the jargon of authenticity

"Its language is a trademark of societalized chosenness, noble and homey at once--sublanguage as superior language.... While the jargon overflows with the pretense of deep human emotion, it is just as standardized as the world that it officially negates; the reason for this lies partly in its mass success, partly in the fact that it posits its message automatically, through its mere nature. Thus the jargon bars the message from the experience which is to ensoul it. The jargon has at its disposal a modest number of words which are received promptly as signals" (Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, Routledge 2003, p. 3; my emphasis).

How often I find myself using and reading the same words. Lovely. Wonderful. Sweet. I'm tired of them, but it takes work to find alternates--the words I need to mean what I really mean, instead of words that will do to hold a place.

My friend Jirka was bemused by the English tendency to say things are 'lovely'. The word for lovely in Czech, rozkosne (I can't put in the diacritical marks on this computer, but they're above the s and the e) is really only used when things are...well, lovely. Not for a view that, on further investigation, proves itself to be fairly average. Not for an insipid design that's nevertheless popular. And I like this, despite my own tendency to overuse words like 'lovely' (visiting friends this weekend, I winced to realise how often I used the word 'nice'). I like the respect it gives each word. It acknowledges that words have discrete uses, implications, and connotations, and it quietly expects their users to be aware of those differences and to use the words well.

I suppose it also requires a level of thoughtfulness in interaction that isn't always in place. I'm thinking especially of the way I interact and observe others interacting online. This 'jargon of authenticity' we adopt and propagate--which is linguistic to begin with but also reproduces itself in an assimilist style of image production, the consumption of certain kinds of things in certain ways, and a cult of personality (which seems to be the root cause of some kerfluffle when people writing online who have a following of sorts either 'leave' or change or reveal things not to be as perhaps originally thought)--is a way of being-together that is based on the surface of things and seems, in the end, rather more closely tied to patterns of consumption (ones I think many makers and writers hope to avoid or escape) than I'd like.

I'd rather my work (be it writing, drawing, prints, or myself) be, after consideration, called puzzling, mysterious, bizarre, uncanny, or weird--or charming, delightful, sensitive, or touching--than simply 'lovely,' which at this point I can't trust as a meaningful utterance. Adorno, writing about a particular jargon of authenticity, is clearly dealing with functions of language that do much more than dictate the way a relatively small number of people interact in a virtual environment; he was concerned with how the ideas of authenticity were implicated in the rise of the Third Reich, for instance. But the slippage of language away from itself and into symbolic roles that a social structure determines for it is worrisome, if only for "the increasing pressure it exerts on individuals to define themselves through consumption" and the way it can promulgate a "compulsion to shut off one’s capacity for empathy"(Daniel, Jamie. "Adorno as Antidote," In These Times, 9 March 2005. Online, accessed 2 Sept. 2008).

I think it's clear that my calling something 'lovely' or 'sweet' is in no way the same kind of thing as the linguistic substitutions that fascism calls for (doublespeak or buzzwords or whatever you like to call it). But I do worry about this tendency I observe in myself to engage superficially instead of taking the time to figure out what I mean and to say it in the specific words it requires (which, yes, sometimes might be 'lovely' or 'sweet' or any other of a number of words I still find overused).

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I want to point out that Adorno (whose theory I am using liberally, having only just begun to read it) was no an uncomplicated figure. He was implicated in many of the structures he critiqued and theorized. I acknowledge, too, my own complicity with and participation in many of the things I have written on above.