Sunday, February 13, 2011

Do the Clothes Make the Man?

The experience was transforming.  I did change.  I felt it in my body.  It was not the kilt.  Kilts may have magic; I'll have more to say about this later.  But I am not depressed anymore.  I am again joy.
As directed, I went to play with the band--the Rhizomatics.  Two of us were available (Tom's son played bass and drums for a while but had to go to work), so dug and I set up some prerecorded loops in Abelton's Live.  We played and recorded over these tracks.  At certain moments we hit that magic that improvisation makes possible.  dug played the best solo I have ever heard him perform, and I listened, really listened, and picked notes with effects (I love echoes more than anything else; read my book on music video [shameless advertisement]).  

After an hour or so, like in deep meditation, we were in tune.  This is an important moment in the musical experience of communication; is the band actually in tune with each other?  When we hit that moment, my body responded.  I stood up straight and tall.  I could feel myself growing and receiving from the sounds the power and force (I have read so much on these metaphors that, like many educated people, I feel like I know less and not more.  So, I will use force, like "the force" of jedi lore (so I'm a geek, deal with it) and Power to refer to discourse.  If you do read my older blogs you may see that this use is not consistent; will you, reader, bother reading on with this thought flowing from my fingers, edited by my mind, and sent to the world by the web? I hope I do not bore you with these details that I believe scholarship deserves--even in a blog).

Kilted.  Red and black tartan with red t-shirt and black sweater--at least I think that's what I wore.  It was an entire day ago.  But when the music swelled I felt again that masculinity that I have only felt when kilted.  At some time I will blog about my recollections of early experiences, but know here that the clothes make a difference.  They do make the man.

So, do the clothes make the man?  Like many hackneyed phrases, this is weak.  However, when the music lifted me from this depression (I have had some moments of relief in the past two weeks), I found that re-adopting my preferred dress (well, really a skirt;  that's a joke) allowed the moment to rise, the body to rise with a connection to the force in which bodies and musical expression were tied in musical expression in a circularity that we call communication. This is where Merleau-Ponty seems to have been going with his discussions on art.  It is where Vivian Sobchack, Richard Lanigan, and my own work have gone.  So many phenomenologies written in the spirit of Merleau-Ponty focus on perception (for indeed his work in this realm is supreme).  Algis Mickunas wrote an excellent essay called "The Primacy of Expression" that stood along side Merleau-Ponty's "Primacy of Perception."  Even the book I just bought, "Perception and the Phenomenology of Music Experience," by Harris M. Berger, which I am trying to make time to read, focuses his title on perceptionI will argue that perception and expression do not have a battle for "primacy," but instead, when seen in an unending circularity, are what we call communication.  Indeed, I dedicate my life to this probelmatic. 

So, at the end of the day, Kilt Guy is feeling good, and going home to get dressed for a night at the theater.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

I AM Back (sort of)

Photo of and by Cam Switzer
Most of my time is not devoted scholarship (researching and teaching), but to minding schedules, writing "white papers," instituting mandates--most of you know the office gig.  What does this have to do with kilts?  ...wait for it....

My doctors knew that I was an amateur electric violinist, so both he and she suggested I play more music.  I was able to find some musicians with whom I could play every week.  Sounds great, but it's hard to schedule.  And what does this have to do with kilts? ..wait for it...

Then, my wife was in a horrible car accident:  She's recovering well, but we had to sell our two cars, including my beloved Mazda Miata, for one car.  She may never drive again, and I don't know about your life, but a one car, two person, two professional, career persons, one car situation appears to me to have the potential to damage a perfectly good marriage.  So, what does this have to do with kilts?  ..getting tired of waiting for it...

Maybe everything.  The women I talk to about clothes often tell me that they pick out clothes to help make (magical power) them feel good about themselves and their day or night.  When I talk to men about this, most say that they just grab something clean and get to the task at hand.

In the paradigms of clothing, two stand out.
  1. Uniforms:  Men's clothes tend to be uniforms.  Here denotation, for example, the business suit, connotes professionalism, built on mythologies and ideologies of success, power, hierarchy, capitalism, the paradoxes of individualism, and so on.  Remember, this is a blog, and I'm just grabbing a few examples.  Life is much more complex.
  2. Costumes:  Women's clothes tend to be costumes.  Denotations vary widely, as do connotations, but connotations have a twist we don't find in the uniform, for example, connotations can range from invisible, to categories we rarely think of with men such as sexy and even slutty. The mythologies and ideologies that construct "women" and "the feminine" are different:  The constitutional and revelatory narratives go back to stories such as Eve in the garden of Eden. 
Switching from kilts to business clothes appears, at first glance to be shifting from costume to uniform.  I like my business clothes.  I have some great dress pants, shoes, formal shirts, funky ties, killer jackets.  I can also mix them with jeans, and lots of heavy and dark jewelery. While these clothes are coded as uniforms, I am quite cognizant of the fact that I wear them as costumes because I am clearly putting on a show.  I don't know if I can say I'm enacting a guerrilla semiotics, but awareness of expression and perception, being able to push the perception of the beholder (kairos), is a type of communicative power. 

Wearing my business clothes as "costumes" short-circuits a beholder's first perception of social subjectivity and lends an objectivity to the body that has the potential to build trust.  For example, even when wearing kilts regularly, I would put on a suit and tie when "acting" my "role" as department Chair, meeting prospective students and especially their parents who were preparing to spend quite a bit of money on their child's education.  The "appearance"  was "packaged" and "delivered" as paralanguage.

So, what happened?  By turning to the uniform (and whether my expressive, communicative action was deliberate, the code for suits is uniform) I was able to become invisible.  Believe me, people do not hassle you as much as you think they might when you wear a kilt, but you are never invisible.  So, this week I wore kilts again.  My goal was not to fight depression (you can't do that).  You can, however, reconstruct yourself in the image you desire.  

While I will continue to argue that women are largely "stripped" of power in our culture, there are sites of power, as there have always been, where "women's" power of expression is more interesting than men's.  (I hope I do not have keep saying that there is no "women" as such; I am talking about connotation, myth and ideology not any one real woman).  

Is it possible to shift one's perception (when that perception is depressed, everything is dark, and you have what Alan Watts called an inverted mystical experience, things look plastic, getting our of bed is difficult) by shifting one's expression?  

My readings in contemporary psychotherapy, cognitive therapy, while being a bit too positivist for my tastes, reveal that "communication" is in fact the site of functional and dysfunctional experience.  Phenomenology and semiotics had found this out at least one hundred years earlier, but, what the hay, they deserve credit for finding this out also--and it lends credential to phenomenology and semiotics at the same time.  While cognitive therapy focuses on intra-personal and interpersonal communication, the Kilt Guy is going to focus on a wider range of communication.  If changing thoughts (e.g., all or nothing thinking) changes the person, does changing clothes change the "person"?