Abstract
Two intriguing phenomena pervade the creation and experience of the modern environment.1 On the one hand, there is a growing preponderance of places, buildings and things that are commonly called fake or inauthentic — for example, plastic flowers, false shutters, staged touristic environments, pseudo-vernacular buildings, and mock woodwork. On the other hand, there is a strong cultural trend involving a search for an authenticity which seems to be missing in these examples, a desire to have the “real” thing and to deride any synthesized substitute. It is not easy to say why such themes are so current, yet I take it as a social fact that a heartfelt quest for authenticity proceeds.2 To accuse someone, their possessions or home of being inauthentic implies a strong moral judgement and arouses righteous indignation. The purpose of this essay is to explore this dual phenomenon of the production of fakes and their systematic elimination.
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Notes
The author would like to thank Sandra Gifford, David Seamon, Robert Mugerauer, Lars Lerup, Johanna Drucker, and Dean MacCannell for commentary on various drafts of this essay.
Two provocative critiques of the authenticity of places to which this paper owes a good deal are Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976); and Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class ( New York: Schocken, 1976 ).
My primary source is Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). Secondary sources include George Steiner, Martin Heidegger, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978); Vincent Vycinas, Earth and Gods: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961); and Karsten Harries, “Fundamental Ontology and the Search for Man’s Place,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, Michael Murray, ed., (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp.65–79. The problems of translating Heidegger are enormous and the terms Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit have been variously rendered as “ready-to- hand,” “handiness”, and at “handness,” in the former case; and “present-at-hand,” disposability,” and “on handness” in the latter case. To avoid confusion, I retain the original terms.
See, in particular, Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 97–102; Steiner, Martin Heidegger, pp. 89–90; and Vycinas, Earth and Gods, pp. 34–37.
Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 97.
Ibid., p. 98.
See Edward Relph, Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography (London: Croom Helm, 1981), chap. 10; and Harries, “Fundamental Ontology.”
Vycinas, Earth and Gods, p. 41.
Walter W. Skeat, A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language ( New York: Perigree, 1980 ).
Charles Jencks, Architecture 2000: Predictions and Methods ( London: Studio Vista, 1971 ), p. 117.
This relationship is evident in the predominant style of discourse conducted in the major architectural journals. Buildings are eváluated and reputations made and lost largely on the basis of published photographs, which reduce buildings and places to a Vorhandenheit relationship.
Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 100.
See Adrian Forty and Henry Moss, “A Housing Style for Troubled Consumers: The Success of the Pseudo-Vernacular,” Architectural Review 167 (1980): 72–78; and David Lowenthal, “Past Time, Present Place” “Landscape and Memory,” Geographical Review 65 (1975): 1–36.
From the Latin indu (within) and gen (to be born, to produce), Skeat, Concise Etymological Dictionary. Note also the connection with Heidegger’s notion of “autochthony;” see Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, J. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, trans. (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 47–51.
Relph, Place and Placelessness.
MacCannell, The Tourist, p. 8.
Ibid., p. 3.
See Marcel Griale, Conversations with Ogotemmeli ( London: Oxford University Press, 1965 ).
Tito Spini and Sandro Spini, Togu Na: The African Dogon “House of Men, House of Words” (New York: Rizzoli, 1977 ), p. 74.
Ibid., p. 76.
See James Duncan, “The Social Construction of Unreality: An Interactionist Approach of the Tourist’s Cognition of Environment,” in Humanistic Geography: Prospects and Problems, David Ley and Marwyn Samuels, eds. ( Chicago: Maaroufu Press, 1978 ), pp. 269–282.
See Donald Appleyard, “Introduction,” in The Conservation of European Cities, Donald Appleyard, ed. (Cambridge: M. l. T. Press, 1979), pp. 8–48; Forty and Moss, “A Housing Style for Troubled Consumers;” and Martin Krieger, “What’s Wrong with Plastic Trees?” Science 179 (1973): 446–455.
Spini and Spini, Togu Na, p. 104.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary, sixth ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976).
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© 1985 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Dovey, K. (1985). The quest for authenticity and the replication of environmental meaning. In: Seamon, D., Mugerauer, R. (eds) Dwelling, Place and Environment. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9251-7_3
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