Authenticity

In information societies where representations of deviance are ubiquitous across a range of media—television, radio, Internet, games, and so on—deviance itself becomes a commodity to be consumed. This presents a problem for individuals and groups invested in the development of oppositional subcultural identities; their status as different from the mainstream becomes blurred, if not trivial. The authenticity concept frames the study of self, identity, and experience among such individuals and groups.

Authenticity has been characterized in various forms. In the social and medical sciences and the humanities, a more predominant form has been that of personal authenticity, emphasizing emotions and self-feelings, acting in accordance with one's beliefs, and personal autonomy. A less used form in the social sciences has been social authenticity, which focuses on interpersonal processes of identification, the performance of self, and cultural normativity. The former is predicated on a rationalist philosophy of science; the latter is constructionist in orientation. A scholar's preference for one or the other will shape how authenticity is conceived and, therefore, how it is employed in the processes of theorizing social deviance. Dictionary definitions exemplify a rationalist conception of authenticity and demonstrate the extent to which it is treated as something metaphysically real in everyday culture and discourse. Authenticity is often defined in terms of something being factual or true in substance, implying that authenticity is out there waiting to be uncovered. A second definition of authenticity has to do with the genuineness of the thing in question, as in whether a cultural object is real or a fake. Such definitions are manifest in psychoanalytic theories, where people are assumed to have essential selves or essential self-feelings that are “real” but may be unknown, buried, or otherwise in need of (re)discovery. Émile Durkheim's truism that deviance and crime are functional aspects of all societies further connotes a rationalist approach to deviance inasmuch as deviant behavior is taken for granted as a natural aspect of social life. To the extent [Page 43]that scholarship supports this perspective, individuals and/or behaviors that are defined as deviant become essentialized as a priori phenomena, and authenticity is rarely if ever called into question. People are naturally good or bad, and institutions are created to either fix those who are inherently good or control those who are inherently bad.

Symbolic interactionism, dramaturgy, and other constructionist perspectives offer analytic frameworks that bracket the assumed objectivity of authenticity and facilitate explicit focus on the situational and behavioral elements and processes through which deviance and authenticity are or are not achieved. Howard Becker's labeling theory turned the traditional conception of deviance on its head by exposing how marginal groups and their cultures were not naturally deviant but were, on the one hand, categorized as such by dominant social actors while, on the other hand, active in supporting distinctions between themselves and the mainstream. Constructionist perspectives explicitly reject the assumed objectivity of social processes such as deviance or authenticity and instead operate from the standpoint that human actions are responsible for creating cultures within which certain people, actions, or events are defined as authentically normal or abnormal, and/or right or wrong. The study of deviance or authenticity thus becomes the study of the social processes through which things are defined in certain ways. Just as deviance was reconfigured into labeling, authenticity may be better understood in terms of authentication. Rather than assume that some phenomenon or process is first “really” deviant and second unproblematic, the process of authenticating deviant identities or actions is explicitly called into question. Authenticity and authentication are especially important in highly commodified cultural milieux where everything, including deviant identities, is for sale and those who “are” deviant interact with others who “merely act” deviant.

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