In Front of the Camera, Behind the Commodity Fetish: Profaning the Cult of Work

Boris Knezevic



There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning – that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself – is not earned by work.
-Andre Breton, Nadja

Slavoj Žižek provides perhaps the most incisive critique of the depiction of work in cinema:

In today’s ideological perception, work itself (manual labour as opposed to 'symbolic' activity), not sex, becomes the site of obscene indecency to be concealed from the public eye. The tradition which goes back to Wagner's Rheingold and Lang's Metropolis, the tradition in which the working process takes place underground, in dark caves, culminates today in the 'invisibility' of the millions of anonymous workers sweating in Third World factories.

This invisibility, through which the fetishism of commodities is articulated, is already what Chaplin hints at comically in Modern Times, perhaps one of the earliest film depictions of a capitalist technological dystopia. In one famous scene, Chaplin's Little Tramp, desperately struggling to keep up with the increasing speed of the assembly line by screwing in more and more bolts (as the factory boss instructs a machinist over a then-futuristic video screen intercom to 'speed her up'), is literally swallowed by the machinery: trapped in a steel jungle of cogs and gears, the worker becomes part of the machine. (Not to mention the 'Bellows feeding machine' for which he is used as a test subject)



Even more to the point, when the Little Tramp takes a break for lunch, his hands and arms spasmodically repeat the activity he has been performing on the assembly line, holding imaginary spanners and screwing in imaginary bolts. Doesn’t this abstract mechanization of the human being already hint at the fetishized product of labour, as the human worker is mysteriously submerged, made 'invisible' (as human) in the process of being turned into just another machine attached to the production line? As Agamben points out in a recent essay ('In Praise of Profanation'), 'If the apparatuses of the capitalist cult are so effective, it is not so much because they act on primary behaviours, but because they act on pure means, that is, behaviours that have been separated from themselves and thus detached from any relationship to an end.'



If in the early days of Hollywood (and of film) it was still possible to depict the production process in all its misery, it is because the industrialization of labour, and the ideological mystery-making machinery of global capitalism, was itself less sophisticated, its reach further from total. As the production process disappears from the view of consumers in the West, its disappearance is 'recorded' on film, indexed by its absence. What is even more sinister here is the 'equation of labour with crime' as Žižek further elaborates:

The only points in Hollywood films where we see the production process in all its intensity are when the action hero penetrates the master-criminal's secret domain and locates there the site of intense labour (distilling and packaging drugs, constructing a rocket that will destroy New York).

When the production process does appear in contemporary films, it is stripped of all political meaning, reduced to background or setting, without commentary, or as in The Machinist, pictured through the eyes of a paranoid delusional factory worker wracked by guilt over a hit-and-run car accident. In another visionary precursor to this cinematic mapping of ideology, Chaplin's Little Tramp in Modern Times is arrested and jailed after accidentally participating in a workers’ riot and being mistaken for the 'leader'. When he is subsequently offered release for good behaviour (ironically and foolishly performing his duty as a citizen by successfully foiling a prison break), he asks 'Can’t I stay a little longer? I’m so happy here!'



This is no laughing matter – stuff like this actually happens. As a matter of fact it happened just last year in Franklin County, Ohio, USA when a 62-year-old man robbed a bank and then proceeded to hand the cash to a security guard saying 'Here, be a hero today,' then waited for the police to arrive. His purported aim: to land in prison until the age of sixty-six when Social Security kicks in – on account of financial trouble and age discrimination in the employment market. The judge, on hearing his plea (case of Ohio v Bowers), accepted Bowers' story and gave him three years in prison as a 'birthday present'. And we’re not even talking depression-era America, merely post-September 11 recession-era.



Work in capitalist society is thus on one hand concealed/criminalized, while on the other idolized in a 'cult of work'. The corporatist dream of the Futurists, who were known for fascist sympathies in Mussolini’s Italy, as expressed in a 1913 pamphlet by one of the movement's key figures, Filippo Marinetti, sounds like something straight out of Naomi Klein's 'shock doctrine' (and this from an artist, not an economist, decades before Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys): 'We will glorify war – the world's only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers...We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind…We will sing of great crowds excited by 'work.'' Marinetti spoke of a new age of 'negation of distances and nostalgic solitudes’ that would 'ridicule ... the "holy green silence" and the ineffable landscape' – an age enamoured of 'the passion, art, and idealism of Business.'



This double movement of mystification/glorification is precisely the site of the fetish – the glorification of 'work' through a puritan work ethic is the ideological counterpart of the fetishism of commodities, concealing from immediate awareness what we nevertheless 'know' is there: the production process, surplus value. Given Breton's Communist sympathies, we may then interpret his remark (at the top) as referring to 'work' in this specifically capitalist sense – as the activity of wage-labourers who produce surplus value for the owners of capital and whose labour is mystically concealed by the commodity produced. Similarly, when artist Mladen Stilinovic speaks of laziness, this does not mean simply 'doing absolutely nothing', but rather exempting oneself from the system of commodities: 'virtues of laziness are important factors in art. Knowing about laziness is not enough, it must be practiced and perfected. Artists in the West are not lazy and therefore not artists but rather producers of something…Their involvement with matters of no importance, such as production, promotion, gallery system, museum system, competition system (who is first), their preoccupation with objects, all that drives them away from laziness, from art...There is no art without laziness.' In the capitalist economy, leisure is not opposed to work, for it is still within the system of production/consumption. What is not permissible is idleness, laziness, non-consumption.



The answer to the fascist/corporatist creed is therefore not one of simple opposition, but rather to profane the cult of work and debunk the mystery of the commodity. Agamben concludes with an analysis of the evolution of modern pornography as a realization of the capitalist dream of 'producing an unprofanable': 'in the very act of executing their most intimate caresses, porn stars now look resolutely into the camera, showing that they are more interested in the spectator than in their partners...Into the Marxian opposition between the use-value and exchange-value, exhibition-value introduces a third term, which cannot be reduced to the first two.' The 'apparatus of pornography', with its 'solitary and desperate consumption of the pornographic image', in a sense freezes the profanatory, liberating potential of a sexuality freed from immediate ends. The profane, at first liberated by the 'promise of a new use', once captured by an apparatus of power (apparatus of pornography as industry), is 'diverted from its possible use'. This unprofanable profane can be viewed as an articulation of a process of deterritorialization-reterritorialization – having freed sexuality from 'immediate ends' through pornography, capital immediately reinscribes it with a purpose through the process of consumption.

'The profanation of the unprofanable,' Agamben concludes, 'is the political task of the coming generation.' Profanation here means not merely to desecrate, but more broadly to 'return something to free use', to de-instrumentalize. Given his emphasis on play as an 'organ of profanation' and his lamenting of its decline in the modern world, is this not precisely where Chaplin provides an instructive model? Isn't his 'play' on the similarity between his appearance and Hitler's in The Great Dictator, for instance, precisely an act of profaning, of returning to free use, say, the toothbrush moustache? And isn’t profanation ultimately the answer to the commodity fetish, especially given the religious origin of the latter term in Marx's usage? The political task is to desecrate, debunk the cult of the commodity, of work, through play, in order to reclaim the surplus value of possible uses subtracted from the image by its inscription in the system of production and consumption.

References
Agamben, Profanations (2007)
Breton, Nadja (1999)
Stilinovic in Documenta Magazine 2007, no. 2, Life!
Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the Misuse of a Notion (2002)

kino fist: work

From the latest Kino Fist magazine.

Emmy Hennings on Franju's Le Sang de bêtes (Blood of the beasts)

kino fist: work

Everything they do, the way they pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the blacks against the whites, is meant to keep us in our place.

The next Kino Fist will take place on Sunday 1st June at 2pm at E:vent Gallery, 96 Teesdale Street, E2 6PU.

We will be screening Godard's 1969 'British Sounds', made for but ultimately banned by London Weekend Television (see here for discussion), followed by Schrader's 1978 'Blue Collar' (see Mark on this from a while back).

If you would like to contribute something on the theme of either (or both) of these films, or on the theme of work and cinema more broadly, please send illustrations, photos and texts to infinitethought[at]hotmail.co.uk by May 20.

Kierkegaard on Boredom from Either/Or

People with experience maintain that proceeding from a basic principle is supposed to be very reasonable; I yield to them and proceed from the basic principle that all people are boring. Or is there anyone who would be boring enough to contradict me in this regard? This basic principle has to the highest degree the repelling force always required in the negative, which is actually the principle of motion. It is not merely repelling but infinitely repulsive, and whoever has the basic principle behind him must necessarily have infinite momentum for making discoveries. If, then, my thesis is true, a person needs only to ponder how corrupting boredom is for people, tempering his reflections more or less according to his desire to diminish or increase his impetus, and if he wants to press the speed of the motion to the highest point, almost with danger to the locomotive, he needs only to say to himself: Boredom is the root of all evil. It is very curious that boredom, which itself has such a calm and sedate nature, can have such a capacity to initiate motion. The effect that boredom brings about is absolutely magical, but this effect is one not of attraction but of repulsion.



How corrupting boredom is, everyone recognizes also with regard to children. As long as children are having a good time, they are always good. This can be said in the strictest sense, for if they at times become unmanageable even while playing, it is really because they are beginning to be bored; boredom is already coming on, but in a different way. Therefore, when selecting a nursemaid, one always considers essentially not only that she is sober, trustworthy, and good-natured but also takes into esthetic consideration whether she knows how to entertain children. Even if she had all other excellent virtues, one would not hesitate to give her the sack if she lacked this qualification. Here, indeed, the principle is clearly acknowledged, but things go on so curiously in the world, habit and boredom have gained the upper hand to such a degree, that justice is done to esthetics only in the conduct of the nursemaid. It would be quite impossible to prevail if one wanted to demand a divorce because one's wife is boring, or demand that a king be dethroned because he is boring to behold, or that a clergyman be exiled because he is boring to listen to, or that a cabinet minister be dismissed or a journalist be executed because he is frightfully boring.



Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings. Adam was bored because he was alone; therefore Eve was created. Since that moment, boredom entered the world and grew in quantity in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored en famille. After that, the population of the world increased and the nations were bored en masse. To amuse themselves, they hit upon the notion of building a tower so high that it would reach the sky. This notion is just as boring as the tower was high and is a terrible demonstration of how boredom had gained the upper hand. Then they were dispersed around the world, just as people now travel abroad, but they continued to be bored. And what consequences this boredom had: humankind stood tall and fell far, first through Eve, then from the Babylonian tower.

Is Boredom Always Counter-Revolutionary? On Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989)

Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?
Raoul Vaneigem

Q. Who wants to watch a film of a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?
A. The viewer of Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent [Der Sebiente Kontinent] (1989).

For the viewer of Haneke’s film supplementary questions impose themselves. If, as Debord and the Situationists contend, boredom is always counter-revolutionary, then should such a film have been made? That it obviously has been made, should we watch such a film? Isn’t a film like Haneke’s, in which we witness the reduction of the family of husband Georg, wife Anna, and daughter Eva, to mere appendages of objects, itself the most obscene ruse of the spectacle? The cynicism of the spectacular society would have reached such a level that it would now ‘entertain’ its audience with the spectacle of its own alienation in all its banal tedium. The studied repetitions of the rituals of bourgeois life, the drawn-out shots, the horror of the banality of consumer culture itself, would all figure that now, in Benjamin’s words, our ‘self-alienation has reached such a degree that [we] can experience [our] own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order’. Our decadence is such that we no longer even experience that pleasure in the ‘grand’ form of war, but only in the terrible banality of the slowly unwinding self-destruction of bourgeois existence.



Guy Debord’s own final film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978) – a Latin palindrome meaning ‘We go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire’ – itself films the boredom of bourgeois existence. The film opens with a scene showing a cinema audience, leaving us to face the spectacle of our own passive viewing. Over images of (then) contemporary bourgeois life Debord intones a lugubrious and devastating critique of the misery of the cinema audience, composed of ‘the stratum of low-level skilled employees in the various “service” occupations that are so necessary to the present production system: management, control, maintenance, research, teaching, propaganda, entertainment, and pseudocritique.’ The audience Debord identifies corresponds closely to the class position, and situation, of the family of Haneke’s film; in Debord’s words ‘compelled to reside within a single space: the same circuit of ever-identical dwelling units, offices, freeways, vacation spots, and airports.’ But Debord’s own insulting of his audience of middle-ranking service professionals is broken by the dialectic of the film. These scenes are the opening to be negated by the banal filmic images infused by Debord’s commentary to embody the passions and adventures of the Lettrists and later the Situationists. Although these revolutionary passions have been overcome by the tides of time and counter-revolution Debord’s film is an act of memory posed against the boredom of service to the spectacle that denies any such passions except the passions of consumption.



Haneke breaks off the dialectic of Debord’s film. There is no moment of negation, at least not in any revolutionary form. This is a film of the stalled dialectic, decapitated from any revolutionary memory or hope – a film of 1989. What is retained is only the insult to the audience, not in the form of the insolence of Debord’s commentary but in the test with which we are faced with in trying to watch and make sense of the film. The repetitions of each year force us to an attention at the displacements that take place, the only variation coming in terms of the emergence of various explained and unexplained affects of anguish – Eva’s feigned blindness, the almost psychotic grief of Ana’s brother. The narrative ‘arc’ is here something like that of the Lacanian drive: an idiotic circling around the (absent) ‘Thing’, in which jouissance gains its true sense of pleasure in suffering. Our only ‘advance’ is not towards any re-starting of the dialectic of the negative but the negative of pure (self-) destruction. In this we face the most eerie moment in the film in which Georg reveals to his parents that, despite the seemingly ‘normal’ life with its daily trials we have witnessed, he and his family have lived an existence of utter horror. The negation here is inherent, but finally, and literally, fatal. This is the prelude not to any memory of revolution, but only the erasure of the traces of all the elements of bourgeois life, from money to clothing, fish tanks to the stereo.



The final lengthy sequence of the family’s destruction of their own ‘world’, and finally themselves, itself transforms the harrowing into the boring, and vice versa. As Haneke has commented:

They carry out the destruction with the same constricted narrowness with which they lived their lives, with the same meticulousness as life was lived, so I see this as the opposite of the vision of total destruction in Zabriskie Point. The sequence is portrayed as work. I have tried to portray it as something unbearable. As the wife says, “my hands really hurt from all that arbeit,” so all this hard work of destruction merely precedes the self-destruction.

We are denied even the pleasure we might take in this destruction. Instead Haneke offers us a kind of pure ‘labour of the negative’ in which the negative has become absorbed within the capitalist labour-process without any remainder. At the same time that labour process becomes the planned and methodical act of the taking apart of the world. Here we find a bitter and ironic reversal of one of the Situationists’ favourite quotations, from Marcel Carné’s film Les Enfants du Paradis (1943–5): the character Lacenaire says ‘It takes all kinds to make a world—or to unmake it’.



So, although the consumption of the scene of alienation is put into abeyance it is obvious that we are hardly left with a way out. Of course this reflects a desire to offer no false utopia, no simple reversibility of signs in which this suffering would be magically transformed into some sense of ‘revolutionary’ agency. The political affect of boredom is one of discomfort and unease against the blandness of the aesthetic of television and against the passive contemplation of suffering, even as we passively contemplate suffering. This equivocal affect is a sign of the non-responsiveness of the film to the alternative of ‘revolutionary’ or ‘counter-revolutionary’ – in the absence of any meaningful capacity to pose this choice. To use the language of Alain Badiou we could say this is the film of the saturation of the sequence marked by the passion for the real in the ‘drama’ of 20th century war and revolution. Not exactly a film of the restoration, this is rather one of the first films of the new pathology of the involution of that ‘passion’ – drained and turned inwards. It is the film of our bad times.

Benjamin Noys

References
Benjamin, Walter (1968) Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books.

Debord, Guy (2003) Complete Cinematic Works, trans. and ed. Ken Knabb. Oakland and Edinburgh: AK Press.

Sharrett, Christopher (2004) ‘The World that is Known: Michael Haneke Interviewed’, Kinoeye 4.1. http://www.kinoeye.org/04/01/interview01.php

Vaneigem, Raoul (1983) The Revolution of Everyday Life [1967], trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Rebel Press.

Hippies and Longhairs in the Capitalist World System

'This September I was in the small city of Isfahan, in the heart of Persia. Persia is an underdeveloped country, as one horrendously says, but [its economy] is rapidly taking off, as one says in a likewise horrendous way. … One night, I was walking through the main street when I saw two monstrous beings among all those ancient, beautiful boys, full of an ancient human dignity: they were not really ‘capelloni’ [longhairs], but their hair was cut in a European fashion, long at the back, short at the front, straw-like, artificially stuck around the face, with two filthy tufts over the ears. What was this hair saying? It was saying: ‘We do not belong to this mass of wretched creatures, underdeveloped poor fellows who were left behind in a barbarian age! We are clerks in banks, students, sons of people who grew rich and work in the oil companies; we know Europe, we have read a lot. We are bourgeois: and here is our long hair that bears witness to our international modernity of privileged people.’

- Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘The “Discourse” of Hair’, Corriere della Sera, 7 January 1973


There are those who have abundant, swollen hair … perfectly set and similar to the ‘perm’ that was popular with ladies in the forties … Others unintentionally quote even more distant eras: the twenties or early thirties: … their hair falls smoothly on both sides of the forehead, while over the forehead there is a small, long and accurate fringe. … Still others, whose hair is without resources, have let it grow wild: but it falls in extremely black and dishevelled locks: the exact hair of a neorealist hooker from the fifties. … There also those who quote men, rather than women: that is, they quote Great Men of the Past who are completely unknown to them: Christ, Cavour, a reactionary intellectual of the eighteenth century, a judge portrayed by an anonymous neoclassical painter.

- Pier Paolo Pasolini, Petrolio



The town where these lines are being written is a small meeting place for hippies, mainly British, American and Dutch; they spend all day here in a very lively square in the old town, mixed in with (but not mixing with) the local population who, either through natural tolerance, amusement, habit or interest, accept them, exist alongside them and let them get on with life without ever understanding them or ever being surprised by them either. … [O]nce out of its original context, hippy protest comes up against an enemy far more significant than American conformism, even if this is backed up by security on the university campus: poverty (where economics coyly uses the expression developing countries, culture and real life use the more honest poverty). This poverty turns the hippy’s choice into a copy, a caricature of economic alienation, and this copy of poverty, though sported only lightly, becomes in fact distinctly irresponsible. For most traits invented by the hippy in opposition to his home civilisation (a civilisation of the rich) are the very ones which distinguish poverty, no longer as a sign, but much more severely as a clear indication, or an effect, on people’s lives: undernourishment, collective living, bare feet, dirtiness, ragged clothing, are all forces which, in this context, are not there to be used in the symbolic fight against the world of riches but are the very forces against which we should be fighting. Symbols (which the hippy consumes frenetically) are therefore no longer reactive meanings, polemical forces, nor are they critical weapons that we appropriate from a well-off civilisation that conceals its image of overnourishment by constant referral to it and that tries to make overnourishment’s signifiers look glossy; if we think of them as being positive, these symbols become, not a game, or a higher form of symbolic activity, but a disguise, a lower form of cultural narcissism: as is demonstrated by linguistics, the context overturns the meaning, and the context here is that of economics.

Roland Barthes, ‘A Case of Cultural Criticism’, Communications 14, November 1969

Konvolut B: Fashion

Taken from Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project



For the philosopher, the most interesting thing about fashion is its extraordinary anticipations. It is well known that art will often – for example, in pictures – precede the perceptible reality by years. It was possible to see streets or rooms that shone in all sorts of fiery colours, long before technology, by means of illuminated signs and other arrangements, actually set them under such a light. Moreover, the sensitivity of the individual artist to what is coming certainly far exceeds that of the grande dame. Yet fashion is in much steadier, much more precise contact with the coming thing, thanks to the incomparable nose which the female collective has for what lies waiting in the future. Each season brings, in the newest creations, various secret signals of things to come. Whoever understands how to read these semaphores would know in advance not only about new currents in the arts but also about new legal codes, wars, and revolutions. Here, surely, lies the greatest charm of fashion, but also the difficulty of making the charming fruitful.



Here fashion has opened the business of dialectical exchange between woman and ware – between carnal pleasure and the corpse. The clerk, death, tall and loutish, measures the century by the yard, serves as mannequin himself to save costs, and manages single-handedly the liquidation that in French is called Revolution. For fashion was never anything other than the parody of the motley cadaver, provocation of death through the woman, and bitter colloquy with decay whispered through shrill bursts of mechanical laughter. That is fashion. And that is why she changes so quickly; she titillates death and is already something different, something new, as he casts about to crush her. For a hundred years she holds her own against him. Now, finally, he is on the point of quitting the field. But he erects on the banks of a new Lethe, which rolls its asphalt stream through arcades, the armature of the whores as a battle memorial.

With Alphonse Karr, there appears a rationalist theory of fashion that is closely related to the rationalist theory of the origin of religions. The motive for instituting long skirts, for example, he conceives to be the interest certain women would have had in concealing an unlovely foot. Or he denounces, as the origin of certain hats and certain hairstyles, the wish to compensate for thin hair.



Who still knows, nowadays, where it was that in the last decade of the previous century women would offer to men their most seductive aspect, the most intimate promise of their figure? In the asphalted indoor arenas where people learned to ride bicycles. The woman as cyclist competes with the cabaret singer for the place of honour on posters, and gives to fashion its most daring line.



Hallmark of the period’s fashions: to imitate a body that has never known nakedness.

The impression of the old-fashioned can arise only where, in a certain way, reference is made to the most topical. If the beginnings of modern architecture to some extent lie in the arcades, their antiquated effect on the present generation has exactly the same significance as the antiquated effect of the father on his son.

In my formulation: ‘the eternal is in any case far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea’.

In fetishism, sex does away with the boundaries separating the organic world from the inorganic. Clothing and jewellery are its allies. It is as much at home with what is dead as it is with living flesh. The latter, moreover, shows it the way to establish itself in the former. Hair is a frontier region lying between the two kingdoms of sexus. Something different is disclosed in the drunkenness of passion: the landscapes of the body. These are already no longer animated, yet are still accessible to the eye, which, of course, depends increasingly on touch and smell to be its guides through the realms of death. Not seldom in the dream, however, there are swelling breasts that, like the earth, are all apparelled in woods and rocks, and gazes have sent their life to the bottom of glassy lakes that slumber in the valleys. These landscapes are traversed by paths which lead sexuality into the world of the inorganic. Fashion itself is only another medium enticing it more deeply into the universe of matter.



Does fashion die (in Russia, for example) because it can no longer keep up the tempo – at least in certain fields?

A contemporary fashion and its significance. In the spring of 1935, something new appeared in women’s fashions: medium-sized embossed metal plaquettes which were worn on jumpers or overcoats and which displayed the initial of the bearer’s first name. Fashion thus profited from the vogue for badges which had arisen among men in the wake of the patriotic leagues. On the other hand, the progressive restrictions in the private sphere are here given expression. The name – and to be sure, the first name – of persons unknown is published on a lapel. That it becomes easier thereby to make the acquaintance of a stranger is of secondary importance.

Each generation experiences the fashions of the one immediately preceding it as the most radical antiaphrodisiac imaginable. In this judgement it is not so far off the mark as might be supposed. Every fashion is to some extent a bitter satire on love: in every fashion, perversities are suggested by the most ruthless means. Every fashion couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, fashion defends the rights of the corpse. The fetishism that succumbs to the sex appeal of the inorganic is its vital nerve.




Where they impinge upon the present moment, birth and death – the former through natural consequences, the latter through social ones – considerably restrict the field of play for fashion. This state of affairs is properly elucidated through two parallel circumstances. The first concerns birth, and shows the natural engendering of life overcome by novelty in the realm of fashion. The second circumstance concerns death: it appears in fashion as no less overcome, and precisely through the sex appeal of the inorganic, which is something generated by fashion.

The detailing of feminine beauties so dear to the baroque, a process in which each single part is exalted through a trope, secretly links up with the image of the corpse. This parcelling out of feminine beauty into its noteworthy constituents resembles a dissection, and the popular comparisons of body parts to alabaster, snow, precious stones, or other (mostly inorganic) formations makes the same point.

Fashions are a collective medicament for the ravages of oblivion. The more short-lived a period, the more susceptible it is to fashion.



There is hardly another article of dress that can give expression to such divergent erotic tendencies, and that has so much latitude to describe them, as a woman’s hat. Whereas the meaning of male headgear in its sphere (the political) is strictly tied to a few rigid patterns, the shades of meaning in a woman’s hat are virtually incalculable. It is not so much the various possibilities of symbolic reference to the sexual organs that is chiefly of interest here. More surprising is what a hat can say about the rest of the outfit. Helen Grund has made the ingenious suggestion that the bonnet, which is contemporaneous with the crinoline, actually provides men with directions for managing the latter. The wide brim of the bonnet is turned up – thereby demonstrating how the crinoline must be turned up in order to make sexual access easier for the man.

Extracted from Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (trans Eiland & McLaughlin, Harvard, 1999)