I always find myself suspicious any time the word “authenticity” comes up. It is a bourgeois concept, apparently, to be concerned with whether what one does with one’s time is real enough. T. J. Jackson Lears, man of many initials and cultural historian at Rutgers, traces anxiety about authenticity and whether modernism had a role in its eventual demise to the shifting cultural climes of the America in the nineteenth century in his book No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture. His most useful argument is perfect, ironic schadenfreude: the antimodern sentiments of upper class white men was so contingent upon modern comforts, that it basically turned into neoliberal capitalism primed to run rampant on the twentieth century.

And yet, here we are, still picking through the forest looking for some comforting authenticity: rejecting the Brooklyn lit scene to grow pumpkins on an upstate commune, wishing for days of summer better remembered by an episode of Dawson’s Creek than by us, a sorry lot of workers. This is just as it was in the 1960s and 70s when biology majors dropped out of University of Chicago to join the bioregional movement in the Ozarks and folklorists in Louisiana tried to recapture a preAmericanized francophone culture along Bayou Teche. This is just as it was for the Shelleys and Byron and Polidori when they escaped to the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva for another impossible summer, telling ghost stories that refused—at the time—to be taxonomized by the hungry specter of the Enlightenment. Just as, as Lears tells it, Victorian men idolized the olden warrior spirit, promoted “traditional” craft markets, incorporated some of that old Catholic sensuality into their piety.

[jwplayer mediaid=”210″]

Lears makes a compelling case for why his Gilded Age boys turned against progress and towards earnestness, fantasizing about an older gilded age that was impossibly better. His discussion of the attraction of the European medieval period was especially interesting, the ability to imagine it the way Rabelais did: brimming with fat, vital energy, washed in primary hues. I can also imagine the playhouses now, full of pince-nez, brocade, and hoop skirts, clapping at Peter Pan for to raise Tink from the dead (see above video for a taste!). This book makes a fine argument as long as we concede to Lears that white bourgeois anxiety was the major cause of a cultural hegemony, one that cannibalized all the people Lears did not talk about—the working class people who were more concerned about their endless, industrial workweek than their foi banalisée, the newly freed African Americans, the women who were neither arbiters of cultures (a tricky feat even with the right to vote) nor yielding comforters.

Perhaps also the force of capital was going to continue to avalanche regardless of the hobbies of Victorian dilettantes, that the rejection of the now has not been remarkably absent from premodern times, that authenticity, the trial of living a life worth living, is a concept history keeps struggling with. We accept authenticity, but only at a remove, something in a former life maybe. I get the sense that Lears sympathizes (or at least did in 1981 when he wrote this book) with the plight of the 19^th century intellectual looking at the terror of the city—maybe from an office at Columbia looking eastward over Amsterdam Avenue wishing Frederick Law Olmsted would hurry up and drop an oasis on the rocky slope of hill between the college and Harlem, a professor who might wish for something natural in a world increasingly unreal.

Poussin was down with nostalgia for the good old days, but it did make him consider DEATH.

You get the sense that if only this bourgeois antimodernism wasn’t co-opted by industry, by a reaffirmation of Enlightment rationality and emphasis on individual will, then maybe we’d be in a better place, one not still plagued by neurasthenia, the 19^th century word for pervasive mental illness. But maybe we should look at antimodernist sentiments as affectations created by the discourse of capitalism, which gave us the economic structure of progress? Maybe antimodernism isn’t the best word because it includes too much: the rallying cry of the Tea Party activist alongside the antinomian punk today, and Walt Whitman and Hitler back then? It is hard to say because antimodernist rhetoric is so prevalent today, and, even as I, too, am caught in the fist of capital and love wishing and imagining, I reject rejecting the modern.

Can “authentic experience” be achieved by reviving practices of the past while simultaneously denying the fundamental commitments of their original practitioners?  In T. J. Jackson Lears examination of the American antimodernism movement, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920, the answer seems to be an emphatic “No.”  The antimodernism that Lears explores expressed itself in many forms, including the arts and crafts ideology, the martial ideal, a fascination with the medieval, and a Protestant revival of Catholic forms, but each expression was divorced from its original time and place in such a way that it was easily assimilated into the service of emerging corporate capitalism.  Commenting on the eclecticism of the modern environment, Lears observes that, “Uprooting once-sacred symbols from their appropriate time, place, and purpose, the eclectic approach trivialized them” (33).  

The antimodernists seemed to want to protest the positivism, determinism, and progressivist optimism that pervaded the end of the 19^th century.  However, Lears observes a fatal flaw inherent in their various protests—a satisfaction with the products of the modern movement.   The Arts and Crafts movement bought into marketplace capitalism; the Martial Ideal was wedded to corporate imperialism.  Fascination with the medieval period was expressed through art and literature that could be consumed without the religion or the experiences that formed the foundation of the medieval world view.  Catholic forms were introduced with Catholic theology, as liberal Protestantism ran from notions of sin.  Although Lears points out that one of the fears of the Puritan and republican moralists who opposed the modern movement was the erosion of personal moral responsibility, the antimodern movement joined in the avoidance of responsibility by playing at what was once taken seriously. 

As Lears repeatedly observed, many antimodernist Americans shared the modernist assumptions about religion, they enjoyed the comfort that positivist science had provided modern Americans, and even if pessimism sometimes overtook their progressivist optimism, it did not last for long.  Plagued by the meaninglessness (or weightlessness) of modern life, they were searching for a cure to neurasthenia without being willing to give up any of its causes.  They tried to revive a sense of the terror inherent in life by reading about tragedy, to recover a connection with the divine by viewing painting of those who engaged in asceticism to achieve such unity while denying that such practices were necessary.  They wanted to regain a sense of usefulness in work by making products that could be obtained much more cheaply from the very factories they disliked, while acknowledging that “if handmade products could not pass the test of the market, they were not worth producing” (88). 

Those trying to recapture authenticity of experience by grasping at practices from the past while holding on to the larger frameworks of their own time seem doomed to the dissatisfaction that spawned the antimodern movement in the first place.  Lears points out that turn-of-the-century America “lacked resources for creating its own symbols” (33).  It seems that for an antimodern critique to have been successful, it would have needed to either revive the “larger frameworks of meaning” that accompanied these earlier practices, or have developed their own frameworks that were more than scaffolding on the dominant corporate culture.