Authenticity In Affirmative Culture

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.

Authenticity represents this affirmative culture succinctly through it's emphasis on withdrawal.

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

culture.
Authenticity is an even greater example of affirmative culture than the soul; the soul was at least concerned with ethical behavior to others.49 Authenticity and affirmative culture glorify resignation; irreplaceable, indistinguishable man is put above all social and natural distinctions.50 To be authentic, one does not even have to do this; a torturer can justify himself on being an authentic torturer.51 Authenticity arises at a time when affirmative culture began it's self abolition; every sphere of one's life is subject to intense discipline.52 With no escape, the authentic self represents the ultimate, self-destructive withdrawal and dialectically, the prime illustration of affirmative culture. Authenticity has become the perfect example of affirmative culture.
The problems presented by authenticity can be best resolved through a dialectically constituted self. This dialectical, historically mediated subjectivity is the best way to deal with his dialectically conceived subjectivity is historically formed and not reducible to historical determinations; The limits of this constitutive synthesis reflects the relations between abstract concepts.53 The authentic self is a "mineness" that is entirely empty of any sort of content; it becomes a form of empty thought.54 This dialectical self is also better at explaining social relations; by accounting for the object, it can properly explain alienation as endemic reification. Under a dialectical conception of the self, the individual does not exist independently of the social. No thought or feeling is simply tautological under this conception of subjectivity; each mental activity requires the other.55 Rather than grant more freedom, the uncritical jargon of authenticity constrains the freedom of this historical subjectivity.56 A historical, dialectical subjectivity is the greatest method for dealing with the problems of the authentic self.
This dialectical subjectivity is the best way to explain the origins of the authentic self. Authenticity clearly could not have arisen out of a vacuum; like all other systems of ideas it must have been the result of a specific historical moment. While the idea fails on it's own merits, it should be analyzed so that the dialectical self can potentially realize further historical possibilities. By seeing the origins of authenticity, a dialectic could unfold where exactly the concept went wrong and what could be done to fix this problem. This historically mediated self must exist to explain the arrival of authenticity and what this entails.
This historically mediated self begins with the relationship between the subject and nature. The subject was not initially entirely alien to the object. However, nature in its ambiguity presented a threat of subsuming the subject. Initially, perception was a form of projection in which the subject behaved mimetically towards the externality that was a threat.57 To reflect the object as it was, the subject had to give more back to it than receive from it; a synthetic unity is the result as the object both constitutes and is separate from the self.58 The two would relate dialectically as the subject would need to take a part of the object into himself in order to control it. The unity of the subject was not presupposed; magical acts were directed at the specific individual rather than a mere specimen.59 Even in the act of sacrifice, the chosen victim still had an element that was particular to it and so avoided commodity fetishism.60 This mimetic relationship was primitive man's way of dealing with nature. The primitive relationship between subject and object was a mimetic one.
The rational, independent, autonomous self emerged from the increased domination of man over nature. In the attempt to dominate nature, Man became and has become increasingly distant from the object.61 The task of mimesis was not to find an underlying, hidden truth underlying the world that was to be dominated.62 Modern man claims to transform his process into one of a pure truth that underlies the world that it enslaves.63 The unity of the subject arose while all things are abstracted to essences and are denied their specificity.64 Instead of the multiple masks of the medicine man, man has taken possession of himself through one impenetrable mask.65 Man became the rational, orderly subject while nature is solely passive objectivity: the unified cosmos to be exploited.66 Man gives his ordering mind a godly status; nothing is incapable of being understood and dominated.67 This process was necessary for the further advancements in industrial capitalism to arise68.The autonomous self emerged as an attempt to dominate nature: to understand nature in order to control it.