Texture, Feeling, and the Clothing Libido
Among the list of difficult things to express in writing might be considered rich sensuous experience, intense rapturous feelings, and deeply meaningful lived experiences. We even find speech to sometimes fail us. Responding to extreme, almost apophantic experiences, we’re left speechless. In other words, the richness of experiences robs us of the means by which we could communicate that very experience to others. This is even the case with less extreme, though not entirely unimportant or negligible, examples — or rather experiences, since experiences are never just examples — such as mass events including religious gatherings, political rallies and demonstrations, sporting events and musical performances, etc. The response to the one who doesn’t attend these with us, and in that sense avoids attending to the possibility of such a sense and experience, is simply: “you had to be there,” or “it was an experience.” Such seemingly vacuous and pithy expressions reveal a truth, formally, if not entirely in content: namely, the content is such that it avoids generalizing ways of communicating. It is quite singular and we can only attest to the singularity and unique nature of such sensations, sensuous experiments, and lived experiences by saying what it is not. That such a method had been used by theologians as a way to describe the absolute and God should inform us of the possibilities that negative theology had, and still has, for us to communicate such experiences today even when, and precisely in the act of, not communicating that particular experience.
Among those in-/un-communicables in speech or writing, we can include feeling and sensation, touch and texture, the brushing of our bodies against other bodies or inanimate objects and their felt-feeling textures. Clothing, how we feel when certain textures brush up on us, the sensation of donning certain garbs — all of these things which we experience daily, and even crave the touch of constantly, seem precisely to be part of those ineffable qualities of our daily lives. And yet, their very everyday feature, or incessant feeling, make us drift away from considering their implications. We turn our backs upon the clothing we take off at the end of the day and throw in the wash. In contrast to the indecent exposure clothing saves everyone from on a daily basis we are indecently unexposed to the expressive potential clothing has for us to consider touch, feeling, and sensation. I claim that our negligence of clothing — negligence at the level of touch, feeling, texture, and sensation — is an extension of our negligence of the material, the ephemeral, and the bodily. The implications of this are not just at the level of what we wear, whether we have a diversity of clothing in our wardrobe (diversity that is supposed to match, one would assume, a diversity of lifestyles, etc.); rather, and what I consider to be much more important and pressing going forward, is that this turning away from clothing is a turning away from the sense of touch, sensation, and a richness of bodily feeling, altogether. We are, in essence, anaesthetizing ourselves — aesthetics meaning here both the philosophy and reflection of art, firstly, and a science or study of sensation and feeling, secondly. The smoothness of silk, the warmth of wool, the coolness of denim — these and all the other feelings, sensations, and experiences in response to fabric and clothing require a different way, a new way, of speaking about them.
“In contrast to the indecent exposure clothing saves everyone from on a daily basis we are indecently unexposed to the expressive potential clothing has for us to consider touch, feeling, and sensation.”
The lack of a vocabulary and grammar to deal with the specificity and particularity of lived experience, on the one hand, and our turning away from and neglecting the everyday experiences provided by clothing and the texture of touching fabric, on the other, I argue go hand in hand. That which is closest to us, and to our touch, is precisely what evades the expressible imperative at the heart of such particular experience. How, then, are we to respond? What are the ways we can change our mode of behavior and participate in a much more embodied and reflective manner with regard to our clothing? And how might this change in attitude facilitate our search for the adequate words and meaning to give to our lived experiences with clothing, touch, and sensation? I think that one possible answer comes from a particular practice of reading.
A particular form of analyzing a text is what is known as ‘close-reading.’ This form of textual analysis involves microscopic investigation, a granular and meticulous attention to the details of the written word. This attention to detail might focus on typology and punctuation marks, sentence structure (focusing on active and passive voice, main and subordinate clause work, etc.), and syntax. The demand of such analysis is to literally unpack and unravel the sentences at work, to reveal what work the sentences are doing, and how buried beneath specific and particular expressions lies the possibility of inexhaustible interpretation. Such a practice of reading can spend hours upon the voice and rhythm of particular poems, the work done by a novel’s introductory paragraph, or the rhetorical techniques and tropes of an essay meant to persuade. At stake in such a practice is not simply running one’s mouth endlessly on the small and insignificant; it has to do with attention to detail and sharing one’s findings with others. As many other meaningful exercises in life, it has to do with building community around a shared activity where we also learn from one another. That this style of reading brings out the richness we may not have noticed at first is significant since it emphasizes the explicitly unique non-everydayness of the seemingly mundane everyday.
Informed by this analysis, a fashionable analogy might provide for fashion analysis. I call it, in a passive way, ‘texture-al analysis’; or we can imagine the more active ‘clothes reading’ — it would maintain the puniness of the other without wishing to forego any possible seriousness. Clothes reading is just that: the microscopic reading and unraveling of clothes, removing the limited expression or purpose they may have for us in our wardrobe, or for others generally. This does not mean such clothes reading operates as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. Rather, all can approach any size their own way. Texture-al analysis introduces the possibility of approaching and examining clothing by way of a granular aesthetic purpose. The purpose here would be to focus on the touch of the fabric on one’s skin, the brush of the material across one’s face and hands, or the sensations felt at being enveloped by different textiles.
“This turning away from clothing is a turning away from the sense of touch, sensation, and a richness of bodily feeling, altogether.”
To get to a place for such readings, we need a texture, or fabric, board, akin to the color board used by interior designers and painters to create a color palette. This fabric board would, similarly, list all the different kinds of textiles and textures available for wearing or upholstery. The fabric board introduces a wealth of various fabrics and materials possible for the human touch and a certain re-arranging of the fabric upon the board — similar to puzzle, or word, magnets on a fridge — allow for a variety of mix and match sensation opportunities. One can make one’s own fabric board precisely by picking up and cutting various sized blocks from specific fabric or articles of clothing and adding them to the board. The purpose for such an experiment would be to re-purpose the material of such articles of clothing in order to reveal their appearance as simply sensation-sensible material. No longer dependent upon purpose of the part of a fabric within the whole of the piece of clothing, the removed block of fabric (thus reduced to simply being touched and felt) provides the possibility of simply experiencing the sensation of that material. These touching experiments allow for both focus on the specific fabric, and later expansion to the general articles of clothing, of having our bodies fabricate our sensations. Just as one would feel comfortable within one’s own skin — our initial envelopment of clothing — so too would we learn to treat the fabric we wore to be an extension of our own skin.
This brings me to the second half of the title, “clothing libido”. It is an expression used by the late Italian philosopher Mario Perniola. In his book Sex Appeal of the Inorganic — a meditative reflection on various dominant themes in the history of philosophy — Perniola tries to shift the emphasis of Western philosophy from certain dominant tendencies that have facilitated a movement away from sensation and feeling, art and aesthetics, and the body, more generally. These concerns culminate in his reimagining the subject — spoken of as ‘oneself’ instead of ‘I’ — as “a thing that feels.” [1] Reimagining oneself as a thing that feels, and to whom things give themselves to be felt, also changes one’s perception of bodies, generally. No longer seeing the skin as simply an outer barrier of one’s body, the skin starts to emulate the clothes its enveloped in. Perniola’s observation should here be quoted:
“Bodies have become rolls of material that fold and unfold on one another, so that, finally it is possible to establish a new order, laying silk with silk, wool with wool, cloth with cloth…The organs are clothes whose buttons and seams have vanished and return in the condition of pieces of material ready to be worked on. Thus, they can be united and separated according to new criteria that do not correspond to any function or purpose. It is not I, it is not you that feels, but those hats and clothes mentioned by Descartes. They begin to feel from the moment in which they lose their shape of hats and cloaks, returning to be felts and fabrics that offer each other to one another, and that accept one another, without the intervention of spirits or machinery. Often I ask myself where this clothing libido comes from that cannot be satiated because it is not a hunger.” [2]
The implications of this claim cannot be overstated. What is commonly approached as subject and object, person and the clothing they wear are both reimagined to instead by mutually enveloped-enveloping and co-constituting one another. No longer seeing the clothing based upon its functionality, the reduction of such articles of clothing to fabric and felt material also changes the view of one’s body and skin. As the largest organ, our skin becomes the fabric by which we, now become thing, feel clothing (which has itself now become simply a felt fabric, a felt thing). Things feeling things. This radical reimagining of our experience of things operates in the following manner: the entire scaffolding surrounding our usual way of thinking and interacting with clothing is razed to the ground. According to this prior and dominant logic of approaching clothing, objects have purposes and functions, they can be cast aside, discarded, and are seen as inanimate (unfeeling things). Corresponding to this, we distance ourselves from both clothing and our skin-enveloping experiences. We both, according to Perniola’s account, miss and forget the encounter of our body (as thing that feels) touching and feeling clothing (other things that feel). By razing such an edifice to the ground, the hope is to build a new relationship toward feeling, sensation, and our relations to both our bodies and clothes.
No longer reducible to a specific function or purpose, clothing opens itself up to various modes of interacting and feeling. We here can think of the fabric board, where sensations abound, and different modes of touching reveal themselves. Further, our possible experiences are enriched when we no longer see these fabrics as simply objects to cover our skin. Rather, our skin (the body’s clothing that feels) also expands the possibilities for our experiences. Our entire body becomes a sensorium, receptive to the touch of the world we’re enveloped in, whether touching air, the socks we move through the world in, pants that cling to our legs, skirts that brush and run their seams over our legs, or coat that shields us to the cold weather we greet when leaving our homes.
Notes
[1] Mario Perniola. Sex Appeal of the Inorganic. Trans. Massimo Verdicchio. New York: Continuum, 2004. Page 1.
[2] Mario Perniola. Sex Appeal of the Inorganic. Trans. Massimo Verdicchio. New York: Continuum, 2004. Page 10.
