Can You Wear Philosophy?
Can You Wear Philosophy?
There is potential both exhilarating and infuriating in treating a garment as a think piece.
Hi! In this post, I’ll consider whether or not fashion can be part of a material practice to back up philosophies like Object-Oriented Ontology and Accelerationism—I don’t know that I’ll come up with an answer, but I’m interested in the question! Note that things might make no sense, and that doesn’t mean you’re missing something, it could mean that I simply jump the shark in my thought processes. These posts are completely unedited. If you hate words, I don’t blame you, and the next post will be full of pictures again, I promise.
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Object-Oriented Fashion
“Philosophies are means to ends. New ideas beg the question not of whether they are right or wrong but of whether they make for being rightly or wrongly. For this reason, ideas deserve deployment” claims Katherine Behar in her essay “Facing Necrophilia, or ‘Botox Ethics’,” the main thrust of which implores philosophers of Object-Oriented Ontology to put their physical bodies on the line (or, at least, conceive of doing so) to further their understanding of their claims.
I’m really not trying to get too in the weeds linguistically here, because a) this is a unpaid post on a fashion blog, not a dissertation, and I’m sure you would want me to pay YOU to read it if it were, b) the whole point of both my engagement with philosophy and my proclivities towards Object-Oriented Feminist thinkers like Behar is rooted in the desire to ground abstractions in material reality, creating opportunities in which we (you and I) can discuss big ideas without resorting to opaque, academic theorizing or exclusivist language, and c) it’s so boring to write about.
With that said, as per the last piece in which I mentioned OOO, I define it as a “philosophical paradigm that emphasizes the agency and independence of objects, treating them as entities with their own existence and not just as passive elements in human perception.” Basically, OOO argues things that aren’t human don’t “exist” any less than humans just because we can’t imagine them as the subjects of their own existences, instead conceiving of our hairbrushes and headaches and happiness as contingent accessories to the human experience.
I deeply resonate with Behar’s call to action—hers calls upon OOO scholars to consider body modifications like Botox and plastic surgery not simply as futile acts of vanity, as they’re often framed by the intelligentsia, but as attempts to live the philosophy in its most literal form through self-objectification: “Botox turns us into objects, shoots us up with our own plasticity, and lets us— as objects— exist mutually, independently, and graciously in the dead object world.” Behar doesn’t moralize or assign value to body modification, nor is she imminently interested in its gendered or classed implications, in this piece she simply posits it as a potentially generative practice for the sake of a deeper understanding of, and investment in, an otherwise-abstract philosophy.
Because the subject and object of self-objectification are one and the same, in this case, objectification is not used as a tool to delegitimize the sovereignty of the person in question—to do so would be to deny the existence of a self entirely, a disavowal hard to perform with thoughts that originate in the self. Forms of body modification that alter the body to conform to inarguably Eurocentric beauty standards (weight loss surgeries, nose jobs, eyelid surgery, etc) counter the effects of self-objectification as the body becomes more of a conceptual project or a social strategy than a material. Procedures that either alter the body in a way that doesn’t adhere to these standards or that don’t alter the body but rather ornament it, such as tattooing, allow for self-objectification without necessarily implying a bid to win social currency.
Tattoos can’t negate the weaponized objectification applied to the bodies of marginalized people, but the dissociation and self-objectification of one’s own body they induce are valuable processes that can allow for counterintuitive new ways of inhabiting that body. For me, tattooing has been a valuable tool with which I can disentangle my transcendent sense of self from the immanence of my skin, a major step towards understanding myself as a being not defined by physiological properties but by the creativity and autonomy my tattoos permanently affirm.
Part of the fun I have with fashion originates from the same impulse toward self-objectification, with a conveniently temporary tenor—no grand existential decisions must be made to justify wearing an outfit every morning. That would be hellish. Instead, the process runs quietly under the surface of my dressing, with subconscious questions I must answer: How much physical space do I want to take up with my outfit today? Do I want to look threatening or welcoming, and if so, to whom? Essentially, what kind of object among objects do I want my physical body to be in the word today?
Most of the time, the answer to all is “whatever,” and I end up in boxers and a drugstore tank top on my way to the laundromat or walking my dog. But the times I do have more of an OOO-minded approach to dressing, I gravitate towards visual gags, like this faux wardrobe malfunction from Lanvin SS17:
Deliberate, typically humorous sexualization, like this Helmut Lang number from SS01:
And suggestions of the grotesque, like anything from Comme Des Garçon’s ‘97 Lumps and Bumps collection, as evidenced by my post all about bulky fashion.
I suppose this all amounts to the fact that, when I have the time, energy, and money (extremely rarely), I like to be the kind of object that bumps into people in strategically awkward ways, is seen as a sexual object but attraction can conceivably be played off as a joke, and is generally a confounding thing to be around. This morning, I saw Central Saint Martin student Murray Sheehan’s recent project, like Duchamp’s urinal had a baby with a biblically accurate angel, and felt like it aligned perfectly with all of the above:
I think this form of self-objectification does help me understand the subjective experience of the non-human object a tiny bit better, and it helps me situate myself amongst the matrix of this world’s entities as a bit of an antagonistic force, but one that’s attached to an inescapable sense of humor.
It also points toward an OOO-aligned praxis—Behar writes, “By numbing ourselves with Botox ethics, we can resist the Other- directed compulsion to connect, and the neoliberal internalization of the requirement to make alliances.” Of course, Behar isn’t saying that this connection is bad—her essay is laden with humor and a wry self-awareness, she is just faithfully materializing an immaterial philosophy that deprioritizes “liveliness” and “connection” as anthropocentric, or human-centered, while prioritizing a coexistence that looks more like co-objecthood. As an exercise in philosophical application, I think an Object-Oriented take on fashion is effective, generative, and fun.
Fashion Accelerationism
On the other hand, there are some philosophical endeavors that don’t lend themselves to getting dressed, souring the whole process into a soulless ordeal. I was contacted by a group called “LMX Unlimited” after I mentioned OOO in the post mentioned above. A representative, writing under an obvious pseudonym, emailed me:
“We’ve created a new mode of garment production that allows for the synthetic re-creation of personal narrative, affective aura and handmade craft technique. To model our process (and as a friendly bit of rivalry) we’ve edited and re-created a hand drawn Bode T-shirt.”
On its site, LMX boasts that, with its incredible new machine “lubricated by synthetic spermaceti” (it appears similar to the kind of drawing robot arm you can buy for $100 online, just covered in a waxy substance and lit candles that have zero contact with the shirt itself), it can create “a look-a-like T-shirt [that] carries exactly the same emotional and mystical value as its progenitor, that, thanks to productivity minded innovation, can be brought to market with a dramatic reduction of necessary labor time.”
This project is sponsored by the Confucius Institute and The Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, and reads immediately as a sculpture first-year’s attempt at a poignant art piece. My authority in evaluating that statement is that I, myself, was once a sculpture first-year (at Pratt Institute, no less! And now I can barely draw a smiley face without having flashbacks and remembering my $200k debt. Kids, don’t go to art school unless your family is footing the bill), and saw many a piece with similarly slapdash execution and a similarly bold philosophical justification.
I hate bad faith performance art. I don’t like work that’s an inside joke to everyone except the creators, meant to make people feel excluded from the inner workings of a piece’s ideologies, and this was clearly that—the neo-phrase “Deep Events” are mentioned many times on the group’s site as an underpinning of each piece they’ve produced. When I asked how my pseudonymous correspondent defined them, they told me “As we understand them, Deep Events are to politics as affect is to emotion.” This can mean basically anything, but I’ll choose to understand it as the phenomenological, material experience of a political concept or action. What’s the political action here, in that case? “Our light industrial model mechanizes the production of terroir, allowing massive growth potential for moribund or materially reactionary fashion firms.”
After more inquiring into why in the world developing mechanization to produce faux “aura” as per Walter Benjamin would be a politically salient move, I got the idea salad response that “We believe the ability to make productive investments of fixed capital into a growing sector of the luxury production model (construction of narrative, craft hand work, authentic terroir*) frees firms and workers from piecework models of reactionary nostalgic labor and allow more dynamic and productive forms of work (making things up, playing around with chemicals, bureaucracy).” *Terroir almost exclusively refers to soil in which wine is grown, which I guess could be a cheeky reference to the Bacchus imagery of the t-shirt, but its dominance in the justification of the piece is largely meaningless
I guess this could be construed as fashion-based accelerationism, (the idea that in order to overcome the limitations of capitalism, society must accelerate the processes of technological development, automation, and capitalist growth to a point where the system collapses on its own contradictions), but the piece (which LMX kindly sent me for analysis) itself doesn’t do much to further this train:
An uglier, less wearable $100 version of an already ugly, unappealing garment that I’m sure initially went for hundreds more, doesn’t capture any of the barely-there affective poignance seen in the original shirt, so the acceleration comes to an abrupt halt—if no one wants the product, what does it matter how it’s made? There is no piquing of interest or desire in the material object, the shirt, itself to further any kind of political or aesthetic agenda—there’s not even much to react to, though they picked the right sculpture major to target, obviously, given my thorough response to their fuckery in this post. The only thing, however, that moved me at all about this shirt (moved me against it, that is), was the predictably pretentious response to an inquiry into the artistic aspirations of the piece: “Luckily, we have no interest in producing ‘Art’, but even though our output are clearly products, out of an abundance of caution we globally label them not ‘Art’.“
Note: I initially misunderstood important context here, which is that the group is legally prohibited from making Art. I have no idea what could have happened to create such an esoteric legal situation, but that does mean my brash critique below should be taken with a large grain of salt.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a variation of this meaningless sentence in performance work that fetishizes legalese and bureaucratic tomfoolery, and it is so mind-bogglingly predictable it actually disappointed me. I can’t help but engage with fashion and clothes earnestly, materially and philosophically, art though the label of “art” doesn't inherently make something more valuable or worthy of esteem, the label of “not art” instantly guts a piece of any potential pathos I might’ve projected onto it. The joke is on me, for reading into something, for investigating its aesthetic context, for trusting it had a motive other than arcane academic ennui.
I appreciate LMX for annoying me enough to squeeze this writing out of me on a 90 degree, AC-less weekend, and whoever contacted me seemed very intelligent—I think what really annoys me is seeing intelligence funneled into not only an unfunny joke but also a genuinely ugly piece of clothing. If pressed, I prefer the “enzyme-digested” baseball cap:
It at least catalyzes (lol) some interesting thought processes about the divide between the inside and the outside of the body and what it means to separate a biological process from its context and render it aesthetically viable. The shirt I don’t see as politically, artistically, or philosophically poignant in any way, but I’m sure you’ll catch me wearing it to the laundromat.
Anyway, I’m sure that everyone at this organization could deftly toss word salad to refute any of my above missives, and that giving them a tiny modicum of publicity is well worth me calling their shirt ugly several times, and before I received this package, I was writers’ blocked, so I suppose everyone wins at the end of the day.
If you’re still here, thanks! I’m barely here myself!
<3 HR