East of Enlightenment: The Harper Review’s spring issue continues with another letter and the quarter’s first essay. Jack Wagner traces a thread from the Enlightenment to modernity, observing changes in social systems and our perceptions of them. Ultimately, asserting “there’s nothing left to conserve” might have a lot more to do with the people speaking than the objects of conservation. While Wagner’s piece examines society at large, Kavya Krisnamurthy takes a human focus. Through a court case and a Steinbeck novel Krisnamurthy examines why we should forgive.
Charlie Phelan, assistant editor
A timeless performance: Reading through Baudelaire’s essay The Painter of Modern Life in the context of Walter Benjamin’s modernity-centered Arcades Project convolutes, a particular topic stands out: the dandy, “A mysterious institution,” of great antiquity inextricably linked with modernity’s abortive dreams. The dandy is a man who pays excessive attention to his appearance in an assertion of individuality. He cuts a recognizable figure in 19th-century culture, often associated with the gallantly misanthropic figures of Oscar Wilde and Lord Byron. Baudelaire specifies an aspiration towards sublimity: “he should live and sleep in front of a mirror.” The emphasis on elegance creates a new aristocracy of taste requiring both affluence and a performative cult of the self. For the dandies, this meant a pride in a coldly unaffected melancholy, signaling a disdain of modernity despite arising out of its very products: fashion, orientalism, arcades, and the rise of new methods of intoxication. Performing sublimity requires—if not perpetual indulgence, at least experience of—altered states catalyzed through insomnia, absinthe, opium and the likes. Baudelaire’s personal choice was hashish.
Comparing dandyism to today’s performativity epidemic bears fruitful results: Western society has circled back to decadence and its refutations. The cigarette-smoking, Clairo-listening, messenger-bag-carrying aristocracy of taste translates a certain blasé attitude towards the future. Both set themselves apart in demonstrating what life could’ve been: a world without phones and quantitative trading, without the double irony of constructing a perceived self. They simply add another layer to make it meta-ironic. It is entirely atavistic.
Jacqueline Oury, contributing editor
Image: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Narcissus, oil on canvas, ca. 1660 (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome).