On the Malign/ed Art of Faking It (Part III) - A Guest Post by Thomas Tritchler

Cover of the 2010 Penguin edition of 
Wilde's 1891 essay 'The Decay of Lying'

The Romantics understood that all poetic mendacity begins in childhood, which is why children should be extravagantly rewarded for their relentless pleasure in confabulations of all kinds; from invisible friends to self-incriminating fibs. 

But adult pretension matters too, for, as Dan Fox has succinctly argued in a valuable piece for 'Frieze Magazine', pretension is a form of pretending - and pretending can be extremely productive.

Thus, in contrast to the cynic's inability to see beyond affectation, charlatanism, and self-aggrandizement in such matters, the idealist perceives an innocent, adventurous and sometimes tragicomic excess of ambition over attainment - something Fox suggestively correlates to Susan Sontag's depiction of camp as a 'sensibility of failed seriousness'. 

The melted wings of Icarus depict the tragic potentiality of the soul's imaginative flights, not a mythological excuse never to test one's creative limits. If we remember that the Greek word for actor was hypokrites, then it becomes apparent how the thirst for such performative slippages between who we are and would like to be, is woven into the West's cultural DNA.

What is needed - I am suggesting - is the pursuit of a strategic (if not satanic) reversal of the hypothetical value of our key terms. Like Brian Eno, we should turn the word 'pretentious' into a compliment and move beyond the mistaken assumption that there are authentic individuals and others who simply pretend to be something they're not. As a matter of fact, to fake it, is probably the most creative - and important - thing we might do. For it's the way in which we learn about art and experiment with becoming-other     

Further, if the accusation of pretentiousness essentially rests on the idea of people getting above themselves, it is also not hard to follow Fox into regarding the politics of pretence as implying a kind of informal class surveillance. He is right, I think, to highlight the corrosive snobbery embedded in both historical and contemporary England, with its craven obsessions with rank, accent, and the cynical coalition between sex and social exploitation. 

At the same time, even in toxically class-conscious Britain, we should not make the mistake of confining the codices of class to a socio-economic integer rather than an ontological domain. From whatever walks of life, there is a self-selecting unnatural order of romantics, outlaws, aliens and poseurs - let us call them the constituency of the counterfeit - who refuse the rat-race of reality, whose experimental aesthetics configure the vectors of artistic escape and who understand, in a much over-used phrase, that all style is risk. 

In conclusion, we might do well to remember Wilde's words in 'The Decay of Lying', spoken by the decadent aesthete, Vivian, sworn enemy of the old, the conventional, and the well-informed: 

"Many a young man starts life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful." 

Thomas Tritchler is a poet and critical theorist based in Calw, Germany. He has written and researched extensively on a wide range of authors, including Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Ted Hughes and Jean Baudrillard, and on topics including Romanticism, the Holocaust, and the politics of evil. He has recently worked with the Berlin-based art cooperative Testklang.   

Thomas Tritchler appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for his kind submission of a lengthy text written especially for this blog, edited into three separate posts for the sake of convenience.