Only Clothes?

What could be more innocent than clothing yourself? A necessity by all intents and standards, unless you want to cause public outrage, live against the norm, or have a fondness for the general parkiness which going about clotheless and carefree in springtime UK is bound to bring. However, start unravelling thought on this largely unthought-through daily activity, and you end up with a host of interesting questions: from implications to constructing a public identity, right down to whether clothing yourself is as innocent an activity as first seems.

Recently I was reading a series of short stories by the Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi (Nozee) Adiche. The set begins with the tale of the humbling of a cocky, privileged young man – who, falsely imprisoned, wears his oppression as an ugly badge of pride; not realising that it is his parents influence, the bribes they bring weekly for the guards, that keep his day to day life relatively cushy (given the circumstances). What is it, then, that humbles and brings a grave sense of reality to this young man? The answer is simple, challenging and transformative: the suffering of an other.

This nameless other, in Adiche’s fictional world, seems to stand for everyone, out of our line of vision, who suffers. We know they exist, but rarely does the extent and style of their existence encroach on our daily life, our everyday world, our daily concerns and way we do things. It often takes another’s suffering to make us realise what we have, and how what we consider as injustices to ourselves, often pail in comparison to the unseen made seen; and this is what happens in this short story.

Adiche’s other is an old man: frail, impoverished, helpless – with no money or status, with no family or influence - he is literally thrown into the young man's daily prison world. It emerges that this man has been falsely imprisoned as a kind of human ransom: the old man’s son is a revolutionary on the run; in imprisoning the father, the government hope to snare the son: appealing for him to turn himself in to end his father’s abject humiliation and treatment, inflicted on him by his gaolers. This doesn’t happen. The humiliations continue.

What stood out to me, reading the descriptions of the humiliations heaped on this old man, was how many of them were related to clothes, or at least the prominence lack of clothes given in Adiche’s description: one description stands out in particular, in exchange for basic rations of food, or water for drinking and washing, the guards order the Old Man to parade naked up and down the corridor for their express amusement. His nakedness, publicly paraded, served to both elate and empower the guards, whilst simultaneously sickening the young man who witnesses, attempting to avert his gaze out of respect for the wounded dignity of the Old Man. Being clothed, and remaining clothed, then, confers a kind of status: the uniformed guards form a pack with power, who attempt to bestialise and demoralise a ragged individual, by removing that which covers his body: in that way their joint gaze is fixed on him, imprisoning him, judging him, hounding him: both literally: he is incarcerated in abject conditions, and in another sense he is also fixed, or imprisoned, in his nakedness: he exposed utterly before these guards, and this extreme exposure in which he is frozen by the gaze of others, robs him of identity and power to assert, project or even feel his own humanity. There is nothing for him to hide behind: he is rendered powerless and demoralised.

Reading this story was, you may have gathered, a pretty powerful experience and it caught me up in thoughts about the connection or relation between power, social gaze, concealment and unconcealment. As it stands that’s just a barrage of words, but once we start thinking about the lines we might draw between them, things get interesting.

Power. Social Gaze. Concealment.

It seems that in the case of the old man, dignity is eroded when the right to conceal his body is taken away; or to put it even more accurately, dignity is eroded when he is forcibly made to ‘bear all’ in exchange for an allowance of basic necessities. Think about the phrase ‘bearing it all’, it’s one which would commonly inspire fear in the hearts of many (or alternatively, it might provoke unbounded joy of liberation for others – either way, reactions are limit reactions, you’d probably not get a blasé response from someone asked to ‘bear it all’) – take away our clothes, and you’ve literally nothing to hide behind; terrifying or liberating, I’ll leave it to you to decide.

The phrase ‘bearing it all’, in my mind at least, is connected to thoughts of laying yourself completely open, the very being of you, as you are, without apology, conforming or adornment: in this way we begin to see the link between self-identity and embodiment: the tradition of phenomenology, specifically when we turn to philosophers such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and even Sartre, emphasise that our bodies, and the things they allow us to do, are strongly related to, and constitutive of, our personal identity. Our bodies are markers of our personal history, and activities. Every individual body contains markers of what we’ve been through, or are able to do: this scar stands as testimony of a fall down Edinburgh hill, his well developed calf muscles, indicate that he likes to run. However, in concealing and clothing our bodies in a certain way, you reserve the right to keep these bearers of past, of ability, intimate. In this way, appearing clothe-less before of another, is often a mark of trust, respect and one of the highest forms of intimacy.

What effect, then, does a denial to conceal and clothe the body have both on us, and those who witness us?

I’ll not presume to answer for you, but will simply suggest you loose an immediate channel with which to project a certain air, express individuality or sense of belonging, to avoid an invasive gaze of others. You are robbed of the opportunity to conceal aspects of yourself which are utterly intimate, not for general public view. (as an aside to this: this about reports of people squirming whilst reporting ‘it felt like his eyes were undressing me’ - clothes are a buffer to invasion.)

All this goes without saying, but it is the harshness, and the lack of humanity contained in Adiche’s description of the helpless stripped naked, stripped from the ability to keep a part of himself sacred, which reveals this forcefully. When this is enacted before and for others, it reduces the power, dignity, humanity of one individual and aggrandises the other, who gains a sense of superiority over the other. I’ll stop here, with thoughts of social gaze and concealment in mind.

Forced Reflections

This year is the centenary of St. John's College. A pretty big event like that means large volumes of celebrations. One of them, an event for alumni in the north east, was held in Bishopsthorpe Palace, the Arch Bishop of York's place, just outside York itself. The college asked if I would speak about the college and what it has meant to me over the years I've been a part of it. Of course, I agreed, and as I've not posted in a while, I decided to use the event as blog-fodder.

Needless to say, being invited to speak forced me to take a new look at my time in John's, which was strange, since I'm still in the midst of it. However, it lead me to realise that it's good to take stock and appreciate something whilst that thing is still ongoing, rather than leaving things all to endings, when things are bundled up with nostalgia and out of reach. I can't help but feel that in a life that rolls on and around pretty quickly that there's value in taking two steps back from the things, places and committments you're immersed in to take stock, appreciate and tweak what might need tweaking.

(very) Belated Easter thoughts

Easter week is a time for reflection. A time for austerity and solemnity, before giving way to celebration. The time when one man’s blood and death saved a nation and the world. On Good Friday I sat reading in a coffee shop looking out, watching passers by milling in the street. They frequently stopped outside a shop bearing a massive sign:

 

‘Easter event: 20% of homeware’

 

There we have it, Easter now holds significance as the perfect time to buy a discounted toast rack.

 

This started thoughts about the government sponsored way out of the current economic climate: the spend-your-way-out. It stands in harsh contrast to the Easter message: instead of one person saving a nation, we the nation are saving the economy. Pouring money, life’s blood, away in a bid to save what has been lost.  

Consumerist News?

News. Here one day, replaced with more the next. New news quickly sours into old news. And old news is rapidly tipped into the cavernous backlogs of our mental and literal recycle bins, where it merges with and is absorbed by similar stories of old.

In a world in which we are bombarded with information and assaulted with headlines is it any wonder that we often watch, or read, the news with emotions which are luke-warm at best? News has become all too convenient. By this, I don’t mean that we should be foraging for our information and news stories, but simply that in our ‘news 24’ culture, it’s easy to take a spoonful of each story, often without sticking around to finish off the whole bowl. This might seem like a good thing when the story reported is the news equivalent of sprouts (tastes nasty, leaves you with bloated and uneasy feelings) but, as your mother would be sure to remind you, sprouts are good for you. You really should eat them all up. I suppose my point is that in our headline culture, we usually only expose ourselves to the basics. One headline flashes up ‘ice sheet size of Scotland breaks free’ and we only have a second or so to register, being to think ‘how terrib…’ before the next headline has interrupted thought mid-flow and our attention is directed to the next gobbet ready for consumption.

Given this, is it any wonder that people are largely apathetic about ‘current affairs’? Often we don’t have that much time to care about or digest a story before it moves from currency to attentional bankruptcy. Why is this? Is it the fault of the media and its reporters? The owners of the media? Or our own?

Neither. Or Perhaps, at least, a blend of them all.

Listening to a podcast yesterday, my attention was drawn and focused by a single phrase. Five words, which I think come uncomfortably close to the way we often inhabit and take note of the world around us, and its affairs. The speaker talked about our ‘Soap Opera Arc of Attention’. The phrase provoked thoughts of what we might identify as the phenomenon of commodification and individualisation of the news. That is the recentish phenomena that news is something to sell to us. That news can be ‘exclusive’, and that reporting in this fashion can boost ratings for one news show over another. This mentality leads to a shift, I think, in reporting news stories largely from a grandstand view, to the level of the individual. Bound up with this is the idea that news has a sell by date. Once a conflict or event has been going on for a while, it slips the media attention. A classic case might be that of the long term Sri Lankan civil war which has been going on since 1983, but which I hadn’t much awareness of until recently.

A potential source of the problem lies in the dynamic between the newswatcher and news supplier, and the insidious creeping of what we might call consumerist values (if we’re feeling particularly post-Marxist) into the sphere of journalism. In our fast-paced lives, there is a heavier demand for the neat and concise which will not drain the precious resource that is Our Time. News channels recognise and respond by wheeling out the headline artillery, from which we get our daily obligatory news hit. So far, fine. Rolling headlines are a way of acquainting ourselves with what’s going on. Quick style. But my concern is how this affects the way major news events are covered in light of this.

If we are used to shots of news in the form of headline, that we can knock back easily, what effect does this have on the way news stories are presented in more depth? The question for news providers becomes one of how they might reel us in to listen in more depth, and to choose their channel over another. One of the answers it seems to have found to this is to convey and pitch stories from the level of the individual. You only have to look at ITV news, or similar to see this in action. We are increasingly led to care through being presented by one person’s struggle, or another’s loss. In this way, individual-centred reporting seems designed to draw and sustain interest on a direct empathic level, rather than an impartial and detached reporting of events as and when they have happened. In stating this, I don’t wish to state that the stories of individuals are trivial or less worthy of attention than a grandstand view. Not at all. I just wonder to what extent this is ‘news, but not as we [have] known it’, and on the other extreme, whether such reporting must always entail a subtle form of propaganda. Our opinion-formation on root issues and events are primed by the manner in which the case is reported. In presenting us with an individual’s case from one side of a conflict, say, we might come to empathise with the plight of the ‘side’ which the particular individual comes from. In a sense, in pitching news from the level of the individual there is a loss of emotional distance between us, the consumers of the news, and the events.

But does this lead to difficulties in forming an objective opinion on events? And we've got to wonder what happens to these individuals once their news story reaches its sell by date.

Useful Feminism?

Reading the guardian website this morning, I was shocked to come across this story:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/04/taliban-flogging-inquiry-pakistan

It started me thinking about feminism, and the decline, or relative unpopularity, about using the term as a by-word for the fight for basic women's rights (or basic human rights made available to all). Recently, I've come across a few debates, on radio or where ever, which have been questioning where (if at all) feminism went wrong; that is, why feminism doesn't seem to be all that useful, or has slipped off the agendas of modern women. Against this backdrop, reading this article, I was struck by how much feminism still has to do.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Western women, who have achieved a degree of equality (as far as they have similar rights to male counterparts) and freedom, take their freedom for granted, as the norm. What is surprising is that most women would not elect to call themselves feminists, despite agreeing with the view that women deserve to be treated, paid and respected as much and as well as their male counterparts. This is especially the case when issues such as domestic abuse, inequalities in pay and abortion (to name a few) are brought up. That said, I’m left wondering what is it about the word ‘feminist’ which provokes the squirm and giggle response, the ‘oh-I-wouldn’t-go-as-far-to-call-myself-that’ rejoinder, in most people? I am left wondering whether the freedom and ability to follow whatever path decided on, and our freedom from institutional and social constraint when deciding what to make of our lives, is integrated to such an extent in a reality of living (for most in this country, anyway), that is, we take it for granted that we are even able to do this, or that this freedom just is the norm. According to this, feminism, and feminists, just aren’t needed. They’re outmoded. The oppression of women seems something out of history, far removed from our enlightened practices of 'today's world'.

But it's not.

The largely unbounded freedom of western women entails and is bound up with a blindspotting of small cases of what we might think of as gender inequality (such things as the relative 'acceptability' of men being able to behave certain ways to women, which would be thought of as grotesque the other way around); however, those small acts are nothing compared to what life is like for women in the border regions of Pakistan and similar places. Imagine not having a basic education, rights to visit a doctor without permission of a male relative, the freedom to go into public places and talk to whoever you want. Imagine the right to refuse sex to your partner being legally removed (as might be the case in Afghanistan if Karzai doesn’t cave under UN and US pressure). I don't know about you, but I can't. Perhaps I'm being naive, but the fact that I can't, leaves me with a curiously blended sense of privilege and responsibility. Who is it that gives these women's experiences a voice? Why don't we know about the general plight of women who live in such oppression? What is being done about it? I don't really know the answer to such questions, which troubles me further.

Being a philosopher by trade, a cluster of questions announce themselves: Is feminism is dead? If so, should be resurrected? How can we make feminism speak out to women who consider the f-word to be a dirty one? I, for one, think it has to be, but am unclear as to how.