Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
changes what was originally there (an idealised ‘raw’ culture, centuries-old ceremonies,
much of which, on examination, is but ‘staged authenticity’: MacCannell,
1976). Further, tourism is big business and it acts accordingly: aeroplanes must
be filled, hotel rooms booked (and of a standard to meet the expectations of visitors
from affluent societies, hence showers, clean bed linen and air conditioning
where appropriate) and people given a good time. All this requires arrangements,
artifice, inauthenticity (Boorstin, 1962, pp. 100–22).
Inauthenticity is not just the province of overseas nations such as Italy and
France which have a distinct interest in perpetuating tourist imagery. It is also a
pervasive feature of Britain. Indeed, it can be argued that Britain generates an
array of museum sites, architecture and amusements not merely to sustain
a massive tourist industry, but also to express its ‘real history’ (Hewison, 1987).
The ‘heritage industry’ is centrally involved in this creation and development of
Britain’s past, dedicated to the task of constructing history, rebuilding and refurbishing
it in the name of evoking it ‘as it really was’. Consider here examples
such as the Beamish Industrial Museum in County Durham, the Jorvik Centre in
York, Ironbridge and the Oxford Story. How ironic, assert the postmodernists,
that so many of these tourist attractions have been arranged with a claim to make
visible life ‘as it really was’ (right down to smells from bygone days), given that
their construction unavoidably undermines claims to authenticity.
It needs to be stressed, too, that these are not in some way more inauthentic
than other, perhaps older, heritage centres such as stately homes. The Tower of
London, the Imperial War Museum and Stonehenge are quite as inauthentic
because we can never reclaim an authentic past. This is not just that these require
and offer so much of the contemporary as to subvert authenticity (modern
methods of preservation, motor transport, electricity, professional guides and so
on), but also because all attempts to represent history are interpretations – hence
constructions – of the past and are thereby inauthentic. Consider, for example,
the disputes which characterise the discipline of history. Is it to be an all-male
account or will it include women’s experiences (herstory)? Is it to be an imperial
history of wars and conquest? Is it Anglocentric or European in outlook, covering
a short period or concerned with the longue durée? Is it to be social or political
in emphasis, a history of kings and queens or one of the common people? Bluntly,
the very variety of histories defies the ambition of the modernist scholar to relate
a ‘true’ history, something that is subversive of the aspirations of a very great
deal of the Heritage enterprise.
The postmodern era thus rejects all claims for the ‘real’: nothing can be ‘true’
and ‘authentic’ since everything is a fabrication. There is no ‘real England’, no
‘real history’, no ‘real tradition’. Authenticity is nothing more than an (inauthentic)
construction, an artifice. This being so, it follows that the recurrent and urgent
question delivered by modernists – ‘what does this mean?’ – is pointless. Behind
every such question is an implicit idea that true meaning can be perceived: that,
for instance, we may discover what the Bible really means, what architects mean
when they design a building in a particular manner, what it really meant to live
during the Napoleonic Wars, what that girl means to suggest when she wears
that sort of frock.
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