child to be able to achieve and maintain a positive psychological and social adjustment throughout the lifespan.

    Read More

  • Thomson Highway's The Rez Sisters

    1309 Words  | 3 Pages

    Identity is 'how you view yourself and your life.'; (p. 12 Knots in a String.) Your identity helps you determine where you think you fit in, in your life. It is 'a rich complexity of images, ideas and associations.';(p. 12 Knots in a String.) It is given that as we go through our lives and encounter different experiences our identity of yourselves and where we belong may change. As this happens we may gain or relinquish new values and from this identity and image our influenced. 'A bad self-image and low self-esteem may form part of identity?but often the cause is not a loss of identity itself so much as a loss of belonging.'; Social psychologists suggest that identity is closely related to our culture. Native people today have been faced with this challenge against their identity as they are increasingly faced with a non-native society. I will prove that the play The Rez Sisters showed this loss of identity and loss of belonging. When a native person leaves the reservation to go and start a new life in a city they are forced to adapt to a lifestyle they are not accustomed to. They do not feel as though they fit in or belong to any particular culture. They are faced with extreme racism and stereotypes from other people in the nonreservational society.

    Read More

  • Blacks and Latinos in America

    1038 Words  | 3 Pages

    Identity is one of the main questions throughout all of our readings, because it is hard for people to accept who they are in society. Accepting their identity as a minority with little if any freedoms sparks many of the social problems which I will show happening in all communities and cultures. The main issue we will discuss is how social environments effect the search for identity. The Mexicans in the U.S. module gives us examples how Mexicans try to keep their customs while living in a discriminated environment by the Whites. This module also gives us examples how people are searching for personal identity while struggling with cultural traditions. Finally, the African-American module gives us more examples to compare with the Mexicans in the U.S. module, because these readings deal with Blacks finding personal identity also through discrimination from the Whites. To properly understand the theme of identity, we must first look the factors influencing it.

    Read More

  • Affirmative Action Essay

    521 Words  | 2 Pages

    Affirmative action was created to allow minorities to have more opportunities in the workforce and in education. It still remains to be a debate whether affirmative action should be a necessary route even though we have made progress towards greater equality. The argument over Affirmative action has been going on for some time with two opposing sides. There is one side who finds Affirmative action as an opportunity to the less fortunate; those who are against have the belief that it promotes less qualified individuals rather than a person own merit.

    Read More

  • I Was Born a White, Middle Class American

    570 Words  | 2 Pages

    Culture and identity are two very strange ideas. They are received at a very young age, yet they are very hard to give to someone else. They will affect you for the rest or your life, yet for the most part you are born into them. However, they soon become very important to us and we cannot, no matter what we do, live without them. They are a part of us, and a vital aspect of society. However, it took me a very long time to recognize that I had an identity and a little while after that before I knew what it was.

    Read More

  • The Biracial Population and Personal Identity

    2267 Words  | 5 Pages

    In today’s society the high influx of interracial marriages between Black and White individuals has resulted in the biracial population increasing significantly over the past 30 years (Roth, 2005). According to the 2010 census, the number of American children that categorize themselves as biracial has increased to 4.2 million, making it the quickest emergent youth group in the United States (Census, 2010). This has led to interest in the biracial population; recent literature has shown that amongst many studies, “individuals perceive the relationship between their mixed parentage and their self identity differently” (Rockquemore & Brunsma, 2002). This is significant in the area of child development and family studies because self-identity begins to surface during child development, the dynamics of biracial children brings up the question as to how they construct their racial identity. Due to the understanding in recent literature that being biracial can lead to feeling between both racial categories while dually feeling marginalized (Rockquemore et al., 2002); this paper will examine the nature of racial identity formation and the consequences’ black/white biracial identity can have on individuals to further address the need for additional research and attention on the biracial experience.

    Read More

  • Racial Discrimination In American Society

    938 Words  | 2 Pages

    Thankfully, sociologists study what cultural elements dictate society’s influence on racial inequality and Brekhus (2015) enumerates identity authenticity as one. Density, “whether one performs the identity adequately” and duration, “whether one performs the identity enough of the time” (Brekhus 2015:120), comprise how authentic an identity is. Although some individuals fail to find their identity until later in life, they observe the duration component by establishing their identity as innate. Erin Johnston (2013) exemplifies Paganism as a supposedly innate trait, where her participants “described [it] as an essential and permanent element of their being” (Brekhus 2015:121). Subcultures, such as music genres, also have identities, where the hip-hop industry desires a racially black, old school, from the hood artist. Conversely, what is not desired signifies identity authenticity and a white, suburban, mainstream artist is not authentic hip-hop. In American society, race is an identity everyone holds, whether white, black, latino, asian, mixed, etc. There are auxiliary characteristics inclined for and against each race, mostly chalked up as

    Read More

  • Ron Karenga's Black Cultural Nationalism

    1167 Words  | 3 Pages

    The people of the black culture need a motivating force behind their community. They need a black aesthetic to motivate them and incline them to support the revolution. The black aesthetic itself will not be enough to motivate the people; they will need black art to help them understand what they are supporting. The art in the black culture needs an aesthetic to get the message across to its viewers and allow them to understand the meaning behind pieces of artwork. One of Ron Karenga’s points is how people need to respond positively to the artwork because it then shows that the artist got the main idea to the audience and helps to motivate them to support the revolution. In “Black Cultural Nationalism”, the author, Ron Karenga, argues that

    Read More

  • Ways of Seeing by John Berger

    891 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the book “Ways of Seeing,” John Berger explains several essential aspects of art through influence of the Marxism and art history that relates to social history and the sense of sight. Berger examines the dominance of ideologies in the history of traditional art and reflects on the history, class, and ideology as a field of cultural discourse, cultural consumption and cultural practice. Berger argues, “Realism is a powerful link to ownership and money through the dominance of power.”(p.90)[1] The aesthetics of art and present historical methodology lack focus in comparison to the pictorial essay. In chapter six of the book, the pictorial imagery demonstrates a variety of art forms connoting its realism and diversity of the power of connecting to wealth in contradiction to the deprived in the western culture. The images used in this chapter relate to one another and state in the analogy the connection of realism that is depicted in social statues, landscapes, and portraiture, also present in the state of medium that was used to create this work of art.

    Read More

  • Denim, Metal, Passion Campaign Analysis

    966 Words  | 2 Pages

    The third facet of authenticity is performative: those who engage in an expressive lifestyle can be seen as exemplars of authenticity; those who wear jeans perform originality. In the appendix I have provided a picture

    Read More

  • The Importance of Positive Cultural Identity

    1171 Words  | 3 Pages

    It is therefore important to be a multicultural person by first forming a positive cultural identity. Manning and Baruth (2009, p.24) defines culture as “people’s values, languages, religions, ideals, artistic expressions, patterns of social and interpersonal relationships and ways of perceiving, behaving and thinking.” However, in this paper, cultural identity also relate to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, social class and all that defines the self. Hence to have a positive cultural identity (PCI), one must be able to identify with and integrate those identities that bring about a well-built, healthy self-perception and a sense of well-being. PCI would also be ingrained into a person’s self-concept seeing as culture affect how a person thinks, understands and perceives the self. “I am a psychology student, my mother’s daughter and I am gay.” The sentence used to describe myself illustrates how culture shapes the structure of self-concept with the use of more social self-descriptions indicating an interdependent self, typical in collectivistic cultures (Franzoi, 2009).

    Read More

  • My Ethnic Identity Essay: This Is Who I Am

    1348 Words  | 3 Pages

    Times are changing and I feel like I am forced to conform to the everyday social norms of America, which makes me feel impuissance. Racial identity, which refers to identifying with a social group with similar phenotypes and racial category, is the only experience that I have with life (Organista, 2010). Racial ethnicity was used to build my self-esteem and to keep me in the dark when it came to how society treats individuals of darker complexion. However, once I left the confines of my family and neighborhood, I was forced to befriend and interact with individuals that had different cultural values and beliefs than me. This experience caused me to learn how to appreciate other racial and ethnic groups and their cultural values and belief. This is an accurate definition, of acculturation because I was able to understand and fit in with individuals different from me, while maintaining my own culture and ethnic identity. Therefore, knowing the importance of my ancestry, while acculturating and developing my own identity was all used

    Read More

  • Culture Is Ordinary, by Raymond Williams

    1076 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the end, what we learn from this article is very realistic and logical. Furthermore, it is supported with real-life examples. Culture is ordinary, each individual has it, and it is both individual and common. It’s a result of both traditional values and an individual effort. Therefore, trying to fit it into certain sharp-edged models would be wrong.

    Read More

More about Authenticity In Affirmative Culture

Open Document