Tuesday 103: The Phones of Perception
By the time he’d reached the age of 20 in the early 1880s, Evander Berry Wall, the grandson of a successful rope manufacturer, had inherited more than $2 million and was emerging as a prominent member of New York’s cafe society. He owned horses, dined exclusively at the fanciest restaurants, and was known for a maximalist sartorial aesthetic that saw him proclaimed (controversially, it should be noted) “The King of the Dudes” on more than one occasion.
In Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, a paved loop circles a manicured pond near the Boathouse, one of the Park’s signature architectural highlights. Although designer Frederick Law Olmstead bristled at the more manicured elements of the park’s layout (like the melodramatically designated “Vale of Kashmir”), the Boathouse area remains one of the park’s more popular destinations, offering picturesque views well suited for picnics, moments of reflection, or staged photographs. In Wall’s time, the loop—which meanders around the pond through willow and oak trees and an extremely rare elm of (alleged) aristocratic lineage before cresting at a bridge overlooking the boathouse and (usually) a handful of regal, vapid swans—was similarly a place to see and be seen. People in their Sunday best would parade around, showing off their hoop skirts and false collars and parasols and whatever else they wore, just sort of admiring one another, and presumably flirting.
By the time Prospect Park was opened in 1867 (work continued well into the 1870s), Georges-Eugène Haussmann was entering the latter stages of the reconstruction of Paris under Emperor Napoleon III. The massive public works project aimed to modernize the cramped, narrow, medieval sections of the city that were hotbeds of crime, disease, and—probably most importantly for Napoleon—frequent revolutionary activity.1 Barricades are generally easier to construct and defend in alleyways than across broad avenues, and Louis presumably wanted something sunnier, more open, and easier to disperse or squash when necessary.
One of the characteristic innovations that took hold as Haussmann opened the city up was the cafe. Restaurants with large, street-level windows now lined the open streets, creating a natural relationship of perception between those on the street and those sitting down for a coffee and a little pastry. Just as Olmstead had created the architectural conditions for performative sociability, Haussmann had established what might be considered the modern conditions for celebrity: An appearance at once intimate, familiar, and wholly alienated and inaccessible.
Although the tune may have changed, the song remains the same. Today’s notions of social visibility are innately digital, even when, of course, there’s a real person on the other side of the filter, but the anxieties of perception, how to square one’s existence as one who both percieves and is percieved, are nothing new. It’s the same mediation of desires, the same search for meaning, and frequently the same emptiness.
Yet however vapid, superficial, or inconsequential you might assume a given Kardashian to be—one of those percieved entities in the fishbowl of the phone screen or the television rather than the cafe—because you can’t under any circumstances claim to know them, or what is in their heart, you can’t really percieve them either. At least not in the way you probably feel that you can and do. Their interiority is more alien to you by virtue of their celebrity, by the cultivation of an image to be seen.
There is some agreement we all enter into, in this social architecture, that tells us to find purpose and to know our desires through the delicate balance of perception, but it’s ultimately alienating and atomizing, and we stray further from ourselves and build psychic walls between one another, again, like the big glass windows of Haussmann’s Paris or the tiny glass windows of our modern social existence.
Of course, one can’t escape the feeling that the desire has a substantive core somewhere beneath the architectures of modernity, and that we pursue this core in substantive ways, usually believing we escape the tricks of materialism or vanity. It’s hopelessly cynical to really believe that you live your life—your one life, which will begin and end—under the strictest terms of market mediation. Nobody actually wants to live in a thought experiment. But when we belive too readily in the possibility of a selfhood cleanly divorced from that market-mediated reality, we risk commodifying our most valueable and humane experiences of art or epiphany.
I do wonder where Evander Berry Wall, The King of the Dudes (perhaps), ended up on this subject. He never made any money, burning out in New York and eventually ending up in Paris, where it seems his socialite star only shone brighter. He wrote a memoir near the end of his life, preciously titled, Neither Pest Nor Puritan. It seems to be out of print, but I’d like to dig up a copy.
I think I should note here that I’m currently combing through Marx’s 18th Brumire of Louis Bonaparte, the reading of which (I have discovered) requires a better understanding of the Parisian uprisings of the 1840s than I currently have. But this isn’t so much of a history blog as it is cultural commentary, so fuck it. If Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens can puke up a party-size order of jalapeno poppers in the New York Times every couple weeks, I think the 30 or so people who read this Substack can live with the possibility of some superficial or even flawed historical perspective.