Comment On Devient Doll

 

Kaloprosopia Rising

    Consciousness has all but disappeared. In his 2013 talk for the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) collective, Mark Fisher clarifies that capitalist realism is most properly a form of consciousness deflation, a loss of the ability to imagine an alternative, and a lack of even thinking the problems of capitalism, which is “directly aimed at crushing” the consciousness raised in the 60s and 70s (Temporary). In his talk, Fisher identifies three types of consciousness—class consciousness, psychedelic consciousness, and consciousness-raising–-which have been smothered by the rise of neoliberalism. It is this last one which interests herethics most. Consciousness-raising was a process pioneered by socialist feminists wherein group members would gather together in groups and talk through how problems and feelings—whether social, familial, professional, or amorous—related to and were the fault of structures of capitalism and patriarchy. 

All three forms of consciousness, the awareness of class, the awareness that the future is plastic and changeable, and the ability to create awareness of the facts of class and mutability were key to what Fisher saw as one of the biggest needs for the left: enunciating an alternative to patriarchal capitalism. In response to the rising consciousness of the 60s and 70s, capitalism ramped up what Fisher terms “Libidinal Engineering” or the directing of workers’ desires back towards capitalism and stamping out any idea of a reasonable alternative among countercultural movements such as nthe Black Panthers or trade unions, as well as destroying international socialist movements with the crushing of the Allende government (Temporary).

Fisher takes hold of the strategy of consciousness-raising and suggests something similar for the creation of imagined futures free from the manacles of patriarchal capitalism, breaking revolutionary work’s confinement to the spaces of the idealized factory floor and allowing the work of creating a future to start on a much smaller individual or group level by reengineering the desires of workers towards an alternative to capitalism. The work of consciousness-raising, then, is the work of discovering through ourselves how to desire something beyond capitalism, beyond the bounds of patriarchy, how to throw off the veils which cover us, and how to open onto the abject which surrounds us. As capitalism, as our current social formation, informs the boundaries of acceptability, it is only by lucidly staring into the void of abjection can one truly peer past the veil. Only by unveiling the abject can one encounter it. Only through opening oneself to the abject can one imagine a future forbidden and outside of capitalism. Only through this work can the libidinal landscape—the topology of what people desire—be reoriented towards a more perfect future, a future that is open to the other.

Doubtless, being open to the abject will not result in a future free from abjection—one needn’t look further than repulsion at dung or eating rotten food to find examples of forms of abjection which serve one—however it may be possible to readjust and reassign the abjection of people. The many ills of society, including racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia, inequality, and classism, have at their root abjection of the other, abjection of the one who is unlike the always white cishetero male subject. Abjection will never, ought never, be totally erased, but new social formations may in fact allow the erasing of abjection of the other.

    If Fisher gives us a rough-cut idea of how to begin desiring other than those chains which bind, we must next divine by what means to raise this consciousness. For this, we should turn back to the Symbolists, most notably to Joséphin Péladan, who believed that art was the key to raising conscious beings towards a higher form of consciousness. To the Symbolists, the purpose of art is to describe deep truths which could only be approached through languorous vocabulary, beautiful metaphors, and esoteric symbolism. Péladan takes this further, to him the sole purpose of art lies in enabling the material act of becoming. Art only truly reaches its apex in the Salon de la Rose+Croix by bombarding the public with hidden occult messages, thus enabling what Péladan calls kaloprosopia—ambiguously defined as the art of personality, of establishing oneself as a beautiful person, or simply the art of becoming (L’Art 54, 59). To this end, Péladan published his Amphitheater of Dead Sciences series, a line of enchiridions on how one may approach a higher self, in other words how one may achieve kaloprosopia. 

    The didactic strain of Péladan’s Amphitheater series is not confined to Péladan alone; many authors, most notably including the premier decadent Huysmans’ A Rebours, wrote what may well amount to manuals on how one might aestheticize their life (Deak 10). Yet, as A Rebours shows, a truly and purely aesthetic life may be an impossibility. Unperturbed, Péladan presses onwards towards the ideal of a fully realized aesthetic life. Deak quotes Péladan thus on kaloprosopia:

“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.”                                   

(15-16)

    Kaloprosopia is therefore the active and bodily realization of art to manifest “the willful aspects of transformation and the connection between the mental and the physical” (Deak 16). That is to say, that kaloprosopia is the act of living doctrine to make it manifest as change in the world. Life fuses with the text and the text infuses the body. Kaloprosopia is a way of opening the reader to the text, creating a threshold between reader and text in which the two meet and return to the self, as Diotima’s Eros crosses between lovers’ thresholds. For Péladan, this is didactic, one learns through art the way to create and curate oneself as a beautiful being.

    To Péladan, there are different routes to kaloprosopia for each sex, as he fervently believed in difference between the sexes. To him, women were not men with complications, but essentially different from men. It is easy to read his pronouncements that “ [woman is] to man as 2 is to 3” and “[women] are inferior to man [...], whatever [their] education; [they] are inferior in essence, in birth, in constitution,” as statements of an uncomplicated male chauvinism, however, Péladan’s position is rather complicated in his pronouncement that woman has more soul, which makes her more ripe for salvation and gives her the power of mutability (Fee 30). Peladan was notably harsh with women—in his introduction he purports to “destroy the temple of Woman”---but believed that women really could attain an ideal. He is vociferously opposed, in other words, to what woman has been made to be by social mores and expectations. 

Péladan had, finally, “set himself up as the foe of what society had made women become” (Chaitow 201). He was, however, a deep admirer of the powers that women have at their command, running from an intuition “could connect directly with God” to the powers over men she possessed with merely the curve of her body (ibid). A woman, for Péladan, is a being who is able to use her sexuality and powers of seduction to undermine all the offices of power which society imposes upon one, throwing the magistrates and officials into the “lakes of sexuality” from which they cannot escape (Fee 69). She is nevertheless abject, a maenad of irresistible sexuality, and responsible for the rupture of Edenic grace at the bidding of her instinct. In this way, woman becomes a complicated figure of subversion to Péladan, a being that becomes and initiates kaloprosopia by properly directing her sexuality, instincts, and mutability in the service of art, science, and superior consciousness.

The Perversion of the Process

    So then, art must simply be directed towards the end of didactically initiating people into kaloprosopia in order to build consciousness and a better future will naturally arise? If that were the case, such a future would have started with Péladan and one would be living in a luminous landscape free of the Hephestean nets of capitalism and patriarchy. No, kaloprosopia was not achieved through art in the manner Péladan prescribed, no more beautiful kind of person arose through his properly directed idealist and mysterious art and theater. Like his successors, Artaud and Brecht, Péladan sought to produce such a profound change in the reader that they would not simply leave the theater and next discuss what to have for dinner. Instead, he single-mindedly pursued the process of curating kaloprosopia in the reader. This was, of course, exactly the issue. As Deleuze and Guattari note, the process “must not be viewed as a goal or an end in itself, nor must it be confused with an infinite perpetuation of itself. Putting an end to the process or prolonging it indefinitely—which, strictly speaking, is tantamount to ending it abruptly and prematurely,” (5). By so relentlessly pointing his art at kaloprosopia, Péladan ruined any chance he might have had at producing it.

    In order to produce kaloprosopia, art must not be directed towards this or that end. In fact, art must exist for its own sake if any change in the reader is to occur. By engaging with the rudderless jouissance of the drive, art for its own sake may engage the abject, it takes the unacceptable impulses which become veiled and directly grabs ahold of them. L’Art pour l’art therefore opens onto the abject, it creates a threshold, a mucous membrane with the abject. It may cross daimonically from the abject, to the reader, and back. An Eros of abjection, l’art pour l’art serves to initiate the reader into kaloprosopia through opening them onto the abject, undermining the veils which are placed over it. 

Cruel Eros

    This is an art which does cruelty to the ideas of sex and gender which bind us, which performs not the stupid brute cruelty of simple blood and gore, but the Artaudian cruelty of which Maggie Nelson writes in Art of Cruelty. An art which does not seek to shock the reader into consciousness, but which implacably opens the reader, which crosses the thresholds. Not the cruelty of Nitsch’s Six Day Play, a Dionysian performance of animal sacrifice and slinging of dung, but the implacability of an “army of cruelty” riding across the space of discourse and staking out new territory for the abject (da Rimini). 

Nelson’s reading of Artaud is, however, uncompelling, claiming that “cruelty meant whatever Artaud wanted it to mean,” (Nelson 17). What is left, then, is to turn to Artaud for guidance. Artaud creates a more solid idea by first stating what cruelty is not, like an apophatic theology which describes the divine only through negation. First, Artaud contrasts his theater of cruelty with that cinema which, descending from Racine’s psychological theater, fails to truly “unite with our sensibility,”  it is additionally “a matter of neither sadism nor bloodshed, at least not in any exclusive way” (Artaud 84,101). Nor is it “synonymous with bloodshed, martyred flesh, crucified enemies,” nor laceration of the flesh, nor anything brutish (Artaud 102). Artaud’s cruelty can and often does include laceration, bloodshed, and brutality—especially in creating lighting and noise which is brutal to the audience—but these do not define it. Pure cruelty is, to Artaud, something far in excess of what Nelson terms “stupid cruelty” of conformism or bad-faith employments of sadism and debauchery (Nelson 10). Cruelty must then be something more cerebral, not an art that goes for the shock and awe of “raping the viewer into independence” (Haneke in Nelson 4) 

Artaud does go so far as giving a few positive declarations about cruelty, famously that “[everything] that acts is a cruelty,” and “Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination” which colors the act of living “since it is understood that life is always someone's death” (Artaud 85, 101, 102). Finally he states that a theater of cruelty must be a “total spectacle” which uses gesture, space, and sound to bridge the gap between art and life and bring the viewer “the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out, on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior” (Artaud 86, 92). In other words, the total spectacle of a cruel art is one in which the piece operates on such a level that the external art piece is asserted on an internal level, changing the reader irreversibly on the level of consciousness.

Deep Spaces

    Francesca da Rimini’s 1997-2001 piece, Dollspace, is one such cruel piece of art for its own sake; a rhizomatic network of audio, images, text, and video which winds round and round through the wet works of queer sex and sexuality. The piece is composed of a large number of simple web pages, which are hyperlinked together in a choose-your-own-adventure web of gender-bending political violence. “Re: Gender terrorism. I define it mostly as going against the natural order of sexism by way of invading patriarchy without the enemy's knowledge,” says Mikhail, a presumably transmasculine correspondent of Doll Yoko, the apparent author of the experience (da Rimini). Doll Yoko and her ambiguous correspondences act out abject sexual and gendered acts of sex and violence, mediated by their seeming confinement to the internet while navigating the sexual violence imposed by the capitalist patriarchal system. The characters in Dollspace utilize their sexuality in an almost Péladanian manner, instrumentalizing it to attack and upend male power structures and normative notions of sexuality and sexes. Trans narratives are irrepressible in the piece, one moment Doll Yoko is sleeping with a genderfucked transmasculine beastman, and the next she’s plunging her hand into her plaything’s skirt so she can feel “[Special Jane’s] dick [swell] in her panties as Mistress rubs the palm of her hand against the fabric. She obviously can't control herself, and she blushes, realizing the humiliating sight she offers,” (da Rimini)

    The piece is an explosion of violent jouissance, the violence men do to women is juxtaposed with extreme torture fantasies—one page sees an extended erotic textual scene wherein the presumed author, gashgirl, and their partner slowly and gleefully dismember a man, taking turns with his torture and taking a break only when they want a diet coke—engages in BDSM roleplay with partners “Male, female, hermaphrodite, transsexual, transgendered, undecided, ambiguous, ambivalent” while typing out horrific erotica and Department of Defense news briefings (da Rimini). The hyperfiction is several hundred pages long, littered with hacker and activist pieces, calls for political violence, satirical Aristocrats-style scenes of racist US imperialism, collaborations with the Zapatistas, and references to the sexual exploitation of women and children under patriarchal media systems. As the piece puts it “all history is pornography," and to Doll Yoko, an avatar of the dead women that litter the pages of history, it may well be a snuff film (da Rimini).  The piece additionally forefronts women’s resistance to patriarchal and capitalist modes of domination claiming that “All women are ghosts and should rightly be feared,” immediately prior to an image of gun-toting young women (da Rimini). 

The piece is often voyeuristic—as the reader looks over chatroom logs and suggestive emails they are engrossed and sometimes titillated by an act that they can read but not engage in—but the hypertext medium draws the reader into a closer dialogue than traditional modes of engagement as the reader clicks and navigates the sprawling network of pages. Readers are likely to lose their way and will possibly never proceed through the piece in the same way twice. Prior experiences of the piece linger as the reader dives into it again again, the temporality becomes blurred, “[it] wants to haunt him/her to become an intersubjectively embodied act, performed by the user/participant him/herself. It is a space where dolls become human, where reality and fiction intermingle, where the word becomes flesh.” (Paniagua 9)

    The aforementioned Special Jane is one such doll, a promiscuous transfeminine character who plays with both gashgirl and Doll Yoko in BDSM cybersex and real-life meetups. She is a doll through and through, a girl who dresses herself up for her mistresses to play with, one who desires only to “be your doll and private whore, and you can use me the way you like..” (da Rimini). The relationships between them are, finally, brimming with love and affection. There is a deep and abiding tenderness that underlies their play. Each page of correspondence is a love letter, aware of the sometimes shocking, always erotic differences between characters. The characters in Dollspace cross borders between pain and pleasure, between genders, between the real and virtual worlds; and all of this they do with an implacability of gesture and drive which are the true marks of Artaudian cruelty. They become, through this love and this cruelty, their most beautifully realized selves, they partake of kaloprosopia through directing their taste for jouissance. The cruelty and love which they share become the enabling factors for their imagination of a space where the boundaries may be crossed, where the veils of acceptable womanhood, manhood, and sexuality may be dismantled.

Dollspace, through its enunciation of jouissance, opens the reader upon the abject in gender and sexuality. This is not the point, so to speak, of the piece, but the piece leaves an indelible mark on the reader, who notices, like Salome, their brutishness beneath the veils which have been thrown over them. The reader becomes aware not only of the veilings of others, but also their own veilings; in doing so they can begin to distance themselves from the veils, to dismantle them thread by thread. Political violence becomes enunciated not on the street, but in the very space of its “maximum intransigence,” within the identities of the reader, allowing them to “speak so as to escape from their compartments, their schemas, their distinctions and oppositions: virginal/deflowered, pure/impure, innocent/experienced” (Kristeva 209; Irigaray 206). In doing so, the piece enables a kaloprosopia all of its own, pulling the reader into embodying the text, into embodying the openness to the abject which Doll Yoko expresses.

This is not to say that art such as Dollspace is inherently revolutionary. The real work of the piece is not just in the content or the form—though the hyperfiction medium does allow for the creation of a deeper chiasm between the reader and the piece, allowing for a closer dialogue with the abject—but, again, in allowing the reader to become open to the abject. The piece is a tool that opens the door for further work. The reader must continue to examine and dig into the abject of their own volition following the end of their engagement with Dollspace, the piece itself merely creates that space for continual encounter with abject about and within oneself. In a similar way that the Symbolist art of the Salon de la Rose+Croix bombarded the reader with symbols in an effort to bring the viewer to esotericism, art for its own sake merely begins a longer process of becoming.

If herethics is to demolish the borders with those deemed dirty and unacceptable, if it is to demolish the oppositions and veils which bind, it will be by engaging art for its own sake, by initiating kaloprosopia, and thereby reorienting the libidinal landscape towards a desire for the new, for new embodiments of sexes, sexualities, and modes of being. It will be by engaging with the Artaudian cruelty of an art which cuts open the reader with its pursuit of jouissance and its crossing of boundaries, and by a love of the other which does not deny difference. If a new future is to be imagined, much less realized, it will only be by radically exiting the constraints imposed by the numerous veilings to which we are subject. Dollspace is just one such piece of cruel art which, through its pursuit of jouissance, may open in the reader a violent gash, exposing the bleeding tissue of their consciousness to the abject, tearing open a hole in their veils. The future that Dollspace conjures is one in which the bounds of queer and sexual taxonomies are splintered and shattered like too-brittle bones. A future in which gender is flayed alive, its nipples cut “off with pinking shears because I like the sound it makes”, Herethics reaches its apex with the creation of l’art pour l’art, the maximum violence against abjection is conducted in jouissance, consciousness is raised through cruelty, and “l'amor is a hard blade which cuts heaven open,” (da Rimini). The dolls are coming to life and “BOY THE TIME FOR GENTLE EXPLANATION IS OVER” (da Rimini).

Bibliography

Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Grove Press, 2004.

Chaitow, S. “How to Become a Mage (or Fairy): Joséphin Péladan’s Initiation for the Masses”. Pomegranate, vol. 14, no. 2, Jan. 2014, pp. 185-11, doi:10.1558/pome.v14i2.185.

Deak, Frantisek. “Kaloprosopia: The Art of Personality. The Theatricalization of Discourse in Avant-Garde Theatre.” Performing Arts Journal, vol. 13, no. 2, 1991, pp. 6–21. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3245465. Accessed 25 Jul. 2022.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari Félix. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke, Cornell University Press, 1985.

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Nelson, Maggie. The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning. W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.

Paniagua Zalbidea, Maya. "Towards a Multimodal Analysis of da Rimini's Dollspace." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.3 (2011): https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1799

Péladan Mérodack J. Comment on Devient fée: Érotique. Chamuel, 1893.

Péladan Joséphin. L'art idéaliste & Mystique: Doctrine De L'ordre Et Du Salon Annuel Des Rose-Croix, Chamuel, Paris, FR, 1894.

da Rimini, Francesca. Dollspace, https://dollyoko.thing.net/.