It’s my pleasure to be able to share this guest essay by with you. Tara is the author of Self Made and Here in Avalon. You can find here on Substack writing at
.If you are fond, as few people are, of little-read nineteenth-century French contes cruels, bleak and ironic fables told, more often than not, by dandies and decadents, you may have come across “Deshoulières”: an 1876 short story by Jean Richepin, a writer better known for his friends (Arthur Rimbaud) and lovers (Sarah Bernhardt) than for his body of work. “Deshoulières” is not good, exactly. Nevertheless, it’s chilling. Somewhere between satire and manifesto, it recounts the brief life of the titular protagonist: a dandy who yearns for nothing so much as to be original. He wants, Richepin tells us, to be the “dandy of the unpredictable”: someone whose thoughts, words, and deeds are so thoroughly uprooted from reality that nobody can tell what he will do next. Who he is does not matter; what matters only is that he is not like anyone else, or even like the person the people he knows perceive: one should never,” he determines, “look like himself.”
He thinks about a great many ways of being this original. He dismisses the easy answer – the work of a creative artist – as vulgar. No, he decides. Criminality suits him best. He murders his mistress, for no reason at all, embalms her corpse, and lives with her in a necrophiliac ménage until he is caught. Declining to speak in his own defense (he is too busy, by this point, studying the pseudo-scientific, pseudo-occultist art of “animal magnetism”: a precursor to contemporary conceptions of manifesting and vibes), he allows himself to be condemned to death. Even then, however, he must shake things up a bit. When the guillotine comes down, he leans back, so that the blade slices not – as it does for mere normies – his neck, but straight through his head.
Deshoulières is, of course, an extreme personality, though less extreme than you’d think, by the standards of dandyist literature of the time. Dandies, after all, were in mid- and late-nineteenth century France not merely well-dressed individuals, but (as dandy-theorist Barbey D’Aurevilly put it) “miniature gods”: devoted to a life of unpredictability, of impassibility, of autonomous self-invention. To be a dandy, D’Aurevilly argued, was to elevate oneself above the petty forces – society, vulnerability, love – that shape us. Drawing on a Greek myth about a boy who – desperate to conceal a stolen fox under his tunic, allowed the creature to feast on his entrails, D’Aurevilly writes: “A dandy may be blasé, he may even suffer pain, but in the latter case he will keep smiling, like the Spartan under the bite of the fox.”
We can have sympathy for the dandies. To live, as many of them did, in a rapidly changing, ever-industrializing Paris, where alleyways and artisans were constantly being supplanted by grands boulevards and department stores, must have been disorienting; the ease of technological reproduction at once dazzling and destabilizing. A whole host of literature written about this time highlights the ultimate source of anxiety: the mechanical woman, whose lovers cannot tell that she is a robot. Against this backdrop, originality – the quality of not being reproducible – is not just desirable, it is necessary; it is what distinguishes real people from their NPC counterparts: androids and normies alike. At least, it is what is left to distinguish people, once you dispense – as many dandies do (at least until their late-in-life Catholic conversions: another genre staple) with the conception of the soul.
Which is all to say: there is always something a little, well, dangerous, about the concept of originality: a danger that has been elided by our contemporary startup-statured culture, which holds as gospel that imitation is for normies, and innovation for the kind of geniuses most people now secretly believe themselves to be. Think, for example, of Palantir founder and investor Peter Thiel’s business self-help book Zero to One, which likens the originality of a truly novel entrepreneurial idea – Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s Google, say – to God’s creation of the world. “The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine,” he writes (along with co-author Blake Masters), “And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.”
To be original, Thiel’s words – no less than those of Barbey D’Aurevully – imply: is to be god-like: to reproduce the creation ex nihilo that opens the Book of Genesis. An original creation is a creation purely of human ingenuity, of whatever mysterious and perhaps numinious quality defines human creative freedom: superior (so prophets of innovation think) to the kind of imitation that defines the mediocre. Originality – ideas untethered to material reality, to cultural production, to human relationship – becomes the mark of godhood; those humans who have made themselves (or their startups) properly original take on the roles of demigod or mage.
This reading of originality as appropriation of godhood is not limited to nineteenth-century dandies, or twenty-first century transhumanists. As René Girard writes in his 1990 essay “Innovation and Repetition,” innovation was – for much of the pre-Enlightenment world – a theologically loaded, and potentially diabolical concept. Innovation implied the upending of nature: human ambition set against divine authority. Thus (Girard reminds us) Shakespeare’s Henry IV: who recoils at “hurly burly innovation”; thus too, a few centuries later, Edmund Burke, shuddering at the French Revolution as an example of a “revolt of innovation.” For Girard, “the romantic historian” – and his successors – “puts innovation on a par with foundation and creation itself, the creation ex nihilo, nod oubt, that up to that time, had been the exclusive monopoly of the biblical God.”
To read Girard, Thiel, and Barbey D’Aurevillly alongside one another is to understand that innovation – and originality – are inseparable from theological readings both of creation and of reality itself. Is reality something that human beings have moral or ontological license (or the dizzying absence of any license at all) to shape in their own image, or something with its own telos, its own predetermined form, such that any action we take must be judged only insofar as it conforms to a higher, presumably better truth?
Girard’s essay turns to the economic: the role of innovation and imitation in business life, specifically. He denies a clear binary, arguing instead that “imitation and innovation are not only compatible but almost inseparable.” But it is in his writing on artistic imitation, and the ressentiment he sees as categorizing the relationship between great authors and those who fear their influence, that we can find a path towards re-imagining imitation: not as a relationship of soulless copy to self-creating genius, but of human being to human being. “When the humility of discipleship,” Girard writes, “is experienced as humiliating, the transmission of the past becomes difficult, even impossible.” But it is precisely in the understanding of influence, and imitation, as rooted in discipleship – perhaps (although Girard does not use the term in this essay) in the model of the imitatio Christi – that we can understand the relationship between innovation and imitation not as higher and lower ways of being in the world, but rather as two different understandings of what it means to be in the world, or have a world, at all. To be a created being in the world, to be a being that is shaped not only by one’s own will but by a vast lattice of cultural texts and stories and myths and songs and languages, by other human beings – both ancestral and contemporary; to recognize that other people are always models against whom we form ourselves – all this is to understand the desire for originality qua originality as a profoundly anti-human desire: a desire to extricate ourself from our own embodied and social givenness. Just as the writers Girard describes deny through jealousy their own intellectual lineages, evincing an “obsessive concern with their own mimetic rivals…always accompanied by a fierce denial of mimetic rivalry,” so too does a too-credulous fascination with creative autarchy deny the possibility of human submissiveness to one another – and to the possibility of a transcendent reality towards which conformity is our calling.
That does not mean, of course, that there is no room for human creativity, or human freedom, or even human distinctiveness, in our aesthetics (or our theologically-informed economics, or anything else for that matter). But it does mean that human freedom, and human creative power, must be assessed against some benchmark other than lack of precedent, or lack of predictability. Alongside our capacity for creation, if it is to be a human creation, and not a transhuman one, we must hold onto a degree of epistemic humility: innovation as discovery of that which lies outside the bounds of existing human knowledge, rather than outside reality altogether. We must hold on, too, to a moral stance that assesses innovation against the benchmarks of the good and the true, rather than in the light of posited nonexistence.
But there is something worth holding onto, too, even in a figure as appallingly anti-human as Deshoulières. What is Deshoulières’ desire to be original, after all, but a hunger to prove himself irreproducible: to prove that he is neither an imitation nor a creature simple enough that imitation is straightforward. In his striving for untethered originality we can see a perversion of a better hunger: to be inimitable, not in the sense of the dandy but in the sense of the human person, complex enough that there is no exchange. We might say that a truly human theory of innovation holds that there is no such thing; but we might go further: true imitation is also impossible. If human beings are indeed made in the image and likeness of God; if there is a fundamental reality to our us-ness, our haecceity, then no amount of imitation can make someone who is like us exchangeable for us. Originality is as encoded in who we really are as is contingency. Read against this backdrop, the desire for innovation is revealed as a desire to be treated as real: rather than a copy. Imitation, even the kind of imitation that conforms us to something higher; is always asymptotic; we can never stop being our own selves.
None of this, of course, is particularly useful to starting a company that makes a lot of money. But it is useful when considering how best to expend our limited human powers, to make and to shape things and tools and technologies, to influence other people, to treat both the entrepreneurial and the artistic as spheres in which both human singularity and human contingency are valued, and where both technology and art help us better imitate a reality we hope for without fully understanding. We do not have to be dandies to prove that we are not NPCs. We just have to be what we are.
Tara Isabella Burton is the author of Self Made and Here in Avalon. This essay is a small taste of what you can expect in the volume of collected essays (tentatively titled “Be Not Conformed”, the theme of the conference) that we hope to publish sometime later this year or next—but that is dependent on finding the right publishing partner which has so far proven difficult. (There are certain creative and editorial decisions I won’t budge on.) Please, don’t tempt me to start an imprint.
'Humility [of discipleship] as humiliation' has such rich explanatory power in our age for the felt pressure that makes us flit from thin desire to thin desire in the quest of "originality" and "uniqueness".
Tara,
I "met" you last night on the zoom with Natasha, which I enjoyed very much.
I enjoyed also this essay. I've noticed that no group of people are more suspect to the Dunning-Kruger effect than extremely successful businesspeople and entrepreneurs who decide that skill and insight (and luck) in their one field of great accomplishment makes them equally skillful in other fields. And people listen to them, making the same mistake.
Also, you taught me a new word: "haecceity"