Authenticity. posted by Richard Seymour

Suppose you're a second-rate ham actor like Tony Blair, touring the country with a new show called "I Think We're A Clone Now". In it, you produce a wooden ventriloquist's dummy, carved to look a little bit like you. It wears the same banal suit with the same red silk tie, has a demonic grin carved into its face, empty staring blue eyes, with one slightly larger than the other. This is the classic decoy - it is a playful object, raising questions about reality, meaning, similitude etc. But it's non-threatening.

For your next trick, you produce a robot which is similarly designed to look a bit like you, but this time there is no ventriloquism. It speaks on its own accord, barking out those cheap casuistries and cliches that you use like so many crutches. This time, it is equivalent only as an operational process. It is a bit of mechanical efficiency, less a fake than a replica in steel. But it struts robotically about the stage, gesturing, preening, exuding fake sweat and tears, and the audience ooooohs and aaaaaahs.

Nice one. The final part of the show, you pull out a clone. A complete biological replica, grown in some hellish test-tube at Huntingdon's Life Sciences next to where the chimpanzees are smoking forty a day and using cut up rabbits for ashtrays. The clone is an altogether more terrifying creature. It is the original minus x. In all essentials, it seems the same. It simpers, it glowers, it expatiates with cutting hand gestures, its smug, effete voice cuts through you like a dentists drill. Now, you march on 100 or so of these monstrous things, lose yourself in them, and no one can tell one from the other. In fact, as they are all precise clones with every patented strip of DNA replicated there really is no difference between them. Yet, somehow, authenticity has been lost. Not that the original Tony Blair has ceased to exist, you understand, simply that the crucial difference separating real from fake has been collapsed.

In the Prime Minister's simulacrum world, the biggest lies often come precisely in the form of sincerity and truth, as Slavoj Zizek perceptively noted. It is not that Blair himself is not emotionally persuaded of his own case, but that this is precisely the means of delivering falsehood and sophistry. Blair says on television "I'm a pretty straight sort of guy", or evinces familial horror over his son's drinking habits (ASBO the little fucker!), or evinces lachrymosity over the death of a spoilt Royal. To which Zizek retorts:

[T]he public sharing of inner turmoil, the coincidence between public and private, even and especially when it is psychologically 'sincere' is cynical - not because such a public display of private doubts and uncertainties is faked, concealing true privacy: what this display conceals is the objective socio-political and ideological dimension of the policies or decisions under discussion. The more this display is psychologically 'sincere', the more it is 'objectively' cynical in that it mystifies true social meaning and effect of these policies for decisions.

The great thing about these replicants is that, although they are autonomous human agents, they are almost programmed to emote like Blair, occlude real political considerations with phrases like "ah genuinely believe...".

Thomas Carlyle, in one of his hilarious moans about the rising Democracy, complains :

Close following which, as if by sympathetic subterranean electricities, all Europe exploded, boundless, uncontrollable; and we had the year 1848, one of the most singular, disastrous, amazing, and, on the whole, humiliating years the European world ever saw. Not since the irruption of the Northern Barbarians has there been the like. Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos. Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare to dogs and the profane:--Enter, all the world, see what kind of Official holy it is. Kings everywhere, and reigning persons, stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole world bellowing in their ear, "Begone, ye imbecile hypocrites, histrios not heroes! Off with you, off!" and, what was peculiar and notable in this year for the first time, the Kings all made haste to go, as if exclaiming, "We _are_ poor histrios, we sure enough;--did you want heroes? Don`t kill us; we couldn`t help it!" Not one of them turned round, and stood upon his Kingship, as upon a right he could afford to die for, or to risk his skin upon; by no manner of means. That, I say, is the alarming peculiarity at present. Democracy, on this new occasion, finds all Kings conscious that they are but Play-actors.

Beyond this, we now find Prime Ministers who are unconscious play-actors, living out tragicomic careers as if for all the world they were indeed the authentic rulers of our time. Histrios who mistake their acting out for heroism. The collapse of the distinction between the two, in fact, is what makes our political culture so bizarre that when Prescott lamps someone we celebrate as if at last some Real had irrupted into the simulacrum of politics, forgetting that this Real is exactly what sustains the simulacrum. Prescott may punch from the Left, but he governs from the Right, and talks from his fundament.

The inadequacy of cynicism in the face of this is transparent. For if the liars do not even recognise their own lies, it is far better to take them at their word and realise that they are incapable of seeing beyond the bare-assed stage production they are trapped in. Better to turn our attention to the objective conditions that produce these lies, and seek at last to change them.