The Sloppiness of Authenticity

The Situational Nature of Authenticity

My post last month focused on a post from another Substack publication — Both/And — written by scholar Tabitha Kirkland. Her post’s title is “Why We’re Drawn to Authentic People (and How to Be One).” As noted last month, I’m going to use Kirkland’s post as a jumping off point more than once because it is so dense with interesting ideas and observations about authenticity. This month, I’m going to focus on her claim that authenticity is situational — i.e., we are more or less authentic depending on the situation, whether the situation is defined as a setting (e.g., doctor’s office, dormitory room, classroom, etc.) or the people/roles in it (doctor/patient, roommates, friends, student/instructor, etc.).

I believe that Kirkland’s claim accurately reflects our common understanding of authenticity. I believe this based on my experiences assigning a paper in the interpersonal communication courses I used to teach not so very long ago. I had my students write a paper in which they used Goffmanian theory to analyze two different fronts they produced and presented to and for others. According to Goffman, we are always presenting a front — a self or identity constructed of clothes, hairstyle, piercings and the like, as well as accents, dialect, etc. Thus, the assignment was to specify all of the clothes, piercings, etc. that my students used to create two very different selves in their everyday lives. And because Goffman says that we produce different selves in different situations with different people, the assignment also required students to describe the two situations in which they presented their very different selves.

I also specified that neither of the selves they described could be their “true” self, because, at least as I read him, Goffman doesn’t believe we have a true, unconstructed self. Nevertheless, a fair number of students could not refrain from writing about their “true” selves, which all these students said they exhibited (rather than constructed) in “private” situations peopled with close family, friends, lovers, and the like. These students also contrasted this self with a “professional” self, which they mostly associated with work situations peopled by work colleagues, bosses and the like. That is, many of my students couldn’t rid themselves of the common notion that we are more or less authentic depending on the situation even when they were required to. I believe this shows the extent to which members of American society have bought into the notion that authenticity is normally situational.

Of course, this phenomenon is less remarkable if it truly is the case that we are our true, unique, unconstructed selves in private situations. However, it is entirely possible to analyze such private selves in Goffmanian terms. For instance, it is entirely possible to characterize the sloppy clothing people seem to universally don in entirely private encounters — stained t-shirts, sweats, etc. — as a kind of uniform for people wanting to project — to construct — their appearance of being authentic.

Further, it is entirely possible to describe behaviors that seem unique in an authentic situations as behaviors that universally and uniformly construct a situation as an authentic one. For instance, in situations we wish to mark as private, we may belch, fart, pick at our teeth or nose, lick our plate clean and the like — embarrassing behaviors that we would never produce in public situations in which we might fear being ostracized. Of course, if such behaviors are uniformly produced in private situations, they are not unique and spontaneous and thereby authentic, but rather behaviors produced to mark the situation as family events, friendship situations, and the like.

If such is the case, then we are never in authentic situations; rather we are always in situations in which we produce a constructed self of some kind. That is, we do not exude spontaneous, unique, true, authentic selves regardless of situation. This is not to say that there is no difference between private and public situations. However, that difference, as Goffman seems to state, is a difference of consciousness. We are conscious of our construction of our selves in public situations and less so, if at all, in private situations. This is perhaps because we seem to be less concerned about creating a strategically advantageous self in private situations than in public ones. Perhaps we just know we’re less likely to be judged negatively in private situations.

Does all the above mean that, from a Goffmanian perspective, we can dispense with the notion of authentic behaviors and authentic situations? I don’t think so if for no other reason than that whatever we treat as real is real in its consequences. That’s a paraphrase of W. I. Thomas, which means that if we perceive something as real, even if it isn’t objectively real, that thing will have a real effect on us. For instance, if we perceive that demons exist, we will be lead to fear them, exorcise them, protect against them and the like. So, even if authenticity isn’t real, our belief in it will cause us to at least speak about it as if it does exist, at least in certain situations. That is, we may advocate for it, label some specific behaviors as authentic, regard certain situations as more than likely authentic, etc.

The analysis above indicates that authenticity exists, but not in the way it is popularly conceived, if we take social psychologists research to heart. It also indicates that authenticity is situational, just not in the same way as is currently understood. So, while the popular understanding of authenticity may be problematic, it is still a very important phenomenon.