In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

AUTHENTICITY VS. ARTIFICIALITY 263
lution of intelligence has condemned humans to a position of eccentricity:
"Almost certainly, we used to be much more tightly linked than we
are now to that universal soul with which our subconscious still communicates.
Our intelligence has separated us from it, separates us from
it more and more. Is our progress, then, isolation?" (Maeterlinck, 206).
Richards, Kracauer, and Maeterlinck share not only the belief that human
life has lost its correspondence with nature, but also the conviction
that, despite this loss, a natural order of things must still exist somewhere.
This is why the French novelist Georges Bernanos can postulate
"the need to give back to souls the taste for the authentic" (Bernanos,
240). Explicitly or implicitly, opting for Authenticity presupposes a belief
in nature as cosmology and, consequently, a quasi-religious respect for
any traditional forms or structures that one can identify.
Such veneration of the given contrasts sharply with the urge to find a
new rapport between humanity and its environment, a rapport that is
not based on any natural law and that sometimes must even actively
avoid perspectives and views produced by nature or mediated by tradition.
This position acquires an element of Artificiality through the gesture
of going against the grain of tradition or nature. But Artificiality
does not deny the existence of those objects which everyday language
identifies as "nature," nor does it suggest a specific distance from themit
merely suspends the idea of their normative status. Artificiality thus
encourages the invention of new-rigorous, crazy, surrealist-orders under
which things and humans can come together. It does not acknowledge
any limits, even for the most extreme forms of body fashioning [see
Gomina, Male = Female (Gender Trouble)] or the most unheard-of levels
of athletic achievement. [see Endurance] Since Artificiality rejects any
assumption of natural coherence, it tends to make things and bodies
seem disconnected, isolated, fragmented, and exclusively self-referential.
Pushed to its extreme, it can encourage the project of artificially constituting
what is seen as quintessentially natural-for example, a family
(Supervielle, 158,211).
On the other hand, the world view of Authenticity presupposes an
already given distinction between the substantiality of a depth and the
lightness of a surface-a binarism that parallels the distinction between
a meaning (depth) and the forms of its expression (surface). This similarity
becomes as obvious in philosophical speculations as in astrology
and astrophysics: "We may think of the star as two bodies superposed,