a heroic vision of life

Identity, Fashion, Gender instagram aheroicvisionoflife giulialiberti.com

[aheroicvisionoflife]

March 2023/8 Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit. George Santayana, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906)

[aheroicvisionoflife]

April 2023/1 Indifference to style ... is almost always symptomatic of the dogmatic sclerosis of content. Theodor Adorno, "Reconciliation under Duress," in Aesthetics and Politics, 1977

[aheroicvisionoflife]

March 2023/4

The notion of curatorship is pertinent for understanding profilicity because it expresses nonauthenticity rather than inauthenticity. Persons manage their personas and profiles, are emotionally invested in them, and are constantly involved in staging their presentation. Personas and their profiles are exhibited like public works of art; they must be taken care of, cared about, and cared for. Hans-Georg Möller, Paul D'Ambrosio, You and your Profile. Identity after Authenticity, 2021

[aheroicvisionoflife]

April 2023/a

FASHION, n. A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

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January 2023/4 And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, 1937

[aheroicvisionoflife]

March 2023/7

Fashion covers everything and involves everyone – if you want it or not, if you are aware of it or not. Fashion is an extensive and somehow disturbing phenomenon. It is that “Goddess of appearances” as Mallarmé later on defined it, it is a mysterious deity which, as it was said at the time, is the daughter of Saturn and of change, something that makes all of us – here I am quoting La Bruyère – makes all of us crazy and unstable.

Fashion did not always exist, and until the beginning of the 17th century there wasn’t even an expression to refer to it. (...). Later as fashion arose and the corresponding terms for fashion in the various European languages arose, and together with the terms, arose also lively debate on the interpretations and the consequences of fashion. A very serious word debate which is very different from today’s carelessness (...). For us, fashion is often considered something frivolous, something marginal, something that concerns especially women – and that’s not understood as praise in the debate – and concerning mostly clothes: when we think about fashion we think about clothes first. In the 17th century on the contrary it was very different. Fashionable people were primarily men, and fashion involved not only clothing, and not only the way to appear, but every possible object. That worried for example La Bruyère, that when fashion spreads, everything seems to be governed by fashion – clothes of course but also taste, lifestyle, health and consciousness. Fashion dictates the shape of clothes, the shape of wigs, but also what to eat, which medicines to use, what feelings to experience and to manifest, philosophical orientation, and and especially the attitude towards religion.

Elena Esposito – "In and out. Fashion and the culture of transitoriness", 2013

[aheroicvisionoflife]

October 2022/4 If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of “men” will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that “women” will interpret only female bodies. Further, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution (which will become a question), there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two. The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it. When the constructed status of gender is theorised as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 1990

[aheroicvisionoflife]

January 2023/8a Let us consider, with some scientific strictness, what a Dandy specially is. A Dandy is a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well: so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress.

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books, 1831

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March 2023/1a A regime of authenticity requires constant concern with and emphasis on uniqueness, creativity, and autonomy. One must not only strive for these values but also voice one’s support for them. Otherwise it is difficult to find recognition, to distinguish oneself, and to accrue moral value of one’s identity. Hans-Georg Möller, Paul D'Ambrosio, You and your Profile. Identity after Authenticity, 2021

[aheroicvisionoflife]

March 2023/8a ...and Cesare said: dress like a lord, and keep your mouth shut. Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 1528

[aheroicvisionoflife]

October 2022/1

If he is an artist the individual is likely to paint self portraits; if he is Rembrandt, he paints some threescore of them. And he begins to use the word ‘self’ not as a mere reflexive or intensive, but as an autonomous noun (...) Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 1972

[aheroicvisionoflife]

December 2022/1 Yes, the objective form is the most subjective in matter.  Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.  Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891

[aheroicvisionoflife]

November 2022/3b + 3a To keep the social validation feedback loop going, it is of crucial importance to regulate and channel the power flow. Yes, power is concentrated in high profiles, but all low profiles are, and must be, integrated into the ongoing circulation of power lest they drop out of the loop. Social validation feedback loops are social power generators and regenerators. Just as in the capitalist economy the poor need to be given the constant opportunity to spend the little money they have (so that this money can eventually make the rich richer), in profilicity the low profiles constantly need to be given the opportunity to spend their profilic power in evaluating the profiles of others. And the cycle is self-reinforcing. By citing Naomi Klein or Judith Butler, we further their high profiles. And if we don’t cite people like them, we lower our profile even further by not being “in the discourse.” Hans-Georg Möller, Paul D'Ambrosio, You and your Profile. Identity after Authenticity, 2021

[aheroicvisionoflife]

January 2023/6

It would be wrong to think that the discussion of “identity” ought to proceed prior to a discussion of gender identity for the simple reason that “persons” only become intelligible through becoming gendered in conformity with recognisable standards of gender intelligibility. 

Whereas the question of what constitutes “personal identity” within philosophical accounts almost always centres on the question of what internal feature of the person establishes the continuity or self-identity of the person through time, the question here will be: To what extent do regulatory practices of gender formation and division constitute identity, the internal coherence of the subject, indeed, the self-identical status of the person? To what extent is “identity” a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience? And how do the regulatory practices that govern gender also govern culturally intelligible notions of identity? In other words, the “coherence” and “continuity” of “the person” are not logical or analytic features of personhood, but, rather, socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility. Inasmuch as “identity” is assured through the stabilising concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality, the very notion of “the person” is called into question by the cultural emergence of those “incoherent” or “discontinuous” gendered beings who appear to be persons but who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined. 

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 1990

[aheroicvisionoflife]

October 2022/3

Just as the dress is extremely well-groomed yet almost invisible in its perfection, the impassibility of the dandy serves to deny the effort made, the underlying discipline, and to create at the same time that distance that consecrates the individual in his singularity and is the very basis of distinction.

Gilda Piersanti, Introduction, J-A. Barbey d’Aurevilly, George Brummel e il Dandismo, 1994

[aheroicvisionoflife]

December 2022/4

Society requires of us that we present ourselves as being sincere, and the most efficacious way of satisfying this demand is to see to it that we really are sincere, that we actually are what we want our community to know we are. In short, we play the role of being ourselves, we sincerely act the part of the sincere person, with the result that a judgement may be passed upon our sincerity that it is not authentic.

Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 1972

[aheroicvisionoflife]

September 2022/2

I have discovered a universal rule which seems to apply more than any other in all human actions or words: namely, to stay away from affectation at all costs, as if it were a rough and dangerous reef, and (to use perhaps a novel word for it) to practise in all things a certain nonchalance - sprezzatura - which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless.

Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 1528