Fashion: Sartorial Opiate or Shamanistic Magic?

New word: sartorial means pertaining to tailoring. The history of consumerism is embodied in the glamorous, eye candy history of fashion. These writers have more direct awareness of the relationship between fashion and imperialism than most economists. Where economists seem to accept industrial growth and expansion as a good that will raise all boats, these art historians and cultural observers touch on the darker underpinnings of an elitism that could not survive without cheap labor to shore up the expensive tastes of its wasteful leisure classes. Christopher Breward, author of "Fashion", from the Oxford History of Art series, is particularly insightful in this regard.

From his rather dry account, I learned that "dynamic obsolescence" was invented by fashion stylists beginning in the mid 19th century with the concept of the fall and winter collection which aggressively rendered last seasons fashion out of style. Obsolescence is of course the driving growth of virtually all industries today.

Fashion being the most portable and accessible of cultural markers was spread from the three key cities: London, Paris and New York via print media, the fashion show and later film and television to other cities aspiring to rank as global players. (The fashion show was big in Bangkok where it was usually associated with royalty. I was a runway model for two of these events at the home of local royalty when I was five and six years old.)

So I was intrigued to learn that it is mainly in the West that fashion was ever changing while elsewhere it was static due to local customs and social hierarchies. This does parallel the rise of the cult of the individual in the West, but I would go further and look at the religious beliefs that allowed this cult of the individual to arise. Buddhism, for instance, with its teachings of no self would not lend itself to the cultivation of individualism and still doesn't, not with the skill of personal power that Western psychology has elevated it to.

But I am not in a hurry to label fashion as a tool of imperialist Western selfishness. These accounts of fashion also point out the influence of street fashion from the 19th century dandy to the Punk styles of the '70s. Vivienne Westwood, whose fashion footsteps I seem to be following, is credited with firing up the whole phenomena of Punk. She then went on to fuse 16th century, ie Renaissance clothing cuts, with modern materials and gender bending presentation. Fashion was certainly a part of the emancipation of women, had a hand in popularizing cycling and has been the visual marker of all kinds of anti-establishment movements including queer culture. It has been as much a tool of the outsider in communicating resistance as it has been a tool of the elite to dictate the parameters of the in crowd.

But to go even deeper, I remembered from the novel "The Mists of Avalon" that glamour is a word borrowed from witchcraft. Thus glamour is a concept used by witches to enhance spells that require the viewer to be enchanted by the appearance of the witch herself. (Kind of a sleight of hand like the use of the Force in Starwars when Obe One persuaded Stormtroopers to allow him entry through a security checkpoint.)

In this sense it could be said that fashion is akin to the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Where drugs were once an important part of shamanistic ritual, they are now taken without the ritual and have become portals to addiction. Thus fashion has become a portal for consumer addiction. But rather than take the puritanical route and declare a "fashion free" zone, I would prefer to reclaim fashion as an inspirational art force that requires a constant stream of creative manifestations to communicate ideas and ideals, but it would also have to be done without compromising values of sustainability. And I can do that as long as there is already manufactured materials out there to salvage. After that it will be back to the fig leaf.

The Middle Mind

So much of what Curtis White says in the final third of this book is brilliant and had me furiously taking notes. He also infuriated me and tried my patience with the first two thirds of his book while he complains about what I have long abandoned as hopeless mediocrity. In his characteristically cranky white boy way (by which I mean he references mostly works by white guys and gives grudging lip service to feminism, queer theory and minorities), he gives the impression that he is struggling in quicksand to free himself from the very culture he is complaining about.

The Middle Mind is what ails us says Curtis White, who characterizes this condition as a lack of imagination and therefore an inability to think and as a result make change happen. He lays out his thesis in a systematic and somewhat exhaustive way to show how the imagination has been co-opted by various sectors of society including the entertainment industry, the academic institutions, the military industrial complex, technological innovation, capitalism, the New Age spiritual movement and the art world. Ultimately he identifies that it is art (both high and low) and philosophy, that will best serve us as the vehicle for cultivating imagination in our culture.

He chooses art for the job by which I gather he means art that has been imbued with meaning and context, but not so controlled that the sublime and unexpected cannot slip in. I was illuminated by his description of how consumerism has robbed us of historical perspective and context. This is why we can't seem to think things through to their logical conclusion. We are made to be satisfied with a surface level of critieria and ethics. We are encouraged to be "stupid/smart" so that we contribute to the market (ie capitalism) through innovation, but don't question the status quo.

He tells us that "art reminds us that change is real and the possible is possible". He specifies that it is the job of art to remind us of justice, freedom and creativity—the promises of the Enlightenment. Art should "critique and imagine alternatives to the social status quo. Art is at work only when it is biting the hand that feeds it."

This last concept was particularly empowering for me because I've always felt that way about art and the market for art. The book was most useful in how it got me thinking about "being the change I want to see" but not that rah rah solution oriented, techno-wonderful, change, more subversive, gritty, badly behaved, unpredictable and revolutionary in meaning. Fodder for my next essay.

The World Is Flat

Reads like an Evangelical preacher explaining, to the already converted, how we will have heaven on Earth if everyone on the planet would just embrace Capitalism and repent from the evil ways of Communism, Marxism and terrorism.

NY Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Freidman, is well known, which is why so many people were reading this pap and mentioning it to me until I felt I had to suffer through it in order to respond intelligently. The first third of the book is about how the internet brought us globalized trade, thus "flattening" the world. All old news if you've kept up with technology or lost money in the dot.com debacle. Some interesting anecdotes of how India ramped up their call centers in Bangalore, that explains a lot about India's current stake in the world's economy, as well as China's, but it's really about Dell Computer's stake in the world and McDonalds.

All his details are a good example of how invested we are in increased complexity, vastly long supply lines, and an exponentially expanding power grid. He does not mention anything about how vulnerable these features make the whole world (except in the event of terrorism).

In the second third of the book he gives his readers a stern talking to about how Americans have to get back to discipline and hard work and figure this whole flat world thing out, in order to keep up with the much cheaper and better educated worker in India who so happily man (and woman) those call centers. At which point I suspect most will put the book down.

Near the end, he becomes so stunningly ill conceived, as to be rendered dangerous, if anyone bothers to read to the end of this tome. He has the audacity to suggest that Capitalism is the ultimate tool of peace because every country that has a McDonald's in it is far less likely to make war on its neighbors (because supply lines have become so important). He does not mention that every country that has a McDonald's in it is far less likely to be bombed by the US, back into the Stone Age, because it has not yet been colonized by corporate interests and needs to be humbled so it can be.

He explains the events of 9/11 as a cautionary tale about how the flattening of the world makes us vulnerable to the suicide bombers of the world (all 200 of them since 9/11) while making no mention of the impact of our sanctified, military terrorism, apart from some references to Bush and Co having behaved badly.

He does attempt to fend off critics of capitalism by offering to tweak the system with his suggestions for a more "compassionate" capitalism. His appeal to industry to take the compassionate route is about as effective a call to arms as a preacher's plea to his flock to abstain from sex (and for himself to abstain from buggering the choir).

His understanding of the world is so simplistic, he reminds me of our Teflon president, Reagan. I can just see him browsing a bookstore and saying to himself, "I don't need to read that, it's written by a Blah, Blah", whenever he comes upon anything that might challenge his viewpoint. I gather that most of the nation sees the world the way he presents it and conduct themselves in a similar fashion.

The Collapse of Complex Societies

Published in 1988, this is the grandaddy of collapse literature. A short, but pithy academic treatment of the subject. Tainter starts by analysing all the past attempts at explaining why societies collapse including: resource depletion, new resources overwhelming old systems, catastrophes, insufficient response to circumstances, other complex societies taking over, intruders, conflict contradictions and mismanagement, social dysfunction, mystical explanations, chance concatenation of events and finally the only one he feels is viable—economics.

Because complex societies excel at handling adversity, he accounts for collapse as the logical fallout from diminishing returns on investment of labor and resources, particularly in agriculture, information processing and education, sociopolitical control and specialization and overall economic productivity.

He examines in detail the collapse of Ancient Rome due to over expansion leading to high operational costs. Leaders tried to compensate by debasing the currency, thus shifting the burden to future taxpayers, but the future also faced equivalent crisis. Eventually overly high taxes drained the agriculture sector and the peasantry upon which Rome relied.

He also details the Mayan collapse. The societies herewith were competing in an art race (to intimidate their enemies). He doesn't mention Easter Island, but sounds similar to those big heads. The Mayan elites further imposed an expanded building program on a weakened and undernourished population that could not support the demands and presumably fled or died.

The third society he examines is the Chacoan of the American southwest. This network of communities was challenged by arid land that eventually was not diverse enough to meet the unpredictable production of the land. Communities left the network, preferring to migrate rather than deal with drought. Major construction of food storage facilities drained resources.

Tainter claims that collapse is not likely today because of 1) absorption by larger state or neighbor, 2) economic support by a dominant power or by an international financing agency, 3) payment by the support population of overhead costs to keep the society going. The situation today is unique because all societies are complex; there needs to be a power vacuum to bring on collapse. What we have today are competitive peer polities. It is an arms race situation. Tainter points out that unilateral economic downsizing is as foolhardy as unilateral disarmament, but doesn't say why.

He feels that we will finance diminishing returns well into the future and that collapse will be global. He points out that reliance on stored energy reserves (oil?) demands that we find a new energy subsidy. Lack of a power vacuum and competitive spiral have given the world a reprieve from collapse. Failure to take advantage of the current reprieve will lead to collapse. Competition may also lead to collapse. The appearance of a disastrous situation that all decry may force us to tolerate a situation of declining marginal returns long enough to achieve a temporary solution to it. He urges that we must proceed rationally and make it our highest priority to find new energy source.

Tainter actually comes across as fairly optimistic especially now that global warming is being seriously discussed since complex societies are supposed to be good at solving complex problems like this. His description of complex societies and how they work projects a solution that is based in technological innovation and bureaucratic management. If a society fails to solve problems of insufficient resources or environmental degradation, then he feels that it is not a dysfunction of the complex society, but of the psychological underpinnings of said society.

His thesis gives the impression of inevitability. We will collapse because increasing complexity will overwhelm the resources needed to manage such complexity. He doesn't really leave room for rethinking how we live or creating a new myth to live by. We are trapped in a prison of our own making. Is this merely a patriarchal way of thinking given all the research on matriarchal societies that lived in harmony with the land?

Collapse

Because his previous book "Guns, Germs and Steel" was so long winded, I wasn't going to read "Collapse", but it's the topic of a discussion group next week, with local environmental leaders, so slog through it I did. His message is that since we have the advantage, that no primitive society did, of knowing how societies have collapsed in the past, this means that we have the power to yank ourselves from the vortex of collapse, if we just choose to do so.

What was illuminating were his chapters on societies that did avert eco-disaster like the Tokugawa shoguns of Japan who reversed deforestation and this dictator chap in the Dominican Republic who enforced environmental regulations that saved the forest from further logging. These examples do rather contradict his premise that we have an advantage over early societies because we know so much about how they collapsed. What we do need to know is how close we are to using up our resources. The Japanese had every tree catalogued and a schedule drawn up for when each could be logged and for what purpose. We could barcode every tree from sea to shining sea with our technology, but that would just reveal that the government was giving away the store.

These early examples of reforestation also imply that democracy is too damned slow and ineffective, but Diamond is not going to be the man who points this out. He shines the way on a path through bottom up, grassroots change and this is exactly why he's so popular with environmental movements.

What I did find useful in reading this 500 page tome, was gleaned from his criticism of Joseph Tainter's book, "The Collapse of Complex Societies". (I've been trying to get this book for over a year now, but it's not in any public library, just at Stanford University to which I have no direct access and it's not cheap to buy.) Tainter's book informs the peak-oil community and is the basis of their discussions, thus I can now make a distinction between the environmental movement and the peak oil movement.

Diamond thinks that Tainter didn't get it about environmental degradation, but Diamond refuses to get Tainter's point about the economic forces of complex societies, which is, if I might simplify, that the solutions necessary to make our complex society sustainable, will require even more complexity and use of resources. Readers of both authors can decide which leads to sustainability—Diamonds path to regulate and restrict industry or Tainter's path to work towards dismantling and simplifying our complex society. One is politically plausible; the other may be politically impossible.

Planet of Slums

Nobody should have any delusions about the global economy raising all boats, after reading this. Fascinating details, thoroughly researched and footnoted. Has a Dante's Inferno quality to it as the author describes the conditions and peels back the myths about the poor and the neo-liberal free market solutions that have been bestowed on them.

This thesis exposes the fallout of the International Monetary Fund policies as it works its way through each third world country for the benefit of those fleecing the world for every last penny. Though I already knew about IMF policies wreaking havoc on local economies, agriculture and the environment, I had no idea that exploiting the poor could be so profitable, but because there are so increasingly many of them congregating in such concentrated areas, they are a large market for all the things that the IMF forced the host country to take away ie, housing, food, power and water.

One of the slums mentioned a number of times is Klong Toey which is within walking distance of my house in Bangkok. I never ventured into it, only drove past.

His parenthetical references to his sources breaks up the narrative a bit and he assumes that one should know where all these cities are. Quick where is Kinshassa, Dakar and Port-au-Prince? Being a British publication, the author may have assumed a higher level of education of his reader, but I appreciated the global sweep of his coverage.

The final analysis by the Pentagon is as revealing as their report on Global Warming was. Something here for everyone whether you fear economic collapse, terrorism or bird flu. A much needed perspective for anyone wanting to fathom solutions for planetary problems. Luckily he is working on another book about how the poor are resisting. After all, after the Inferno comes Purgatory. Would be nice to have a Paradisio too.