💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › david-graeber-dickheads.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 09:05:36. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Dickheads Author: David Graeber Date: March 2015 Language: en Topics: fashion, The Baffler Source: Retrieved on 3rd September 2020 from https://thebaffler.com/salvos/dickheads Notes: Published in Issue No. 27 of The Baffler
Some people (me, for instance) put a great deal of energy into
organizing their lives so that they’ll never have to wear a tie. I’ve
often wondered why this should be. Why should ties have such symbolic
power? It’s not as if other parts of a formal suit—white shirts,
tailored slacks, vests, or blazers—inspire the same sort of indignation.
Somehow, it feels as if tying the necktie around your neck marks a final
act of closure. It’s the act that transforms all those items into a
suit, with all the suit implies, whether it’s the power of the boardroom
or the ceremonial formalities of weddings and funerals—that whole world
of official business over which men in suits invariably preside. No
doubt, part of the objection to the tie is to the pure arbitrariness of
the thing. A tie serves no function. It doesn’t hold your trousers up or
keep you warm. But at the same time, it’s uncomfortable, so much so that
putting it on does somehow feel like a gesture of submission, a
reluctant pledge of allegiance to everything the suit is supposed to
represent.
Still, if you think more about it, there’s something peculiar going on
here—a kind of paradox. Yes, a tie embodies the message of the suit, but
in many ways it’s the very opposite. After all, the rest of the suit is
almost entirely bereft of decorative elements. Suits tend to be dark,
sober, boring. Ties are supposed to be the exception. The tie is the one
place where you’re allowed to add a little color, to express yourself a
little. Why, then, should the one thing that’s least like the rest of
the suit somehow feel like it embodies the message of the whole?
Formal male clothing wasn’t always boring. In Elizabethan times, for
instance, men—particularly rich and powerful ones—were just as inclined
as women to deck themselves out in flashy jewelry and bright decorative
colors, and even (as in the court of Louis XIV) to wear wigs, powder,
and rouge. All this changed in the eighteenth century, a period some
historians of dress have referred to as the age of the “Great Masculine
Renunciation.” Suddenly, male clothing was expected to be less
ornamental, more generally businesslike than women’s. Eventually,
something very much like the modern business suit began to emerge:
uniform, dark in color (the more serious the context, the darker it
should be) with little or no patterning—its very dullness embodying
seriousness of purpose.
The modern business suit appeared around the time of the Industrial
Revolution, and it embodied the spirit of the emerging bourgeoisie. Such
men scoffed at aristocratic fops as parasites. They saw themselves
instead as men of action, defined by their ability to direct and
transform the world. They were producers; aristocrats were mere
consumers. And in this new bourgeois order, consumption was to be the
domain of women, who continued to wear powder, lipstick, necklaces, and
earrings (though usually not quite so extravagantly), even as their
husbands gave them up.
This transformation explains a number of curious usages surviving in our
own formal clothing: notably, the way a blazer can still be referred to
as “sports jacket,” even though you wouldn’t want to run a race in one.
In fact, the business suit derives not from aristocratic formal wear,
but from hunting clothes—this is why fox-hunters, for instance, still
wear something very much like one. Both uniforms are a kind of active
wear, adopted by a class of people who wanted to define themselves
through their actions.
Actually, I suspect that the ultimate derivation of the business suit is
from a suit of armor. The suit, after all, encases your body, covering
as much of it as possible; what minimal openings to the world such
clothes do afford—at your neck and sleeves—are bound tightly together by
ties and cuff links. The contours of the body are thus obscured, in
striking contrast with women’s formal wear, which, even in covering the
body, constantly hints at revealing it, and particularly at revealing
its most sexualized aspects. Skirts, even when they cover the lower half
of the body completely, tend to form an open-ended cone whose apex is
between the legs, and except in the most prudish times, there has been
some gesture toward revealing the cleavage. It’s almost as if the staid
uniformity of men’s attire is meant to efface individuality just as its
design is meant to make the body itself invisible; women’s formal wear,
on the other hand, makes the wearer both an individual and an object to
be seen. Indeed, the conventions of higher-class fashion ensure that any
woman wearing such an outfit is obliged to devote a good deal of time
and energy to monitoring herself to make sure too much is not revealed
and, more generally, to constantly thinking about what she looks like.
And this is still true. Just recall the bifurcated fashions at the
sexual battleground of your high school prom. The guys all dressed
identically. They were, in effect, sporting a uniform. But if two girls
wound up wearing the same dress, then oh, what a scandal.
It seems to me that this very effacement of individuality is itself one
way of expressing power. The French philosopher Michel Foucault argued
that the eighteenth century (the period that saw the emergence of the
business suit) marked a profound transformation in how power came to be
exercised in Europe and America. In a feudal order, Foucault suggested,
power existed in order to be seen. It was enshrined in the very bodies
of the king and nobles, which were on continual display in portraits,
pageants, and court ceremonial. Common folk were faceless spectators.
The modern bureaucratic state reversed all this: suddenly, it was the
powerful who were faceless, depersonalized abstractions, as it was they
who did the inspecting, examining, and monitoring of everybody else.
What Foucault was really talking about were two different modes of
exercising power that always exist, in any society. Sometimes the
general struts about showing off his medals, and sometimes he’s
inspecting the troops, who are expected to keep eyes fixed firmly into
space. Indeed, the most powerful way to represent power has always been
to refuse to represent it. That’s why God or spirits in so many
traditions cannot be shown in images; it’s also why the way to show that
something is truly powerful is to hide it, to render it invisible,
ineffable, unknowable, utterly featureless and abstract. That which is
unknown, Thomas Hobbes once remarked, is for that reason unlimited. It
could be anything; therefore, you have to be prepared to assume it could
do anything as well.
I suggest a simple formula: To express power through display is to say
to those over whom one exercises it, “Behold, see how I have been
treated. I have been treated this way because of who I am. Now you, too,
must treat me this way.” Kings cover themselves with gold as a way of
saying that you must cover them with gold as well. To refuse any such
display, in contrast, is to say, “You simply have no idea what I am
capable of.”
If this formula is true, the generic quality of formal male clothing,
whether donned by factory owners or functionaries, makes some sense.
These uniforms define powerful men as active, productive, and potent,
and at the same time define them as glyphs of power—disembodied
abstractions. Women’s formal attire, with its flounces and fripperies,
sequins and whatnots, defines its wearer as something that you look at,
as a passive object, but at the same time makes her bodily, specific,
and even unique. (The word “specific” is originally derived from the
Latin specere, meaning “to look at.” It’s the same root as gives us
“spectacle,” “inspection,” and “specimen.”) John Berger’s famous
analysis of European oil painting, Ways of Seeing, noticed that the
social presence of a man in such quintessentially bourgeois settings
always turned on what he was assumed to be able to do (the “promise of
power” he embodied), while that of a woman turned on her appearance,
which was taken to indicate how she has treated herself—and therefore
what it is acceptable to do to her. Robert Graves summed it up even more
precisely; in the world those oil paintings represent, “Man Does; Woman
Is.” (Only it’s not clear that Graves meant this as a criticism!)
So what does any of this have to do with neckties? Well, at first
glance, the paradox has only deepened. If the message of the suit is
that its wearer is a largely invisible, abstract, and generic creature
to be defined by his ability to act, then the decorative necktie makes
little sense.
But let’s examine other forms of decoration allowed in formal attire and
see if a larger pattern of sartorial power begins to emerge. Decoration
that’s specific to women (earrings, lipstick, eyeshadow, etc.) tends to
highlight the receptive organs. Permissible men’s jewelry—rings, cuff
links, fancy watches—tends to accentuate the hands. This is, of course,
consistent: it is through the hands that one acts upon the world.
There’s also the tie clip, but that’s not really a problem. The tie and
the cuff links seem to fulfill their functions in parallel, each adding
a little decoration to tighten a spot where human flesh sticks out,
namely the neck and wrists. They also help seal off the exposed bits
from the remainder of the body, which remains effaced, its contours
largely invisible.
This observation, I think, points the way to the resolution of our
paradox. After all, the male body in a suit does contain a third
potentially obtrusive element that is most definitely not exposed,
something that, in fact, is not indicated in any way, even though one
does have to take it out, periodically, to pee. Suits have to be
tailored to allow for urination, which also has to be done in such a way
that nobody notices. The fly (which is invisible) is a bourgeois
innovation, much unlike earlier aristocratic styles, such as the
European codpiece, that often drew explicit attention to the genital
region. This is the one part of the male body whose contours are
entirely effaced. If hiding something is a way of declaring it a form of
power, then hiding the male genitals is a way of declaring masculinity
itself a form of power. It’s not just that the tie sits on precisely the
spot that, in women’s formal wear, tends to be the most sexualized (the
cleavage). A tie resembles a penis in shape, and points directly at it.
Couldn’t we say that a tie is really a symbolic displacement of the
penis, only an intellectualized penis, dangling not from one’s crotch
but from one’s head, chosen from among an almost infinite variety of
other ties by an act of mental will?
Hey, this would explain a lot—why men who wear bow ties are universally
taken to be nerds, for example. True, a bow tie could be taken for a
pair of testicles. But even so, bow ties are small, and they point in
entirely the wrong direction. Mafiosi wear ties that are too fat and
colorful; dissipated sophisticates wear thin ties; cowboys wear string
ties that produce the effect you might expect from wearing a bow tie and
a regular tie at the same time—ordinarily, this would be too unsubtle,
but cowboys are mythic he-men who can get away with it. (James Bond can
also get away with a bow tie, but then he’s basically just a giant penis
anyway.)
Professional women have faced endless problems over what to wear around
their necks. Wearing a tie is considered sexually provocative,
threatening. It’s telling that this is the only aspect of traditional
male attire women have not been allowed to adopt. In the 1980s and
1990s, there was some effort to develop flouncy bows as an alternative,
but that didn’t really work out. The expedient today is not to put
anything at all in the open space revealed by the jacket, and just let
the absence speak for itself.
You can take it from here. But let me end with a last observation about
gender. As an anthropologist, I am aware that one of the most common
features of patriarchy—and this is true in a surprising number of
places, from Africa to Sweden to New Guinea—is some idea that women
produce naturally (they bear children) and that men produce culturally
(they create society). Stated outright, this is an obvious lie—pretty
much everywhere you go you can find women doing most of the work of
producing society too. So the message of the patriarchs has to be
communicated obliquely. And I suspect that traditional formal clothing
is one such statement.
Think of it this way: if none of us wore any clothes, then it would be
the male genitalia sticking out visibly, while women’s would remain
largely hidden. Maybe the entire point of formal attire to invert this
possibility, to say, “Yes, in nature, it is women who have mysterious
hidden powers of creation, but once we get all dressed and civilized,
it’s precisely the other way around.”