In Seinfeld’s The Yada Yada episode, Jerry Seinfeld suspects a part-time comedian (who is also a dentist) of converting to Judaism just so he could add jokes about Jews to his repertoire and escape the anti-Semitic allegation. This offends Jerry not because of the alleged anti-Semitism, but because it offends him as a comedian, as he finds the comedy to be inauthentic. Jerry finds this identity as a short-circuit trick to bypass the authentic movement of Comedy, an idealist trick to gain an unfair market-share of reality.
Jerry thinks one has gone through class struggle if one is “authentic”, be it a comedian (or Jew); while Tim Whatley (the dentist worker) believes one should be inauthentic as that’s (really authentic) class struggle against the oppressive establishment of authenticity. However, both Jerry and Whatley are wrong, and they are representatives of the failed current “liberal” political punditry class of Left Twitter (patreon fueled pundits of Breadtube & “leftist” podcasts).
Left Twitter is an exemplar of this double-bind of failed idealism presently. It is a tension of increasing intensity emerging between these contradictory poles of authentic and inauthentic representation (Jerry and Whatley mimesis). The class of political punditry is facing a critical contradiction because critique is cheap, and supply exceeds demand.
While the Jerry perspective is in actuality that of authenticity, think the loud and proud liberalism of Bernie bros, Libertarians, neo-liberal centrists, and so on. All Jerry’s are chasing a liberal form of authenticity. They argue for an escape from the mediocre by abiding to notions of authenticity (conformity by “doing what one has to do”) by acting in the “real world”. For Jerrys’, they argue in content that the world has grown itself a straitjacket by straying from authenticity. Thus, the Jerry style political punditry has become enslaved by its opposition to notions of inauthenticity.
The Whatley “radical revolutionaries” of inauthenticity are trapped in their narcissistically satisfying approach to identity, as they advocate a smoothly delivered message for qualitative change(s) without a struggle of the opposites; thus, what they really oppose is change and they advocate for more of the same. Thus, a transformation of inauthenticity (capitalism?) into authenticity (socialism?) arrives only via a bypassing of class struggle is really a rejection of authenticity and a desire for authenticity to continue.
In Left Twitter there is a collapsing distinction between inauthentic and authentic identities’ drive Left Twitter; be the identity “anarchist”, “socialist”, “progressive”, and so on. Therefore, Left Twitter sells this parallax to their listeners, they sell the audience on their right to determine the identity of class struggle; instead of direct struggle one is shown the potential for multiple preferable idealist “coming outs”.
How does the Real struggle play out in Left Twitter? Is there class struggle involved? Since there are authentic and inauthentic Left Twitter actors (Breadtube & “leftist” podcasts) are engaged in a productive kayfabe rivalry (whether it is over Marxist, Liberal, Socialists, and so on). Both authentic and inauthentic discourses (of kayfabe) oscillate around a failed center, a one manifesting as two poles of parallax between: “as a Marxist” and “as a symbolic Marxist”. An ideology of Left Twitter is one that promotes a productive feedback loop of Class dysphoria.
In Left Twitter there is an ongoing productive parallax of class dysphoria - the self-serving double bind problem of idealistic identities. A self-masturbatory play of authentic or inauthentic identities emerges here out of shifting processes of chaotic and creative transformational flux; any identity but that of material “Revolutionary”. A play of identity that’s good for business, a perfect commentary commodity yada yada.
The contradiction of this Yada Yada episode is one that is explicitly more present and intense now within Left Twitter (more than anywhere else). The contradiction between (inauthentic and authentic) positions persists as a parallax of contrasting negativity, a negativity determining each other.
By placing an emphasis on a different subject and object distinction, the subject and object of Left Twitter are inherently mediated by an “epistemological” swing; one that is determined in the subject's gaze (pov); it is a swing that always reflects an ontological swing in the object itself. Thus, for Left Twitter the subject's gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself, a fold (blind spot) where the object is more than the object itself (the return of the gaze).
Left Twitter is sustained by links between subject(s) (authentic and inauthentic) and object(s) (authentic or inauthentic) that co-exist in asymmetrical (fantasy) exchanges between a subject and object (or, rather I and non-I’s). Left Twitter misses that what actually matters is not the location of the Self in objective reality, the impossible-real of “what I am objectively,” but how I am a symmetrically located in my own fantasy, how my own fantasy sustains my being as subject. Thus, take away the authentic (or inauthentic) fantasy, and the subject whose fantasy it is itself disintegrates.
This pursuit for authentic prescriptions happens to align conveniently with the increased socialisation of upwardly mobile people. It allows one to retreat to inside ideals over concrete political action. These subjects argue thinking and creativity are tempered, channeled and discovered only via notions of societal authenticity. In the conveniently liberal mode of authenticity there is no authentic self-preceding authentic spirit’s “self-alienation”: alienation generates the “Self” from which authentic spirit is alienated and returned to. X gains form only through failures while repeatedly repeating to comprehend it.
The fetishism of authenticity is a history accompanied by an idealism undermining itself through self-serving, and endless claims of authenticity entices a horde of inauthentic duplicates and simulacra, with the subject preserved only as a negation. These liberal authenticity subjects like to appear in content as the avant-garde and enlightened; a posturing that they are the one must throw off these straitjackets of inauthentic conformity. Therefore, where do the notions of authenticity come from – the state, the church, law?
In most cases this liberal Jerry authenticity comes from some middle-class academics, or as by-product of academia, mostly found in the professional managerial class; see, the right way of writing, arguing, and of thinking – most importantly. Authentic Spirit’s self-alienation overlaps with its alienation from its Other, a “return-to-itself” from (immersion into natural Otherness), returning-to-itself fashions the very range to which it returns.
These authenticity advocates act like academics for non-academia; they are self-serving and self-perpetuating; they reproduce what they have been taught and heard, all to maintain the status quo of the acceptable. Thus, authentic Spirit’s negativity is not subsumed under an encircling positivity, relative; but a “simple negation” attached to the presupposed positivity it negated (Otherness from which it alienates itself), and the “negation of negation” is the full acceptance of the void of Authentic Spirit’s self-relating which retroactively posits all its presuppositions.
While in contrast, Whatleys’ subjects of inauthenticity assume that beyond the obstacles there is a more inauthentic being than that of authenticity. Because the range of possibilities and alternatives that can be thought are being narrowed down and delimited to a small domain of acceptability by academic notions of correctness. A framing of inconformity is regimented by notions of correctness. Thus, Whatley’s Liberal inauthenticity claims one is enslaved by a tyranny of traditional presuppositions, in contrast to what is correct.
As a result, what gives authority the right to prescribe what is correct and incorrect? Why respect their notions of what is authentic since they are determined by their notions of the inauthentic? For instance, the opposition to liberal authenticity is to try and claim back your humanness and liberty by an aesthetic of inauthenticity (the true authenticity). As with an old Soviet Radio Yerevan joke that captures this precisely; “Question: Is there anti-Semitism in the USSR? Answer: We must answer in the positive: No!”.
Subjects of liberal inauthenticity argue one must embrace independent thought and rebel against notions of authenticity. There is a real struggle grounding one’s rebellion. An inauthentic grounded in negating the authentic. The Whatley types believe one must push the limits and disregard the pre-conceptions. One must look outside of societies taken for granted systems of authenticity to reach potentialities. One must let one’s thinking run free, without being castrated by notions of authenticity. Inauthenticity shatters the contraceptive of correctness by a vigorous intercourse between incorrectness creativity and correct thinking.
Consequently, Left Twitter collectively decides (in its inauthentic or authentic mode) to leave behind the notion of "traversing the fantasy". It leaves behind a possibility for a concluding moment that makes Left Twitter redundant. Instead, this redundant conclusion is replaced by the opposite move of accepting the definitive non-analyzable obstacle, an obstacle that allows the traversing of the fantasy (whether authentic or inauthentic) to repeat, a repetition through failure allowing ever elusive: Yada Yada. If the symptom is a formation of the unconscious to be dissolved through interpretation, the Yada Yada is the struggle as an object of "inseparable residue”.
What frames Left Twitter is the excess it sees as an exception, an exception that blurs the difference, a pure difference existing as a dyke externality (“Stalinist”, “Nazbol”, “Authoritarian”, and so on). A pure difference persisting only as a particular element of contradiction aside from the differentiated terms of authenticity and inauthenticity.
Consequently, the struggle addressing this contradiction (excess) in all its violence is the true struggle. Thus, Left Twitter’s mistake is not in that one must take sides in order to have access to the truth. Their mistake is that Truth (authentic or inauthentic) is not “universal” in the traditional sense of applying equally in every situation from one side; each situation has its own truth.
Even a “universal” as an unattainable ideal, like authenticity, inauthenticity, fairness or democracy, must always be found in a struggle to approximate the ideal to one’s particular circumstances (an incorporating of the third contradictory exception of rabble). A third element outside the authentic and inauthentic of Left Twitter is one that cannot be re-incorporated without class struggle.
The radical asymmetry of authentic struggle, manifests in class struggle, where the proletariat has an aim that is not simply to negate (however) its enemy (the capitalists) but to negate (abolish) itself as a class identity. Class struggle is precisely the struggle for hegemony, i.e., for the appropriation of these third elements. Class struggle should be “absolutized”: as it is never the direct conflict of the two classes of authentic or inauthentic, but the very excess which displaces such pure hostility.
The Yada Yada of Left Twitter resists interpretation and interpretive dissolution over class struggle. The goal of Left Twitter becomes analysis instead of an "identification with the symptom” instead of an act of “traversing the fantasy”. This magic analysis obfuscates and diverts from any real class struggle; instead the goal becomes a perpetual consuming subject of identity games. Thus, a consumer is cultivated to wield and live with either the authentic or inauthentic identity of “it” - an absolute coincidence with itself, a coincidence of the pure antagonistic difference. Consequently, for Left Twitter there is no dissolving of this unique Yada Yada, and there is no “moment for concluding” in Yada Yada, there remains simply non-identity games.
Do you think the authentic and inauthentic swing of Left Twitter comes from the mass number of contributors who idetify as Left Twitter that may not fully understand the ideologies they are signing too?