Chapter 6 Slippered Negligence: The Dandy

The meaning-factory that I (joylessly) am is hermetically sealed off, and so I am free—as soon as I can shed my conditioned fear of the consistency business—to attack any meaning that threatens to take control of me. To make cynical use of the language of the prisoners of language: the light only goes out when the skull slaps against the wall. But sleight-of-hand, however radical, still has its laws. The world of “anything goes” is pink noise, and as such is dependent on a recording apparatus. That is to say, random space has structure.¹

Like the nihilist, the dandy is a figure on the brink of vacancy. Dealt in as a dummy hand, this figure relates to its being as a bluff, a gambler indifferent to loss. If vacancy is presumed, value liquidated, the fundamental problem remains that of the brink. This is where the dandy wagers its being.² Embracing the throw of the dice, the accidental and the contingent, the fortuitous detail, mere filigree, some signifier occasioned by chance that makes the difference, the dandy lends the void a luxurious air, a crystalline refinement, an elegant ease, or, as William Hazlitt beautifully writes, “a slippered negligence.”³

If dandyism, as Baudelaire writes, “is the last spark of heroism amid decadence”⁴—and Joris-Karl Huysmans’s depiction of Jean des Esseintes in À Rebours (Against the Grain) takes this heroism to a truly ridiculous and decadent extreme⁵—the dandy marks the triumph of hyperbole. Polishing one’s boots with nothing but the froth of champagne, lighting up a banknote to help a rich financier look for some small change lost in the dark, dreaming like Fitzcaraldo of an opera house in the jungle, or having a favorite foot, the dandy treads the thinnest of lines between sense and nonsense.

Speaking of Beau Brummel as an ephemeral creature of gesture and a minimalist of wit, William Hazlitt writes:

All his bon-mots turn upon a single circumstance, the exaggerating of the merest trifles into matters of importance, or treating everything else with the utmost nonchalance and indifference, as if whatever pretended to pass beyond those limits was a bore, and disturbed the serene air of life. We have heard of

“A sound so fine.

That nothing lived ‘twixt it and silence’”

So we may say of Mr Brummell’s jests, that they are of a meaning so attenuated that “nothing lives ‘twixt them and nonsense’”: —they hover on the very brink of vacancy and are in their shadowy composition next of kin to nonentities. It is impossible for anyone to go beyond him without falling flat into insignificance and insipidity: he has touched the ne plus ultra that divides the dandy from the dunce. But what a fine eye to discriminate: what a sure hand to hit this last and thinnest of all intellectual partitions!⁶

Like the fetishist, condemned by the man of Enlightenment for caprice and whimsy, the dandy pins its subjectivity to a trifle. Relating to its manner of appearance and speech as both the only confirmation of its being and its consummate betrayal, the dandy attaches its identity to the disjunction (the brink) where that which lacks sense assumes the sense of its lack.

Not an entity but not a nonentity, the dandy’s subject comes undone from the particles that place it. If the dandy believes with Freud that style makes up the human (Le style, c’est l’histoire de l’homme), it is because the human is always on the verge of being nothing more than a mere heap of clothes.⁷ Placed then at the bind/unbind at which the subject appears as a thing identifiable, that is, as a person, the dandy is a detached observer of its self, its situation, and the social relations on which it depends. The dandy is inside out, an outsider on the inside, and it is in this sense that the dandy aspires “to be sublime without interruption; he must live and sleep in front of the mirror.”⁸

If the figure of Monsieur Teste is the end of dandyism, in the sense of being its most extreme possibility, as Oswald Wiener claims, it is because, identifying with nothing, counting for nothing, he comes to observe the void of his constitution. Teste grasps the subject as a game played between the I and the me, which is to say, a game played between oneself and the void of one’s constitution (a relation to the other). The other, like oneself, for Teste, i.e., for the dandy, cannot be posited as a person, for like oneself it must be grasped as a thing acted by another.

The game played with oneself.

The effect on others must never forget mechanics—quantities, intensities, potentials—and treat them not only as themselves, but as machines, and animals—whence an art.⁹

The strained lucidity of Teste’s self-relation makes his relation to others equally strained and awkward. His speech is not addressed to the other person, but to the Other in the other. Addressing his speech to nobody, each of his utterances drops like a stone: “To what he said, there was nothing to reply. He killed polite assent. Conversation was kept going in leaps that were no surprise to him.”¹⁰

Figures that make speech uneasy, whether in the manner of Teste or of Brummel, prove always in the end to be unwanted guests. Provocations that make us aware of our perilous proximity to the void awaken in us an anxiety that the structures upon which we depend for our very existence—signifying and social—are nothing stable. Such provocations are of course a nuisance and must be liquidated, got rid of one way or another. “The anxiety of dandyism,” Wiener writes, is provoked by “the threat of the cataclysm [more literally, flood] of the unconscious [bedrohung durch die flut der unbewussten].”¹¹ Figures like Beau Brummel or the Marquise de Merteuil had to be disappeared, exiled to the social margins, according to Wiener, since they exposed “a hidden mechanism”¹² that gives the lie to self-possession and, for that matter, all other naturalizing mechanisms that attempt to explain the fate of the human being—its identity, its social place, and self-worth—as anything other than aleatory. A figure at home in the uncanny (das Unheimlich), the dandy’s ease with its thingly character and loss of identity helps to equip those of us concerned with the prospect of being buried alive.

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In the essay “Eine Art Einzige” (A manner singular), Oswald Wiener takes his point of departure from Baudelaire’s interest in the dandy, framing his discussion through reference to Valéry’s Monsieur Teste. The dandy form, for Wiener, essentially unfolds between Baudelaire and Teste. What interests Wiener is “a singular characteristic [ein einziger zug]” of the dandy: “dandies are still metaphysicians.”¹³ This is not to say that the dandy is a philosopher or that he produces an articulated system. The dandy is certainly not without theoretical interests, or an interest in theory, but, as Wiener stresses, it is only ad hoc, proceeding by means of “maxims, propositions, aphorisms.”¹⁴ The dandy’s practice, however, does produce a spontaneous metaphysics that Wiener attempts to extract by attending to the dandy’s distinctive phronesis (practical intelligence).

What distinguishes the dandy has nothing to do with the sartorial, or at least this is a secondary phenomenon, “the vulgar phase of dandyism.”¹⁵ The focus on appearance for which the dandy has become an identifiable type (such calculability being precisely anathema to the dandy) misleads, or better, distracts from the true focus: the concern with the subject’s absence. The dandy is constituted as an observer of its own disappearance. A singular witness to what Verena von der Heyden-Rynsch (a feminine heteronym of Oswald Wiener), in the afterword to the collection Riten der Selbstauflösung (Rituals of self-dissolution), calls “the automatizing of groundlessness. Meaning slips away, the grid remains.”¹⁶ The dandy’s art concerns the place of the subject in the grid, the role it plays within a given structure. The dandy’s practice embeds an experimental form of cognition in which an engagement with the other (conceived broadly: other persons, society, language, etc.) occasions a complex play in which the place of its own subject is marked as absent (within/from the structure). By marking this place, the dandy separates itself from all content, i.e., from the belief in the person.¹⁷

The dandy constantly tests the sense in which it can be said to be human, conscious, intentional, etc. without presuming such determinations to be the case. Assuming the self to be artificial (kunstlich)—the self (person) as a matter of production¹⁸—the dandy investigates, through the reactions it provokes in its social context and in itself, the extent to which it is a thing (in the sense explored by John Carpenter’s The Thing: a being that has no content outside of its resemblance). Rather than opposing the self to “ordering mechanisms” (the rules) that structure its relation to its environment and to itself, the dandy assumes its subtraction from meaning and intention in an effort to break with the naivety of its own action: “from self-observation we know that our activity almost always short-circuits; that is, our models obviously touch upon only its surface without its relations to patterning, validity, or modification being subject to test. in this narrow sense, the artificial exists only in the vicinity of the creative moment, it is the creative.”¹⁹ The dandy is an artist only to the extent that it is artificial, i.e., its relations (self and social) are determinable through the structural mechanisms that lend formal determinacy to any given content. The outside of any given structure can only be sought within a given structure.

Opposed as much to Rousseau’s and Schiller’s conceptions of the natural as to the Marquis de Sade’s Satanic conception, the dandy identifies with the moments of short circuit within the structure of its behavior, the deviations, in other words, of the law from itself. Abandoning as wantonly utopian the belief in the feasibility of transgression, the dandy is closer to Melville’s Bartleby or Beckett’s figures of exhaustion. The dandy’s opposition to society, like its opposition to law, derives from an opposition to what such laws render possible and impossible, namely a belief (essentially utopian) in that which is outside of the law: nature. Torma is dandyesque when he writes: “The vanity and ridiculous pretentiousness of ornament (style, decoration, architecture …) confer upon it all its value. I care about ornament because everybody likes it, and that’s the way to pay THEM back in their own coin.”²⁰

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The dandy’s protest, for Wiener, is “not directed against a certain state or any other folklore, but against the state, language, consensus, processes, models, ‘rules governing thought,’ not against behavioral styles but against the forms of one’s way of thinking.”²¹ This is the way in which Wiener’s, but also Konrad Bayer’s, interest in the dandy converges with the concerns animating their own artistic experiments and that of the Vienna Group. The singularity of the dandy lies in having at once abolished the notion of interiority (an inner self that would disclose itself through reflection) without ceding the position of the subject to mechanical explanation (which would amount to nihilism: “of course the rejection of the subjective meaning is precisely what constitutes the nihilist”).²² There is a singularity of the subject, but it is not to be found in the so-called personal (the content of the individual). Subjective distinction, in contrast to personal eccentricity, can only be located in the practice of experimentation itself: in the dandy’s practice of gleaning reactions provoked in a given social situation. The dandy’s practice aims to counteract its effect, deviating, however slightly, from the laws that structure any given situation: to act and not just react.

The dandy observes its person in the effects it produces in the other and locates its subjectivity in the act that disidentifies with that person (i.e., the person it has become). Having divorced the problem of the self from romanticism’s concern with interior depth, the dandy accepts the artifice of the emotions—the life of the passions, too, follow automatic laws. The dandy thus does not differentiate the “interior life of the passions” from events unfolding within the world; this privilege of the person and impulsive reaction must be neutralized. As Baudelaire writes, “A dandy may be blasé, he may even suffer; but in this case, he will smile like the Spartan boy under the fox’s tooth.”²³ Like a good Kantian, the dandy treats inner and outer sense (intuition in Kant’s sense) as equally phenomenal, that is, as conditioned by the a priori of time and space whose objective determinations gain meaning or significance (Sinn) through the transcendental laws that synthesize intuitions and concepts. This procedure removes the question of personal identity (the problem of consciousness as posed by Locke) from subjectivity proper. The subject of experience is not given in experience, but deduced as the empty operation that makes identification itself possible: a spiritual automaton in the most radical sense.²⁴ The singularity of the subject (which by force of habit we assign to interiority), for the dandy, is made to surface from the position of the observer (the outside). The dandy occurs as an inward torsion of the social space it inhabits: as Wiener puts it, “the dandy is located as an inward spiral.”²⁵

This is not to say that the dandy is a mere reflection of its environment. Baudelaire’s famous proposition that the dandy “must live and sleep in front of a mirror” does not turn the dandy into Narcissus. Far from being absorbed in self-contemplation, the dandy in the mirror of society faces an other (like itself and yet hostile, as Lacan discerns) from whom it must infer its own identity. If the “normal” subject interiorizes this identification, the dandy’s rigorous and artificial procedure reverses this normal process: externalizing, disidentifying with its semblant, i.e., with the person it appears to be. As Teste the consummate dandy declares: “Imagine thinking our own image is not indifferent to us!”²⁶ The dandy attributes to the other everything that one would normally claim for and as oneself. One’s image is but the image of the other and thus, if not indifferent, must be made to be so. The dandy thus appears to itself as other, literally incarnating that most uncanny of Rimbaud’s poetic propositions: “I is an other [je est un autre].”²⁷

To speak of alienation here is much too weak, since the dandy undoes the presumption that posits recognition as a need. The despair of the dandy, its subtraction from hope, concerns the dandy’s assumption of the structural function of its own absence. Wiener writes,

yet he gives up everything that he understands about himself, none of which he can love as a component of his own personality; he yields that which has been understood about himself over to that which has been understood about the other. the other indemnifies him through his exposure of the mechanical meaninglessness of his life’s course; he is the bearer of all the hopelessness that has been perceived in his own life … it is not important that he love himself—not many dandies do—but that he protect something that would give love meaning … “in front of the mirror” means here: to observe what cannot be perceived differently, to know which impression the strange outside will make on the strange eye, to study in oneself the automatism of the strange eye, and to cultivate what withdraws from all of this. also, the emptying of the world is neither paranoid nor schizophrenic; it follows from the study of societal forms.²⁸

The other exposes the dandy to its structural meaninglessness, allowing it to see its absence in the strange eye that configures its image from which it disconnects. The dandy thus lucidly assumes itself as the bearer of the hopelessness of which its image has become a sign.

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For Oswald Wiener dandyism is the paradoxical art that attempts to make a form of that which escapes the law of formalization. Recognizing its relation to the other as its only content, the dandy seeks to constitute itself through a constant disidentification with the form of its appearance, which the dandy gleans through the other’s provocation. This art lies in treading the thin line between distinction and indistinction, so that the dandy can singularize the absenting of the subject, marking the wisp of a difference (the infrathin) between character and characterlessness, charm and insult, value and valuelessness, wit and stupidity, being a mere object and an intentional subject. The dandy actively identifies with the slight deviation, the swerve (the clinamen), the contingent impression, the singularizing detail, or the slightest inflection of the sign: anything to make sense tend toward non-sense. To speak a language like a human, i.e., as a subject, imitating a parrot; to mark the difference within the automaton itself of that slight glitch that makes a subject—that is, an it that thinks: this is the object of the dandy’s practice, as if attempting to observe the emergence of that difference that frames the place of the subject in the machination of an automaton. Valéry’s Monsieur Teste pushes this attempt, according to Wiener, to its limit: “Valéry tries to present Monsieur Teste as a human would appear to an animal.”²⁹

Far from simplifying Baudelaire’s identification of the dandy, as is the case, according to Wiener, with Huysmans’s “vulgar equation” in À Rebours of the dandy’s decadence with illness,³⁰ with M. Teste sickness itself becomes a form of cognition.³¹ The very notion of self-identity, of character itself, has dissolved and been replaced with the problem of self-observation. As the narrator in an “Evening with M. Teste” asks, “What had he done with his personality? How did he regard himself?”³² It has disappeared into the name. Edmond Teste serves merely the nominal function of naming a set of abstract operations. Wiener writes, “he no longer concerns himself with his self [mit sich selbst], but with the form in which he appears to himself in his ideas; his identity is provisional.”³³

With Teste, everything is external—words like things and things like words—serving only to mark the distance between a projected interiority and its surface, incisions into space that build a hollow whose repetition provides the outline of a thing in variation, plastic, malleable, infinitely receding: “the object, the terrible object” of “inner sight.”³⁴ This object is what is at stake in all of Teste’s speech, his perambulations, and even his sleep. It is that thing which he is, but from which he is removed: “He spoke, and one felt oneself confounded with things in his mind: one felt withdrawn, mingled with houses, with the grandeurs of space, with the shuffled colors of the street, with street corners.”³⁵ Teste relates to himself as a word become thing, as if he is speaking bits of matter. Thingly words lose their sense, and Teste uses words to confound not simply word and thing, sense and non-sense, but even the expectation that one is speaking after all with a person.³⁶ Teste can indeed be eloquent, we are told, making fine use of “touching words—the very ones that bring the author closer to us than any other man, those that make us believe the eternal wall between minds is falling,”³⁷ but he adds to them an inflection or subtracts a sentiment that removes them from sense:

The ones he used were sometimes so curiously held by his voice or lighted by his phrase that their weight was altered, their value new. Sometimes they would lose all sense, they seemed to serve only to fill an empty place for which the proper term was still in doubt or not provided by the language. I have heard him designate a simple object by a group of abstract words and proper names.³⁸

The strangeness of Teste’s speech consists in his extreme nominalism. He sheds any residual belief in language’s transparency. Words refer and identify at the cost of an irrevocable and necessary betrayal that makes the illusion of communication possible. The subject’s dependence on language, for Teste, makes articulation a ceaseless externalization of that which is interior, making even the most intimate of internal monologues a process of hollowing out.

Rather than positing Teste within a field of meaning, his relation to linguistic structure serves to separate him from meaning. He acknowledges himself as an effect of this structure. With Teste the problem of the dandy touches upon that of the nihilist. Teste is excruciatingly aware of the separation of the subject’s identity from meaning: that who he is “cannot be differentiated from the position of the other and that each of his insights occur to him [i.e., the other in him] and that he is only incidentally and insignificantly the one to whom they happen.”³⁹ He-who-observes is who he is, and this insight can only lead to “the impossibility of identifying with the content” of any given act of observation. He is structured. Teste’s existence cannot be distinguished from the position of the other whose position in him serves in turn to divide him from all content: “the observing instance in him becomes strange to him.”⁴⁰ Separated from himself, he becomes the indirect object of his own act that prompts him to identify with the act that divides his identity. The other in him is what speaks.

Teste relates to his character (personality) in the same way that he inhabits space, “like geometry’s any point.”⁴¹ Identifying his voice as the anonymous voice of the other that speaks in him, Teste becomes a neutral it that speaks, that marks and observes from a space defined as nondescript. As the narrator describes Teste’s lodgings: “My host existed in the most general interior” sparsely populated with “dull abstract furniture—the bed, the clock, the wardrobe with a mirror, two armchairs—like rational beings.”⁴² Radically impersonal, the ordinariness of Teste’s external space, which the narrator observes with “horror,” reflects the “extraordinariness” of Teste’s mind: “‘You know a man who knows that he does not know what he is saying!’”⁴³ Socratic wisdom—knowing that one does not know—with Teste is oddly reversed, because he knows that he does not know what he is saying. Teste knows that he is spoken by language, making all knowledge of the self a knowledge of an irrevocable externality, since one is not identical with what one says.

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Teste inhabits his relation to himself as a labyrinth whose structure is itself devouring. It is not the Minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth that is of concern, since there is no center and hence no threatening beast that awaits. More daunting is that the structure itself has become monstrous: the horror horribly banal and all the more horrible since there is no escape.

Or perhaps the more appropriate metaphor is that of a crime scene. If “one should go into himself armed to the teeth,”⁴⁴ as Teste writes in his Logbook, it is because one is entering a space that is structured like a mystery, “a tale of ratiocination.” Like the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupont, Teste proceeds by “ratiocination” alone—entering interiority like an exterior space riddled with the signs, the remains, to be more macabre, of his own absence. To speak is to be caught up in an intrigue, and Teste is a subject that knows that he is ensnared by structures on which he nonetheless depends. The subject is only a subject as caught up in an intrigue, a conspiracy, and the ultimate conspiracy always amounts in the end to the subject’s own abduction, its death and/or disappearance.

Wiener alludes to the dimension of intrigue in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and he views a character like Dupin as “at once a deepening and flattening of the possibility” of the concept of intrigue developed by Choderlos de Laclos with the figure of the Marquise de Merteuil.⁴⁵ However, such flattening is the dandy’s prerogative, and it is always the measure of elegant poise to see how such figures can maintain the slight cock of the chin while encountering some black ice. Will they crack up, like Jerry Lewis who slips from every surface in a Lucite world?⁴⁶ Or will they become a piece of “incomprehensible still-life”?⁴⁷ Both are certainly strategies, no doubt, for turning the ridiculous to one’s advantage.

Both the Marquise’s and the Chevalier’s sculptural poise—that is, Dupin’s—stems from their lucidity: to believe in interiority as some hidden lock box is for them both an abominable illusion. Neither of them makes much ado about this “discovery.” They possess it as a banal rather than a disturbing truth. They keep their equanimity and are even braced by the unsettling revelation that the subject has no place in the world; its place is to be without place.

This is what makes the dandy such an exemplary observer, of itself and of society: its sympathies do not lie with the person. A point that Virginia Woolf conveys comically when she notes: “If a man and a dog were drowning in the same pond [Brummel] would prefer to save the dog if there was nobody looking. But he was still persuaded that everybody was looking.”⁴⁸ If the dandy’s sympathies lie with the drowning dog, it is not from sentiment but misanthropy:⁴⁹ “I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind / For thy part, I do wish thou wert a dog, / that I might love thee something.”⁵⁰ There is more than a little Timon of Athens in the dandy’s sensibility: “Hate all, curse all, show charity to none, / But let the famished flesh slide from the bone / Ere thou relieve the beggar. Give to dogs / What thou deniest to men.”⁵¹ The dandy, like Timon, despises humanity’s attachment to money: “Let molten coin be thy damnation.”⁵² In a famous anecdote, a beggar asks Brummel “for alms—‘if only a halfpenny’. ‘Poor fellow,’ Brummel replied. ‘I have heard of such a coin but never possessed one’; and gave him a shilling.”⁵³

Notes

1. Oswald Wiener, “Remarks on Some Tendencies of the ‘Vienna Group,’” trans. David Britt, October 97 (Summer 2001), 128–129.

2. Throughout the chapter I refer to the dandy as an “it,” using “he” or “she” only when referring to a specific dandy who happens to be male or female, for example Beau Brummel or the Marquise de Mertuil. The use of this impersonal pronoun when referring to the dandy as such is decisive, since the dandy’s impersonality is of capital importance. Historically speaking, dandies have been men; however, androgyny has always been an important ingredient of the dandy’s dissolute identity.

3. William Hazlitt, “Brummelliana,” in Selected Writings, ed. John Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 159.

4. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 28–29.

5. The character of des Esseintes is largely modeled on the French aristocrat Robert de Montesquiou, who would also inspire Proust’s Baron de Charlus in The Remembrance of Things Past, a dandy-decadent who pushed his eccentricities to a ridiculous extreme. Mallarmé, who dedicates the poem “Prose” to des Esseintes which begins “Hyberbole!,” once visited Montesquiou’s home, and it is likely, as Robert Baldick suggests, that Huysmans heard about the manner in which Montesquiou furnished his home from Mallarmé himself. See Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, ed. Brendan King (1955; Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 2006), 122–123.

6. Hazlitt, “Brummelliana,” 159.

7. In From Thirty Years with Freud, Theodor Reik writes, “Freud once varied the saying ‘Le style, c’est l’homme’ to ‘Le style, c’est l’histoire de l’homme.’” As quoted in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Echo of the Subject,” in Typographies: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 166.

8. Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare, trans. Ariana Reines (Mal-O-Mar, 2009), 5.

9. Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste, trans. Jackson Mathews (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1947), 85–86.

10. Ibid., 14.

11. Oswald Wiener, “Eine Art Einzige,” in Riten der Selbstauflösung, ed. Verena von der Heyden-Rynsch (Munich: Matthes & Seitz Verlag, 1982), 52. It should be noted that Wiener himself writes in what one could call a parasyntactic style and, like his fellow member of the Vienna Group, Konrad Bayer, writes in all lower-case letters, not capitalizing either the first letter of a sentence or nouns (as is conventional in German). An unauthorized translation of the first section of this essay, “Du Dandysme …,” by Jeffrey D. Gower and the late Ludwig Fischer, appeared in Machete, May 2011. For the archive of Machete see the website of the gallery Marginal Utility: www.marginalutility.org

12. Wiener, “Eine Art Einzige,” 52 n. 20.

13. Ibid., 36.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., 54. Baudelaire is already clear on the matter: see “The Painter of Modern Life,” 28.

16. Oswald Wiener, “Nachbemerkung,” in Riten der Selbstauflösung, 325.

17. I am here transposing Wiener’s language into my own, shifting idioms by bringing his own discourse into relation with structuralist forms of thought as they are developed, for example, in Deleuze’s essay “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” Although my own account does not deviate radically, in my view, from Wiener’s own, I do not feel hermeneutically beholden to the idiom of his discourse. Wiener’s own interest in formal systems, although by no means exclusive of structuralism so defined, tends to be concerned more with systems theory, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence. He is, for example, the German translator of Herbert A. Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). He does, however, provide the following as an instructive example of dandyesque application: “Freedom of interpretation—a fabulous example of dandyesque audacity is Roman Jakobson’s and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s interpretation of Chats; everything that these authors know about Baudelaire—I presume—that can be wondered about him, is liquidated [ausgerottet]; an icy glance sees a possibility, a severe mind [scharfer geist] drives it along” (Wiener, “Eine Art Einzige,” 55).

18. Michel Foucault touches on this point in his essay “What Is Enlightenment?”: “Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not ‘liberate man in his own being’; it compels him to face the task of producing himself.” (The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al. [New York: New Press, 1997], 312.)

19. Wiener, “Eine Art Einzige,” 40–41.

20. Julien Torma, “Euphorisms,” in 4 Dada Suicides: Selected Texts of Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma and Jacques Vaché (London: Atlas Press, 2005), 153–154.

21. Oswald Wiener, “some remarks on konrad bayer,” in Peter Weibel, ed., The Vienna Group: A Moment of Modernity 1954–60 (Berlin: Springer, 1997), 42.

22. Wiener, “Eine Art Einzige,” 37.

23. Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 28.

24. Kant distinguishes the transcendental subject from psychological personality: “Yet we can lay at the basis of this science nothing but the simple, and by itself quite empty, presentation I, of which we cannot even say that it is a concept, but only that it is a mere consciousness accompanying all concepts. Now through this I or he or it (the thing) that thinks, nothing more is presented than a transcendental subject of thoughts = x.” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996], 385.) The notion of a spiritual automaton (automa spirituale) derives from Spinoza’s use of this concept in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect: “This is the same as what the ancients said, i.e., that true knowledge proceeds from cause to effect—except that as far as I know they never conceived the soul [psyche] (as we do here) as acting according to certain laws, like a spiritual automaton.” (Benedictus de Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985], 37.)

25. Wiener, “Eine Art Einzige,” 36.

26. Valéry, Monsieur Teste, 19.

27. Arthur Rimbaud, “Letter to George Izambard, Charleville, May 13, 1871,” in Rimbaud Complete, vol. 1, Poetry and Prose, ed. and trans. Wyatt Mason (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 365. The translation has been modified.

28. Wiener, “Eine Art Einzige,” 38.

29. Ibid., 59.

30. Inhabiting an inverted world where falsity is truth, where anchors are made out of cork, Huysmans makes a “vulgar equation,” as Wiener puts it, between sickness and artificiality: “krank = künstlich” (ibid.).

31. Ibid.

32. Valéry, Monsieur Teste, 14.

33. Wiener, “Eine Art Einzige,” 59.

34. Valéry, Monsieur Teste, 22. As the narrator describes, “This man had early known the importance of what might be called human plasticity. He had tried to find out its limits and its laws. How deeply he must have thought about his own malleability!” (Ibid., 13.)

35. Ibid., 14.

36. This is perhaps the reason for Wiener’s addition at the end of his essay of discussion of Hadaly’s and Parry’s “proofing” of the Turing test.

37. Valéry, Monsieur Teste, 14.

38. Ibid.

39. Wiener, “Eine Art Einzige,” 60.

40. Ibid.

41. Valéry, Monsieur Teste, 20.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid., 85.

45. Ibid., 44.

46. See Cracking Up, dir. Jerry Lewis, 1983.

47. Hazlitt, “Brummelliana,” Selected Writings, 161.

48. Virginia Woolf, Beau Brummel (New York: Remington and Hooper, 1930), 7.

49. Ellen Moers’s writes: “To the dandy the self is not an animal, but a gentleman. Instinctual reactions, passions and enthusiasms are animal, and thus abominable. Here the dandy temperament diverges most widely from the romantic, which dominated the major literature of Brummel’s time.” (Moers, The Dandy: Brummel to Beerbohm [London: Secker and Warburg, 1960], 18.)

50. William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 4.3.54–56.

51. Ibid., 5.1.520–525.

52. Ibid., 3.1.41.

53. Moers writes, “The dandy has no occupation, and no obvious source of support. Money does not strike him as a subject worthy of his attention” (Moers, The Dandy, 18).