I am walking down Oxford St., having difficulty shopping. As usual, it is
dense with already well dressed young people carrying shopping bags of clothes. They bomb along. The threat of all the people, and a flashback,
of walking through the restaurant at Belfield (University College, Dublin) aged eighteen, overpowered by the
scale of it, and the number of students.
Unable to buy anything, fearing disintegration, I reach for something abstract. I think of Simmel and of one of his essays on fashion ('Zur Psychologie der Mode'), and this steadies me.
The numbers on the street. Why, I ask myself, do people in cities dress better than people in the country? The larger the city,
the better they seem to dress, and the more important it is to dress well.
There are, of course, exceptions to this. It is easy to think of smaller
cities where people dress better than in larger ones. Think of any city you know in
France smaller than Dublin (population one million) and people dress there better than in Dublin. (Take it from me if you do not know Dublin!) In Milan or Vienna they dress better than in larger London. But there is something, even so, in the rule. Differences of national culture aside, and all other things being equal, the larger the city,the better we dress. The less badly I dress.
The larger the city, the more abstract is the experience of its
inhabitants. The larger the city, the more removed we are from the person sitting beside us in the underground, the less we know our neighbour living in the flat underneath.
There are again, of course, exceptions to this, as many as you want! But the bigger the city, the more likely is this to be the case.
The city is a place of specialisation. Its inhabitants have
specialised jobs. They tend to know people in a specialised circle and live in that world. The more specialised
a line of work is, the more it is formalised, which has an impact on the life-world of those whose living it is.
Formalisation is a type of abstraction. Functions, relations, interdependeces, out of these a concrete sub-culture and style grow. But the moment of abstraction seems to me
primary.
The bigger the city, the more specialised the jobs, the more abstract the form of life.
With a level of abstraction comes a corresponding degree of definition of
self through it, in many areas, including shopping and clothing. One looks at colours, shapes, textiles, styles from the perspectve of one's own particular, specialised, world into which gradations and distinctions are already built. Finding one's style against this background, within its limits, involves making further, finer, grades of distinction. The result is that the larger the city, the more fine-tuned is the sense of dress ... everything else still bring equal!
I don't think that Simmel has these thoughts anywhere but they are built out of elements of his thought.They are potted Simmel. The focus in his essay 'Zur Psychologie der Mode' is more on understanding fashion as this always delicate, shifting, balance between two conflicting needs, to be of the group and to be individual.
So, if these thoughts steady me on Oxford St., do they allow me to understand why I find shopping for clothes so difficult, and why Belfield so many years ago flashed into my mind?
I think that I am using these ideas in part to rationalise a shortcoming! I am trying to explain why other people on Oxford St. appear to have in the main less difficulty overall in shopping. Yes, I have returned recently to this metropolis and I am not yet working so not that inserted in the life of the city, and, yes, this may make it that bit more difficult for me to choose a shirt but it is not the main reason for my difficulty.
What is it? I do not know exactly but it has more to do the play between group and the individual in Simmel's essay than it has to do with my ideas above about the impact of the relative scale of cities on their inhabitants' dress sense. Both moments, the throng of students in Belfield, the throng of people on Oxford St., have to do with some difficulty in defining myself over against the group, with a fierce desire to do this and an inability to. Shopping for clothes exposes some older wound, a problem perhaps of 'ego development', God knows what. Shopping goes deep. Thinking and writing used to hide this wound, I think, or be balm for it, or act as compensation, but, now, a few thoughts like these touch this place as well. Perhaps this is good!
Any comments would be welcome in this vague place!
I got a comment here some weeks ago from the_tower, a student of Chinese, Psychology and Japanese at the University of California at Berkeley. It was in response to a previous post of mine on something that he had written. His comment marked an advance for me. So far, bar Bea who is family (my niece), I have not attracted readers to, or comments on, my blog! Admittedly, I had asked the_tower to comment, but even so ...
I paste the_tower's comment (I have added a few links to it). He wrote:
Hi, sorry for getting back so late.
I don't know what TrackBack is, so I doubt I got anything from you. I did read this post in response to your comment on my LJ [Live Journal].
To be honest I'm a little surprised you found that post, as most things I say on my blog go unnoticed by all save my friends (and flist).
The post in question was originally composed in a fit of annoyance at the number of spats that occur in the various fandoms between opinionated fans, not only because of how stubbornly they cling to their own beliefs and refuse to give any leeway to the opinions of others, but also because many of these spats could have been avoided if the writers had attempted to communicate their thoughts more clearly. A lot of these fandom wars are reported and mocked at a Journal Fen community called Fandom Wank . Thoughts about the immense popularity of Fandom Wank and of the frequency with which certain online communities get reported there led to thoughts about the pitfalls of communication online in general, which led to the post. Another thing that prompted the post was my personal experience with instant messaging through programs like AIM, where, if I don't know someone personally, it's slightly harder to establish some sort of connection, or rapport, with the person.
In my initial post which the_tower has read, I had written:
What most interests me in the_tower’s thoughts is the sense he gives of how the other person, or other people, are almost present. Online communication, blogging in particular, has the form of a conversation between two or more people, even if it is not, literally, a conversation. It is virtually (in the sense of 'almost' ) one. There is a desire for an immediate response, for the other’s, or others’, presence. Are you there?the_tower didn't comment on this in his response but re-reading these sentences of mine now, it seems to me that they had little to do with what he had written, that I was simply interpreting his post to say what I happened to want to say, as interpreters often do.
I am less confident than I was a few weeks ago of the truth of what I said i.e. that online communication, blogging in particular, has the form of a conversation between two or more people, even if it is not, literally, a conversation. But I think it is fair to say that my posts on Bea (beginning with 'Advice from Beatrix Joyce (my niece)' have the form of a conversation. I doubt now whether there is, as I wrotea desire [in blogging generally] for an immediate response, for the other’s, or others’, presence
But this is, I think, a good interpretation of my posts on Bea.
Interpretation is often self-understanding that does not know its name. I was not writing about the_tower's post at all but about myself.
Has it ever struck you, as it often does me, how, when someone complains about someone else, the complaint is more true of the person complaining than it is of the person who is being complained about?
I have just posted a comment on the_tower's blog:
Dear the_tower (Do you, by the way, have a more common-or-garden name that you would be prepared to reveal to me?),
thanks for posting a comment on my blog, and sorry to have been so very slow to acknowledge it. I hope that you get that essay done today.
By way of response to your comment, I've posted something on my blog again. I don't know if you'll make head or tail of it. I risk disappearing up my own bottom. But I feel that, sometimes, you have to take risks where you hope that, later on, you will understand why you took them.
I've been making some gentle progress on my blog, though I still don't know how TrackBack works exactly! I've been posting mainly on my niece Bea, and trying to get her to start a blog. The purpose is to try to get my writing going again after finishing a doctorate. I went into a kind of writer's depression after it. What I'm noticing in my posts on Bea is that there is some gentle humour in them, and that is a good sign for my writing endeavours, however tentative they are for now. I am entertaining myself, which is a start.
I am going to post this message as part of the post that I have just finished (bar pasting this into it). I hope that is O.K..
Best wishes and thanks again,
Conor
www.conorthoughts.net