Wednesday Section

"There comes into being, then, a situation in which we can say that if individual experience is authentic, then it cannot be true; and that if a scientific or cognitive model of the same content is true, then it escapes individual experience." (349)

- Fredric Jameson

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this one. How can an experience's authenticity or truth be based on its individuality? To help clear things up, I looked up some definitions:

true: consistent with fact or reality; not false

authentic: conforming to fact and therefore worthy of belief

Based on these definitions, the passage can be understood to mean that if an individual (personal?) experience is believable, then it must be fake. And if the respective scientific model is true, then it couldn't be experienced by just one person.

The second part makes some sense to me. If something is a scientific fact, then it has to be reproducible. But the first part still eludes me. How can believability lead to fakeness without fail? I found a lot of the rest of the paper to be confusing too, and I'm pretty sure there is some key piece that I'm missing, so maybe this passage will clear up when I better understand the paper as a whole.