One of my friends has a thesis I find very fascinating. Essentially, everything is pretension. To pretend that there is a pre-pretentious state, a kind of not-trying authenticity, is ridiculous.
Now, he'll have his own way of fleshing this idea out. I think that it accords with the state of the world so well, that you can attack from numerous different angles. You could quite easily go from a kind of determinist view. On this one, everything that you are is a product of your environment. All the little mannerisms and ways that you have are products of the environment, and you can no more authentically choose this or that thing than steam from a steam train can push it forwards. All your little ways about you are consequences of general impersonal causes, and to posit some kind of 'real agent' behind the decision to wear velvet jackets or hate posh people (keeping it real) or whatever is to make a profound mistake.
That's certainly a valid way of looking at this, I think. But there are other ways, too. And I think that explaining away the notion of authenticity is rather easier said than done.
Here's another way, incorporating and expanding on the first. If you point at things which are 'not pretentious', they're generally seen as unforced, or natural. There seems to be something of the idea that you're not really trying to generate a particular impression on others. A good example of this is a botanist I knew at university. He was quite an old man and he'd been studying botany for decades. He was so incredibly helpful and friendly towards people, so willing to give his time, and so completely lacked the sense of 'I'm way smarter than you' that people who are way smarter than you often ooze, that he was consistently a joy to listen to and be with. Nobody was so universally popular amongst people on my course.
How can you trade out the idea that 'everyything is pretension' when you're faced with people like him? Well, I think it can be reduced to mannerisms in some ways - looking at him, he seemed a surviving descendent of years of correctly-attired naturalists, with his sturdy wooden cane flatcap and brown boots and shoulder-bag. Surely this clothing, like the exaggerated mannerisms of Sartre's waiter, mark him out as someone who thinks 'I am a botanist'?
Well, I'm not sure. The fact that he plausibly has this line of descent, this pedigree - as just one in a long, long line of naturalists which in itself might be originally motivated by some 'pure' curiosity - calls into question the idea that it's a pretension. If something is adopted because of its practicality, it hardly seems right to call it a pretension. A mannerism, yes, but even then, one which has its roots in utility. Perhaps, if the botanist adopted these mannerisms and by doing so particularly intended others to think such and such a thing , it might well be called pretentious. He could say 'identifying ferns at this stage in their development is tricky and takes practice' in either a descriptive way, or in order to distance himself from the listener ('I can do this and you can't') and it's in this distinction that pretension walks in.
And perhaps this sheds some light onto what a pretension really is - it's something that is done or performed with a degree of self-consciousness. And I think we can sniff that out very well. Indeed, I find that people who have gone to rough schools can spot this kind of self-consciousness miles away, in people ostensibly 'more educated' than themselves.
But even then, pretension carries negative connotations. And I think it's this which the notion of 'everything is pretension' helps to explode. Because of course, it's the other guy who is pretentious, and I think there are a lot of ways of trying to avoid appearing pretentious which are themselves a species of pretension. By saying straight up 'no, I don't believe you've ascended into some post-interpersonal nirvana where you're not motivated by a desire to make an impression on others; I in fact believe you have a similar level of awareness of yourself and how you appear, and I believe you cultivate that' you do two things.
The first is, you undermine people who believe that by adopting a certain set of mannerisms or clothes or habits or whatever, they've actually managed to become better than others. Think of the anime fan who adopts a bunch of Japanese words into their vocabulary and sneers at people who confuse anime with manga or whatever. Or the image of the 'Tory boy' who wears smart jackets and punctuates his sentences with 'old boy' and 'chap' and so on. On the 'everything is pretension' view, you're no better than all the other self-conscious people out there, and by picking one set over another you haven't actually done anything particularly special. By it's almost Cartesian insistence on the self-consciousness of everyone, I feel this particular line of thinking is on strong ground.
The other way it undermines things is by exploding the idea of the post-pretentious person. The fish-in-a-barrel one is the person who says 'I don't care what other people think'. This is insane. If you didn't care what other people think, you'd be unable to function because you'd never be able to figure out what other people were doing or why they were doing it. You need to have an idea of what other people are thinking and feeling in order to explain their behaviour, and much of this rests on subconscious judgements in any case.
The more sophisticated kind is a kind of intellectual pretension, one I guess the circles I've mixed with makes me more familiar with. Such people tend to have a battery in their arsenal, from 'knowing silences' whenever you say something (instead of actually contesting your arguments), to faintly amused looks, through to a continual shunning of the company of others. Now, if such people aren't aware that this creates an impression of knowing condescension, then I'm a Dutchman. Saying 'everything is a pretension' once again dissolves this attempt to get above or beyond the cut and thrust of everyday interaction, and puts it on a level playing field with any other form of self-conscious impression creating.
Yet, the existence of people who you'd really struggle to call pretentious, like the botanist I named, makes it hard to really reduce everyone to the same level. So what marks out 'bad' pretension?
Well, I think that authenticity probably reduces to acting in an instinctual way, in whatever way really 'feels right' at the time. I might write on that some other time because obviously that needs fleshing out. But taking that as a given, some people really do feel at home with whatever little subgroup they've created. Adopting certain pretensions, and being able to shore up your identity by saying 'I am a botanist/ Tory/ super clever person/ extremely true authentic poor person' or whatever, is one thing. Doing it purely so you can be validated by others, is another. And I think the extent to which an action becomes motivated by the desire to make others like or accept or favourably judge you, is the extent to which it is pretentious.
I was told of a woman who, surrounded by people whom she wanted to impress as 'clever', suddenly started talking about time for no reason. That, I think, is an example of pretentiousness per se. If something does not follow naturally, it is pretentious in a bad way - but disentangling this, even roughly, is very difficult. The main mistake, to be avoided, is to think that any of us can get to the point where our actions just flow naturally from us, without any wish to make an impression on others - or for that desire to make an impression to play no part in our actions. Such an attitude is impossible. To hold that you are a post-pretentious person is, then, self-contradictory.
