In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

AUTHENTICITY VS. ARTIFICIALITY
Where are the boys of those days?
Yesterday's pals, where are they?
Only you and I remember ...
Remember those women,
Faithful, big-hearted girls,
Who used to scuffle at Laura's dances,
Each one defending her love.
(Reichardt, 370)
Such attempts at grasping the past's Authenticity stem from a paradoxical
motivation. For example, the desire of the archaeologist Howard
Carter to speak with Tutankhamen is a function of the way in which
Tutankhamen's mask seems to resist Carter's efforts to extract from it
the secrets of the ancient Egyptian world. [see Mummies] The more
difficult it is to discover a content behind or beneath what is identified
as an expression, the stronger is the conviction that such a hidden
content really exists. This is why the "expressionless eyes" of an African
dignitary lead the American zoologist F. G. Carnochan "to the revelation
of ancient tribal secrets, ... some of which [will] eventually be of great
value to medical science. It took two separate expeditions to Africa and
the better part of four years to make the journey, from the Africa everyone
can see, to that which few have seen. But it was worth the trouble"
(Carnochan and Adamson, 18,23).
Ultimately, the difference between Authenticity and Artificiality is a
question of perspective rather than an ontological contrast. Max Reinhardt's
interpretation of Josephine Baker's dancing as the expression of
an archaic cultural force is not necessarily wrong just because it diverges
from Baker's self-perception. Such oscillations between alternative perspectives
of identical phenomena, however, mark the point at which
distinctions and social constructions of reality may collapse. Trying to
distinguish body-machine couplings in Soviet factories from those in U.S.
factories, Ernst Toller introduces the (more than) precarious notion of a
collective proletarian subjectivity on the Soviet side which controls-in
its own interest-the use of individual proletarian bodies. In contrast,
the battlefield experiences of the Great War lead Ernst Junger to believe
that matter has come to dominate mankind: "A battle is nothing but a
terrible way of assessing production on both sides, and the victory goes
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