Conclusion |
Things, I reflected, are tougher than people. Things are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate.
BRUCE CHATWIN, UTZ
Comfortable: A refuge; a nostalgia; the calm before or after.
JUDITH CLARK AND ADAM PHILLIPS
Fans, like fashion and fortune-telling, inhabit a disturbing inter-space between the material and the spiritual: they depend upon concrete aesthetic objects and experiences, but these are given an intense and ultimately even spiritual meaning. Billie Jean King’s ‘lucky’ dress became more than just a dress; it was a talisman, a fetish object. Less dramatically, ‘successful’ garments – garments in which the wearer feels good, attracts positive attention, erotic or not, or achieves a success – have a special significance that goes beyond mere flaunting. The Japanese dress designer, Yohji Yamamoto, said that he wanted to design clothes that became as it were part of the wearer’s personality, worn and worn until someone seeing a jacket, for example, hanging up, would say ‘that is Tom’ (the jacket’s owner).1 But for many, fashion, forgivable if it is just ‘fun’, becomes pretentious, absurd or sinister if loaded with too much meaning. The occult is mere superstition because it does not conform to the precepts, neither of the dominant world religions nor of reason, and is therefore also downgraded to the status of a joke. Fans are equally ridiculous because they value the wrong things. To take such obsessions seriously offends not only reason, but also a taken-for-granted moral and ethical system that divides the serious from the trivial in established ways.
There is another way of understanding material culture. The objects warehoused in the Victoria and Albert Museum Repository had lost their meaning, becoming an accumulation of, at best, understudies for similar but more valuable or interesting articles on display in the museum itself. Merely sorted into categories, they bore little relation to one another. Only when objects are ordered and displayed and given a pattern, in a museum or a private house, do they acquire human meaning, a meaning acquired through their connexion with the relationships and narratives provided by their owners or curators, and by the audience for whom the displays, whether private or public, are intended.
Ian Woodward makes use of the ‘object relations’ theory of the psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, to explore a similar view. He rejects the pessimism of those writers, such as Jean Baudrillard,2 who have seen only a form of false consciousness in the attachment to things. Woodward argues that human-object relations are crucial to the development of a sense of self. Winnicott, he says, suggests that ‘object consumption is located in an emergent space bridging inner and outer worlds, human and non-human, that is “made” from play, invention and engagement with objects in ones environment’.3 Objects may be largely perceived in contemporary society as commodities, yet can be ‘decommodified through subjectification practices’; that is, by being given non-commodity meanings. Winnicott observed how the infant, in clinging to a piece of cloth, which might be its own shawl or might be part of its mother’s discarded clothing, was negotiating the separation of self from mother. So, ‘the magical element of everyday consumption is that the most banal, emptied-out, seemingly trivial thing can be a most powerful container of cultural values and ideologies’. The relationship of human with object creates a ‘third space’ in which creative transformation is possible. For Winnicott, and, following him, for Woodward, this is where the human imagination transforms the banal and brutally concrete into meaning. Ultimately, it is the search for the sacred object, ‘for that which allows us to transcend the profane, everyday or prosaic’.4
In The Comfort of Things, Daniel Miller5 acknowledges the ways in which engagement with objects is deeply meaningful, at once aesthetic and symbolic. He suggests that the inhabitants of cosmopolitan centres like London – those, at least, who live above the poverty line – have been freed by a relatively well-functioning state and the loosening grip of common moral values, to create meaningful lives in any number of different ways, and that what he calls ‘the comfort of things’ is essential to this creation of meaning. Far from being ‘materialistic’, the significance and value given by individuals to objects and aesthetic practices is how they make sense of their lives, and how they cement their freely chosen relationships or heal themselves from damaging ones. Holiday souvenirs, a laptop, tattooing, a music collection, cherished clothes, resemble the found objects of the Surrealists, imbued by chance or memory over time with magical, even religious qualities. They come to contain the meaning of a life distilled to its essence.
Miller argues that these individual and personal talismans become especially potent in individualistic and fragmented societies such as exist in the West, except that he rejects the idea that they are fragmented. He concedes that the normative sociological idea of ‘society’ as cohesive and relatively homogenous may be outdated, but denies that contemporary ‘post society’ is anomic, that its citizens are isolated, or that the social fabric has lost all ‘sense of purpose and order’. We do not live in a ‘broken society’. For him, our lack of a common identity facilitates more varied forms of self-expression, but it is not individualism or a cult of the individual. It is rather that the search for and cultivation of fulfilling relationships has become more important than ever now that it is not restricted to family and kin, though these may (but may not) remain central.
Individual tastes of course reflect our socialisation, which includes class background, education and other variables, as well as our response to and reinterpretation of these. Nevertheless, the objects that individuals gather round them, and the practices, hobbies and entertainments they enjoy, are intimately connected to their own sense of identity and to the relationships they form and, perhaps particularly in the case of aesthetic objects, express these relationships, creating a life narrative.
Miller does not mention the work that goes into the production of material culture. One form that hostility to fashion takes is to denounce it for the often hideous work practices that go to its making. Victorian seamstresses, Lower East Side sweatshops and lock-in factories in Asia are rightfully attacked. That does not invalidate the skilled craft that invests well-made objects with meaning even before they have found an owner. Material culture is about making – fashioning – as much as it is about owning and preserving.
Miller acknowledges that the freedom to live an aesthetic but also emotionally and spiritually meaningful life involves something of an amnesia towards the state structures that support it. We become aware of them ‘only when they break down and disappoint our quite extraordinarily high expectations of them’ (as when blaming the government for blizzards, volcanic eruptions and floods, or at least its inability to deal instantaneously with the inconvenience they cause): ‘Politics is reduced to that which we blame for whatever and whoever lets us down.’ The idea of allegiance to political party is lost: ‘People do not need to believe in society; they may not even bother to vote and they may treat politics more as a spectator sport, on a par with football.’
This is a compelling defence of material culture, but there is a crucial caveat. Where an ‘advanced’ society breaks down, as happened after the end of the Soviet Union or during the Great Inflation of the Weimar Republic, the benign state of affairs described by Miller also breaks down, as families camp on the street trying to sell the precious objects they cherished so much and which gave their life such meaning. Even in less dramatically collapsing societies, political apathy extracts a price sooner or later, threatening the way of life citizens have come to take for granted. It is dangerous for a people to become politically apathetic, because they are then weak or even defenceless when their taken-for-granted way of life comes under attack.
In 2011, faced with a reign of austerity and the fragility, even the possible breakdown of the global economy, it is easy to fault Miller for not taking more seriously the perilous foundations of this personalised culture. Yet although he underplays the dangers of political apathy and of taking the welfare state for granted, he mounts a strong challenge to the Western suspicion of the aesthetic. He uses this term with hesitation: ‘By choosing this term I don’t mean anything technical or artistic, and certainly I hope nothing pretentious.’ But why should ‘aesthetic’ equate with pretentious? In his uses of the word he simply hopes to convey ‘something of the overall desire for harmony, order and balance that may be discerned in certain cases – and also dissonance, contradiction and irony in others’.
The very fact that our aesthetic choices reside in concrete objects and practices is what constitutes their seriousness. Dress is ritual; it is expressive of a stance in relation to the conduct of one’s life (whatever that stance may be). The life of the hardcore fan is suffused with ritual. To explore the occult (admittedly a world full of fakery and deceit) is to protest against the normative constraints of what is considered reasonable and rational in modern society, just as the defiant behaviour of the post-war pervert, charted by Hornsey, was a protest against the behavioural norms of the 1950s, as well as against the rationalisation of the urban fabric and the utopian desire to eliminate every unplanned corner and forgotten cul-de-sac.
Daniel Miller’s assessment of the ways in which individuals create meaning in their lives is an optimistic one. Ien Ang, in her 1985 study of fans of the TV soap opera, Dallas,6 took a more melancholy view. She wrote of a ‘tragic structure of feeling’, which responds to the melodrama of the fiction that gripped the imagination of the audience. Fans responded to the soap because it was true to the way in which life ‘is characterised by an endless fluctuation between happiness and unhappiness’, tragic ‘because of the idea that happiness can never last forever but, quite the contrary, is precarious’. This is close to Adorno’s view of aesthetic experience as compensatory, as consolation.
Dallas is melodrama and for Ang melodrama is ‘a form of the tragic … for a world in which there is no longer a tenable idea of the sacred’. The tragic structure of feeling responds to melodrama because melodrama is not about great heroes or large-scale sufferings, but heightens and dignifies domestic, small-scale tragedies. ‘There are no words for the ordinary pain of living of ordinary people in the modern welfare state, for the vague sense of loss’, writes Ang. ‘There is a material meaninglessness of everyday existence, in which routine and habit prevail in human relationships’, but its fans valued Dallas because it took seriously the everyday tragedies and ups and downs of life, rescuing them from anomie and giving meaning to the previously meaningless. That is not to say that they were incapable of satirising the over-the-top quality of the wealthy setting and the exaggeration of situations. They enjoyed it ironically as well as with a straight face.
Daniel Miller and Ien Ang unite in challenging the ‘comfort’ of contemporary Western societies, or at least they challenge the common view that its popular cultural manifestations provide a kind of undemanding security blanket. ‘Comfort’ is a word with a lot of traction. It has expanded from its core meaning of a physical sensation of ease (a comfortable chair) and an earlier emotional meaning (he comforted the bereaved) of a response to loss, into its present meaning. ‘I’m not comfortable with this’ is euphemistic, since it can actually mean ‘this greatly offends me’ or ‘I totally disagree’, or can suggest moral unease. On the other hand, to ‘be in one’s comfort zone’ implies that this is not a state to which one should aspire and implies disapproval of perceived laziness or moral cowardice.
Miller and Ang imply that the ‘comfort’ provided by modern welfare states has drawbacks. However, it is not necessary to be in favour of slashing welfare to understand how material comfort might inadvertently limit the imagination and become a brake rather than a springboard, might suffocate a sense of the sacred. Abercrombie’s post-war plan for London, as interpreted by Hornsey, was just such a brake, its intention to limit behaviour that was judged subversive and dangerous to the utilitarian purposes of society. Abercrombie, one feels, would have had no time for Ang’s ‘tragic structure of feeling’ and would have struggled to appreciate the camp irony of Federer’s Credit Suisse celebrity.
The attack Stauth and Turner mounted on the melancholic intellectuals Adorno and Horkheimer strikes a similar note. Melancholy certainly implies a passivity in the face of life’s brevity, boredom and often cruelty. Miller, on the other hand, affirms the strength in the way in which individuals find affirmation and self-expression. Nor is the aesthetic merely a decoration on the surface of life. The film Trouble the Water, directed by Karl Deal and Tia Lessin in 2008, told the story of an African American couple, Kimberley and Scott, caught in the New Orleans floods. They survived their life-threatening ordeal – and their already existing problems – partly by their determination that Kimberley should succeed as a rap artist. It was an artistic project that carried them through and at the same time expressed the political meaning of the New Orleans disaster when they documented it in a second artistic project, the film.
Both film and music were more than ‘art for art’s sake’. In fact, art is never just ‘for art’s sake’. Those who adopted the slogan in the nineteenth century meant that art did not need moral justification, not that it had any other meaning than beauty. Art always reaches beyond itself.
There is, also, more than ‘comfort’ in ‘things’. The value system that finds manliness in stoicism, but only frivolity and ‘feminine’ weak-mindedness in fashion, beauty and fandom, is flawed, unbalanced and one-sided. Yet this suspicion of the aesthetic remains embedded in popular culture. At the conclusion of John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the traitor states that he chose the Soviet Union for ‘aesthetic’ reasons: ‘The West has become so ugly’ – a remark full of irony, given the ugliness of the USSR at the time. But le Carré here endorses an enduring misconception: that the aesthetic is somehow the antithesis of moral virtue. The traitor is a traitor because he values beauty (as he sees it) over and above – and against – patriotism, loyalty and truthfulness. This begs the question of why ‘the aesthetic’ should be posed as the opposite of moral values.
The ‘postmodern’ enthusiasm for mass culture, represented by Stauth and Turner, was equally flawed. It claimed to defend mass culture on the grounds that popular forms gave a voice to minorities and demoted the allegedly oppressive dominance of the ‘white western male’ traditional culture, but often seemed to defend mass culture simply because it was popular, capitulating to the tyranny of the majority.
My selective explorations of – mostly – popular cultural forms and practices defends them for a different reason: that they speak a longing for beauty that is at the same time a search for meaning and transcendence. They mount a challenge to the overwhelmingly utilitarian values that dominate contemporary society, proclaiming that there is more to life than ‘value for money’ or the growth of the economy (even if paradoxically they partly depend on this). Finally, it is poignant to look at the perfectly preserved gown of a woman that died 200 years ago, or at a vase carefully fashioned 2,000 years before we were born, or at a DVD of Federer’s greatest match. These remind us as much as any religious sermon of the transience of life, yet more than any sermon a defence of life’s value.