Here at Steam Calliope Scherzos, I’ve expressed some interest in the notion of authenticity and how we achieve it in the digital age, though only indirectly. The most definitive statement I’ve made on authenticity can be found not on this blog at all (yet — I’ll probably repost it later), but instead here. And in that discussion, I make the claim that how we perceive authenticity is always guided by what we impose upon our perceptions of what’s in the outside world. We look for certain shapes to be filled, or ideas to be realized, or schemata to be met. In other words, we look at the world around us using the cliché, because the cliché is a probe. Back in the age of print, when books were the dominant means through which educated men conveyed and absorbed new information, such men developed an appreciation for the boundless depths of the individual, and they understood authenticity more or less along those lines. But the digital age has compelled us to see authenticity not as an expression of individuality but rather the appearance of being believable relative to a particular model of character. That model is the cliché, and if it seems universal enough, then we can call it an archetype. When we decide if someone is authentic or not, it’s based on the degree to which to he conforms to the identifiable character he puts forth, and his self-presentation on the internet, social media, and so on plays a crucial role in all this.
But since nothing is ever really new, I should have known my understanding of how we behave when negotiating between different media self-presentations would have been anticipated long ago. I recently happened upon the concept of kaloprosopia, or the art of the beautiful personality, an invention of a rather bizarre 19th century French occultist by the name of Joséphin Péladan. Since I have yet to read anything directly by him, this discussion will have to be a bit sketchy and tentative.1
Péladan has not been taken terribly seriously as an intellectual, and his supporters are aware of it. In one sympathetic academic paper about him, the author begins,
History has not been kind to Joséphin Péladan. An enormously prolific author with a vision for societal reform through art, he is usually consigned to a footnote or a few lines in scholarly overviews of Rosicrucianism or the French occult revival. Portrayed as an eccentric oddity, his defining characteristic is that of contradiction and paradox. […] The majority of scholarly references and studies leave an impression of Péladan as an attention-seeking, arrogant and eccentric braggart, whose significance in the worlds of literature, art, or esotericism was negligible.
Nonetheless, he coined a cool-sounding word that seems relevant to our interests here, so as far as I’m concerned, he’s alright with me. Before we get to kaloprosopia, a few words on Péladan and his broader historical context.
Péladan was a part of the French symbolist movement, itself an offshoot from romanticism with some similarities to the decadents. One significant aspect of the symbolists was their interest in theatrical self-presentation. Symbolist theater sought to depersonalize the actor, rendering him a pure symbol, stripped of all differentiating features and nuances. The actors would therefore not act with wild gesticulations as with romantic theatrical productions or melodramas, but with as little emotion as possible. This approach created an interesting effect: the culture of fin-de-siècle France was such where everyone was trying to make himself as much of a character as possible, so this form of theater effectively turned the theatergoers into the actors while the actors on stage were all in the business of transcending their own individual personalities. The symbolists, simply put, did not consider acting an art form but rather something to resist.
I ought to have suspected that the culture of the fin-de-siècle in general would carry a wealth of useful ideas to help us understand the present age for two reasons: the first is that during that time, the presentation of the self became a topic of supreme importance for aesthetic considerations. Over in England, the dandy phenomenon was widespread, and it became a target of various appraisals and criticisms. Thomas Carlyle’s debut novel Sartor Resartus, a sustained meditation on clothes, reserves quite a bit of space for attacking the dandies. And indeed, the same obsession with clothing was going on in France as well as England, with poets like Baudelaire. But the second reason is that various ideas about the theater and its potential began to blossom, of which the symbolists are but one example. Since we now inhabit a media environment that is essentially a digital, non-tactile approximation of three-dimensional acoustic space, it seems that old and discarded ideas about the theater have become potentially relevant once more, since the theater occurs in acoustic space, and you can’t really touch anything when you watch a play. Regarding Joséphin Péladan in particular, it is essential to understand kaloprosopia as occurring within the context of the symbolist movement and broader considerations of the theater.
Now, as the quotation above suggests, Péladan was a Rosicrucian, i.e. a member of an order that may have started as a practical joke. For him, kaloprosopia was one method through which an individual could become initiated into a higher order of divinity. Unlike various other occultists of the time, Péladan held the artist in high regard. To him, the artist could use his art to propel himself upward into the higher mysteries. Some of his interests were a consequence of this position. For instance, while occultists of his time showed a strong interest in ancient Egypt, and Péladan was no exception, he also showed a preference and fascination for the art and myth of the ancient Chaldeans. The reason being, the Chaldeans (in his view) weren’t merely attempting to depict the deities mimetically but instead were trying to give form to their own ideals, which then could live on in the cultural imagination as mythemes, thus pushing civilization in the direction of greater human creativity. In fact, he took his admiration for the Chaldeans so far that he believed himself to be the descendant of the ancient Babylonian king Merodach Baladan, mostly due to the similarity of their last names.
Péladan’s emphasis on the importance and self-divinizing potential of human creativity was no doubt informed at least partially by his post-Miltonic Romantic Luciferianism, something shared by various romantics and decadents of the 19th century. In his interpretation of the Bible, Lucifer and the angels actually created the world, not God. Thus, the sort of artistry he championed can be understood as having a Luciferic bent.
He also was a strong believer in the theory proposed by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium that the first humans were androgynous mixtures of both male and female. Péladan, like other occultists of his time (such as Fabre d’Olivet, who had a marked influence on him), read this myth into the book of Genesis and believed that Adam and Eve were originally a perfect androgyne before their fall from grace, which then split them up into two distinct people with different sexes. For this reason, Péladan would address men and women very differently in his various writings. His tone towards women, whom he perceived as having been corrupted by society, has been enough to alienate a whole bunch of essentially egalitarian New Agers. For instance, in his book Comment on Devient Fée (1892), one of several self-help books he wrote to assist people in auto-initiation, he tells the women, “If a true princess still existed in the world, which is to say, a woman who was simultaneously powerful as the sun and intelligent before God, I would have given her this book instead of publishing it. Alas! The intelligent ones are not princesses, and the princesses are no longer intelligent.” This isn’t the kind of thing that your typical follower of Ken Wilber (or whoever) would want to hear nowadays.
Finally, before we properly turn to kalopropsopia, it should come as no surprise that Max Nordau in his book Degeneration — a scathing indictment of late-19th century cultural degeneracy — would have some choice words for Péladan. Here is an amusing excerpt from Nordau, worth reading in full:
The mental life of Péladan permits us to follow, in an extremely well-marked instance, the ways of mystic thought. He is wholly dominated by the association of ideas. A fortuitous assonance awakens in him a train of thought which urges him irresistibly to proclaim himself an Assyrian king and Magus, without his attention being in a condition to make him realize the fact that a man can be called Péladan without being, therefore, necessarily descended from a Biblical Baladan. The meaningless flow of words of the mediæval scholastics misleads him, because he is continually thinking by way of analogy, that is to say, because he follows exclusively the play of the association of ideas provoked by the most secondary and superficial resemblances. He receives every artistic suggestion with the greatest ease. If he hears Wagner’s operas, he believes himself to be a Wagnerian character; if he reads of the Knights Templars and Rosicrucians, he becomes the Grand-Master of the Temple, and of all other secret orders. He has the peculiar sexual emotionalism of the ‘higher degenerates,’ and this endows him with a peculiar fabulous shape, which, at once chaste and lascivious, embodies, in curiously demonstrative manner, the secret conflicts which take place in his consciousness between unhealthily intensified instincts, and the judgment which recognises their dangerous character.
Does Péladan believe in the reality of his delusions? In other words, does he take himself seriously? The answer to this question is not so simple as many perhaps think. The two beings which exist in every human mind are, in a nature such as Péladan’s, a prey to a strange conflict. His unconscious nature is quite transfused with the role of a Sar, a Magus, a Knight of the Holy Grail, Grand-Master of the Order, etc., which he has invented. The conscious factor in him knows that it is all nonsense, but it finds artistic pleasure in it, and permits the unconscious life to do as it pleases. It is thus that little girls behave who play with dolls, caressing or punishing them, and treating them as if they were living beings, all the time well aware that in reality they have before them only an object in leather and porcelain.
Nordau, it should be acknowledged, was a real no-fun-nik. He didn’t even like Richard Wagner!
Having gotten this background information out of the way, we may finally turn to the question: what was kaloprosopia exactly, beyond just crafting a “beautiful personality”? Péladan explains it himself in L'Art Idealist et Mystic (1894):
The first of the arts of personality is Kaloprosopia, that is to say, the embellishment of human appearance, or, more precisely, the articulation of character through common gestures. […]
Whoever fully realizes the externalization of an idea will fully realize its internal aspect as well, as long as he is consistent; similarly, the realization of the internal will lead to a truthful exterior. […]
The law of Kaloprosopia is to realize the exteriorization of the character one claims for oneself. […]
Among the impressions created by a work of art there are those that can only be given by the living person. […]
The living person has an aesthetic advantage over a statue in the infinite flow of his gestures. […]
One must aspire to one's demeanor, one must search it out, and hold on to it.'
He also hems close to the theater as a useful way of understanding what kaloprosopia is. Elsewhere, he says,
If the people of the world knew themselves, they would no longer dare to pretend to celebrate sacerdotal rites, but would study so as to reproduce the plastic commandments of the work of art upon themselves. The man of leisure should consider himself the actor of his own personality.
As I understand it, kaloprosopia was achieved through a process whereby the initiate would perceive a simplified, archetypal sort of essence within himself, and then he would strive to make his outer self-presentation conform to the essence that he has recognized and inwardly adopted. In kaloprosopia, one has to negotiate between finding aspects of oneself that are already there, and then inwardly transforming oneself to meet them, as if halfway. Then, if done correctly, one’s appearance, behavior, mannerisms, etc. follow accordingly. It is essentially the art of trying to become a living symbol but with all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of the individual remaining intact, only now wholly directed toward that symbol’s realized expression.
If that’s correct, this is remarkably similar to what I’ve recognized as how people achieve authenticity in our digital world, which Marshall McLuhan of course called The Global Theater in his later years. In the process I’ve delineated, someone recognizes a cliché or stereotype to which he can aspire, then he conforms to it and does his best to balance all of his various layers of self-representation (in real life, on social media, etc.) accordingly. Online, he can be flamboyant, but the flamboyance must achieve a certain verisimilitude, so that people can look at it and say, “Yes, this is who this person truly is deep down inside.” And importantly, it can’t just be about being a unique individual — no, not at all. Note how Péladan emphasizes “common gestures,” a feature that is absolutely crucial to understanding how personality is formed today above all other times.
What Péladan achieved historically was to take the romantic fascination with personality-crafting and turn it into a full-blown art form and/or spiritual initiation process. I’ve discussed the likelihood that this way of thinking will only increase as art becomes more automated, particularly with AI doing more and more things, so it’s possible that Péladan’s significance will also only become greater with time. And as the commenter Frantisek Deak (whom I cite in the footnote) notes, his concept can also be understood as a sort of synthesis between the symbolist rejection of “acting” and the 19th century love of flamboyance as a means of cultivating the inner self. It can thus be easy to recognize traces of kaloprosopia in the various overblown personalities we see in Hollywood and the entertainment industry. One writer thus discusses David Bowie and Marlene Dietrich as exemplifying the concept. But today, kaloprosopia appears to be a sort of game that more people can play than ever, and certainly one that many will dip their toes into, though few will take it to its full potential as Péladan prescribed.
I want to end with a somewhat tentative remark, since I haven’t quite fully thought it through. Péladan was primarily a writer, and he wrote many novels with intertwining and interconnected symbols. The way he presents kaloprosopia appears in part to be a literary exercise, one in which the text fuses with the body. I’ll give an example that we wouldn’t normally think of as terribly literary: the aspiring rapper produces lyrics about dealing drugs (as is the style of our time), then decides to toughen himself inwardly and even deal actual drugs. Even in this situation, which resides halfway between the worlds of literacy and orality, the ideal comes first, it becomes verbally articulated and objectified, and then comes the execution. In such an instance, the text acts as a sort of auto-suggestion. Sissy hypno, another verbal phenomenon that plays with stereotypes and appears to yield real shifts in personality, may be another form of this auto-suggestion.
And this use of text as an agent of supernatural internal change is not new, either. In early medieval English healing texts (see Bald’s Leechbook), there are quite a few charms in which the infirm writes something down and either eats it (by writing it into food) or burns it. According to this way of thinking, the written text, with its abstract words, essentially carries the power to transform the physical object, either the food or the sick person’s body, and the moment of their destruction is when this somatic effect supposedly occurs. There are also modern versions of this practice, like sigil magic, which the comic writer Grant Morrison famously discussed at a conference once (it involves making an ideogram out of some written desire or goal, and then jerking off to it so that the words can carry their impact at a moment of peak psychological intensity). So perhaps kaloprosopia can be understood as a more thorough, extended version of this kind of magic, since the identification of oneself with an archetype appears to be a process made out of much cogitation, internal rhetoric, and auto-suggestion. Though admittedly, as Max Nordau seems to imply, some personalities are perhaps more naturally inclined to this kind of thing than others.
Next week I’ll talk more about theories regarding the theater.
Beyond the hyperlinked sources, I’ve relied on two additional secondary articles. One is “Kaloprosopia: The Art of Personality - The Theatricalization of Discourse in Avant-Garde Theater” by Frantisek Deak (1991). The other is “How to Become a Mage (or Fairy): Joséphin Péladan’s Initiation for the Masses” by Sasha Chaitow (2012).