Everything is Artifice
Years ago, when I first started my never-to-be-finished PhD, I had one simple belief: everything is artifice. I suppose it’s a natural enough conclusion to come to when you’re twenty-two years old and reading Lyotard’s theories on the post-modern condition during the bulk of your waking hours, and it certainly seemed to explain an awful lot about the things I didn’t quite understand about the world. That any attempt at authenticity was but a carefully constructed stratagem to create the illusion of authenticity made sense to me. After all, I lived on the Gold Coast. Trying to deal with the concept of authenticity on the Gold Coast is fucking confusing, since the whole damn city embraces artifice as its default state. You make sense of it as best you can, or you get the get the hell out. These days I’m older and dumber and I have about thirteen years of additional experience to process, and I’m still not entirely sure that my
