In this book, I have sought to address our inattention to calamities that are slow and long lasting, calamities that patiently dispense their devastation while remaining outside our flickering attention spans—and outside the purview of a spectacle-driven corporate media. 

Wangari Maathai, Arundhati Roy, Indra Sinha, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Abdulrah- man Munif, Njabulo Ndebele, Nadine Gordimer, Jamaica Kincaid, Rachel Carson, and June Jordan are alive to the inhabited impact of corrosive trans- national forces, including petro-imperialism, the megadam industry, out- sourced toxicity, neocolonial tourism, antihuman conservation practices, corporate and environmental deregulation, and the militarization of com- merce, forces that disproportionately jeopardize the livelihoods, prospects, and memory banks of the global poor. 

• ^ names that deal with vast planetary inequalities and interfaces 

Edward Said called “the normalized quiet of unseen power.”7 

Violence, above all envi- ronmental violence, needs to be seen—and deeply considered—as a contest not only over space, or bodies, or labor, or resources, but also over time.  p8

The attosecond pace of our age, with its restless technologies of infinite promise and infinite disappointment, prompts us to keep flicking and clicking distractedly in an insatiable—and often insensate—quest for quicker sensation. 

• it is the speed of culture and technology that seeps into the ways we see and the way we engage. this isn’t out of choice and is not at fault of the individual but maybe is at the fault of the people designing with this knowledge and not trying to undo it…

“a shadow that is no less ominous because it is formless and obscure.”20 To confront slow violence requires, then, that we plot and give figurative shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time. The representational challenges are acute, requiring creative ways of drawing public attention to catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects. To intervene representation- ally entails devising iconic symbols that embody amorphous calamities as well as narrative forms that infuse those symbols with dramatic urgency. 

• such a fascinating issue of – how are we to express amorphous issues and their reproductions…. 

difference between slow and structural violence…

So, too, feminist earth scientist Jill Schneiderman, one of our finest thinkers about environmental time, has written about the way in which environmental degradation may “masquerade as inevitable.”24 

• (look up)

The explicitly temporal emphasis of slow violence allows us to keep front and center the representational challenges and imaginative dilemmas posed not just by imperceptible violence but by imperceptible change whereby vio- lence is decoupled from its original causes by the workings of time. 

To talk about slow violence, then, is to engage directly with our con- temporary politics of speed. p11

Over the past two decades, this high-speed planetary modification (the great acceleration of the anthropocene age) has been accompanied (at least for those increasing billions who have access to the Internet) by rapid modifications to the human cortex. It is difficult, but necessary, to consider simultaneously a geologically-paced plasticity, how- ever relatively rapid, and the plasticity of brain circuits reprogrammed by a digital world that threatens to “info-whelm” us into a state of perpetual distraction. 

• ^ awfully amazing 

We live, writes Cory Doctorow, in an era when the electronic screen has become an “ecosystem of interruption tech- nologies.”29 Or as former Microsoft executive Linda Stone puts it, we now live in an age of “continuous partial attention.”30 

• something I’m defiantly intending to address in my research. attention span and engagement are both pinnacle to the way we interact with objects, including the ones that we choose to adorn ourselves with
• what are the links with spectacle driven inforwhelming engagement and consumption of of objects of dress… are these ‘things’ still existing within identify politics and the need to embody identity… or will this ‘consumption desire’ be replaced with concepts of socialist ‘need’, designation of resources and tools…

Fast is faster than it used to be, and story units have become concomitantly shorter. In this cultural milieu of digitally speeded up time, and foreshortened narrative, the inter- generational aftermath becomes a harder sell. So to render slow violence visible entails, among other things, redefining speed: we see such efforts in talk of accelerated species loss, rapid climate change, and in attempts to recast “glacial”—once a dead metaphor for “slow”—as a rousing, iconic image of unacceptably fast loss. 

• needed terminology transition!! speed is all relative, especially in an age of accelerated lack attention span. marketing of information…. 

The representational bias against slow violence has, furthermore, a critically dangerous impact on what counts as a casualty in the first place. 

And what perspectives—not least those of the poor or women or the colonized—do hegemonic sight conventions of visuality obscure? Pratt’s formulation of planetary consciousness remains invaluable because it allows us to connect forms of apprehension to forms of imperial violence.36  p15

It is here that writers, filmmakers, and digital activists may play a mediating role in helping counter the layered invisibility that results from insidious threats, from temporal protractedness, and from the fact that the afflicted are people whose quality of life—and often whose very existence—is of indifferent interest to the corporate media. 

• how and why design can be used

In many cultures, moreover, rape isn’t defined as rape if it is inflicted by a husband. And in some societies, a rape isn’t rape unless three adult men are present to witness it. 

if it’s bloodless, slow-motion violence, the story is more likely to be buried, particularly if it’s relayed by people whose witnessing authority is culturally discounted P16

resource rebellions against developer-dispossessors who descend from other time zones to impose on habitable environments unsustainable calculations about what constitutes the duration of human gain. Change is a cultural constant but the pace of change is not. Hence the temporal contests over how to sustain, regener- ate, exhaust, or obliterate the landscape as resource become critical. More than material wealth is here at stake: imposed official landscapes typically discount spiritualized vernacular landscapes, severing webs of accumulated cultural meaning and treating the landscape as if it were uninhabited by the living, the unborn, and the animate deceased. 

(need to finish the reading)

In general this chapter on applying Bruno Latour to fashion wasn’t useful as it was just this – about fashion. The writer proceeded to analyse the market pulls and pushes within the network that is the buyer and the trend of the moment etc which doesn’t enthuse me at all and if anything is doing quite the opposite to what I’m into.

• I guess I still don’t know where I picture an output of ‘dress’ as it is hard to conceive dress without fashion. Does this mean I have to consider the evolution of ‘trend’ in a world without capitalism? Or maybe try conceive of a future where dress exists in isolation from fashion… what is left (obviously an network of things, but is it categorisable/label-able for my purposes) when ornamentation exists without capitalistically induced advertising of ‘trend’…. can’t picture it yet but maybe something to really think about?

Still not totally sure how Butler can inform my territory… I guess her acknowledge of networks is useful and interesting and PERFORMATIVETY is also relevant in that ‘bodily practices’ such as dress are continually and inevitably performative.

This in turn i guess makes me think about what structures one can ritualistically/repetitively unforced through the act of seemingly passive ‘wearing’.

Quotes:

Judith Butler’s feminist analysis of gender dovetailed well with these concerns, and conferred a new status on the study of style, asking, as it did, deeply philosophical questions about the body and how it is stylized into existence within predominant structures of culture and power, not the least of which is fashion.

The body’s reach into the virtual realm that surrounds it may be thought in terms of excess. It is in this moment of escape where the variability may be found. As she explains: ‘The injunction to be a given gender produces necessary failures, a variety of incoherent configurations that in their multiplicity exceed and defy the injunction by which they are generated’ (1990: 145). For Butler, this excess is the source of compulsive repetition of acts on and in the body, a compulsion to bring what we experience as a body as close as possible to idealized projections of it. Thus, each time the body is delimited, it gets sedimented with a history of norms (among which norms of the sexed morphology are the most important). p 288

Butler’s ideas speak to this dynamism, as she argues that the sedimentation of the history of norms is not inflexible; there is always the possibility that the world and the bodies in it will change in an instant, when an impossible action could slip in during one of the temporal gaps between instantiations of the structure. Contingent upon dynamic forces, the body is neither psychic nor material, but a mixture of both, existing as the tension between the psychic and material. p289

In this sense, her work laid out the idea that gender is performative, established through repeating iterations or instantiations, and this repetition leaves open some room for variation in the compulsory categories of male or female. Part of this openness stems from the fact that there isn’t really a ‘there’ there. On the one hand, ‘gender is the repeated stylization of the body’, but this stylization takes place as a ‘set of acts’ within a ‘highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’ (1990: 33) which is anything but natural, as it is just the repetition of the iteration that makes it seems to be so.

• interesting reference and use of the term repetition… 

In this way, we may understand fashion’s iterations as constructing the body within regimes of value that grid its intelligibility, mattering bodies through various cultural codes, policing gender boundaries in the process. Bodily instantiations repeat, with a difference, with every fashion cycle, offering possibilities for slippage outside accepted norms, a view that speaks to the notion of a body contingent upon social forces for its existence.

• JUDITH BUTLER AND IDEAS OF PERFORMATIVETY AND PERFORMANCE:  for a permormative act to be performative it must not only perform but must also have quantified intent – meaning that it must put into action what it is doing. gender is performative because through referring to someone as a he you are reinstating their identity as a male.. gender is constructed by enactment.. performative actions that aren’t ‘performances’ in nature at all.. they just have the power to construct as they are done.

For me, the explanatory potency of psychoanalysis seemed […] limited with regard to sexual variation […]. For example, to look at something like fetishism and say it has to do with castration and the lack […] when I think about fetishism I want to know about many other things. I do not see how one can talk about fetishism, or sadomasochism, without thinking about the production of rubber, the techniques and gear used for controlling and riding horses, the high polished gleam of military footwear, the history of silk stockings, the cold authoritative qualities of medical equipment, or the allure of motorcycles and the elusive liberties of leaving the city for the open road. For that matter, how can we think of fetishism without the impact of cities, or certain streets and parks, of red-light districts and ‘cheap amusements’, or the seductions of department counters, piled high with desirable and glamorous goods? To me, fetishism raises all sorts of issues concerning shifts in the manufacture of objects, the historical and social specificities of control and skin and social etiquette, or ambiguously experienced body invasions and minutely graduated hierarchies. If all of this complex social information is reduced to castration or the Oedipus complex or knowing or not knowing what one is not supposed to know, I think something important has been lost. (Rubin, 1994: 79)

In the same vein, Butler’s work has implications for another major player in the fashion canon, Roland Barthes (see chapter 8), whose work posited that clothing is a language with a grammar he carefully laid out in the mother of all fashion studies, The Fashion System. Using a semiotic analysis, the judiTh BuTler 293 study of how meaning is produced and put into circulation, he argued that fashion is a linguistic structure, and clothing is its expression. According to this structuralist logic, anything can be fashionable; its fashionable nature is determined not by what it is, but rather its place in the fashion system. Once a series of signs is established, they confer meaning consistently, even though the objects serving as vehicles for the sign may change. Thus, while various objects rotate in and out of the ‘it’ position (Fendi baguette bags, Jil Sander’s leather lunch bag purses, nail art) the ‘it’ position remains constant within the system’s logic.

• interesting – dress as language and the idea of fashion as a stable form a linguistics… concepts and various social hierarchies and codes are expressed by any given ‘object’…  its about the context for  that object  to appear in that desired what that object represents within the visually coded language
• this is structuralist stance..?

Wilson (2003) links fashion’s emergence from tentative beginnings in court society (Elias, 1978) to the rise of capitalism about four or five hundred years ago. She argues that the symbolic use of adornment to indicate group belonging or social identification – be it to a tribe or subculture, gender or class, whether through clothing, jewellery, body paint (make-up) and piercing – is found in all cultures. But that is dress, not fashion. Rather, fashion ‘is dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles’ (Wilson, 2003: 4–5).

• nice definitive difference between dress and fashion… predominantly negotiated via capitalism

Not entirely sure how useful this book is to my project but I enjoy how it dedicates a chapter (chronologically) to a theorist and whether the relevance is direct or indirect, she evaluates the impact / collision of their thoughts on fashion or how it aids thinking about fashion.

Quote taken from introduction:

The idea that language is paradigmatic for meaning is then central to structuralism and post-structuralism as it was mostly developed by French thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s, of whom Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault are discussed in Thinking through Fashion.

Post-structuralist thinkers accept the centrality of language, but reject the idea of a stable subject position, the structure of binary pairs and the idea of universal truths (Barker, 2011: 84). Jacques Derrida’s (1976) deconstructionism, for example, argues that language and meaning are fundamentally unstable and forever deferred and shifting. François Lyotard (1984) heralds the ending of ‘Grand Narratives’, proposing that ideologies can no longer authoritatively proclaim a truth nor promise a future of emancipation. Narratives can still present totalizing and unifying ‘grand’ stories, but we no longer accept their truth. Both Barthes (1967) and Foucault (1969) proclaimed ‘the death of the author’, marking the end of the author as the authoritative centre of meaning, to make room for multiple pleasures of the reader. The end of the belief in grand narratives and the death of the author coincide with the blossoming of many formerly oppressed or marginalized groups legitimating their particular stories from the 1960s onwards: youth, blacks, women, gays and lesbians, post-colonial groups and the many cross-overs between them (Woods, 1999). As a consequence, people got inter ested in ‘small’, fragmented stories of ‘partial truths’ and ‘situated knowledges’, as Donna Haraway (1988) would call it. The opportunity – or difficulty, depending on one’s viewpoint – of finding modes for the distinct voice of minority groups can be related to the emerging markets in fashion today when ‘non-Western’ designers find themselves commodified in relation to certain notions of cultural authenticity (Eicher, 1999; Kondo, 1997; Niessen et al., 2003). – (P10)

• I guess just thinking about perspectives on narrative… helpful for thinking about phychological engagement when consuming 
• I should look into structuralism maybe?

While this may sound a rather negative formulation, Marxist and psychoanalytic bodies of thought opened up a new concept of identity as flexible and dynamic, rather than a fixed and unchanging essence that is given at birth by God, nature or chance. If identity is a social construct, that is to say something ‘made’ in a complex process of negotiation between the individual and society, between nature and culture, then it is also possible to change and transform it. This – p10

While many fashion theorists, like Davis and Lipovetsky, celebrate fashion’s ambiguity and fluidity, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman is more critical of the ‘liquidity’ of post-modern culture. He deplores the ‘intrinsic volatility and unfixity of all or most identities’ (2000: 83). Bauman is especially suspicious of the pivotal role that consumption plays in shaping identities within the socio-cultural power structures of fashion, not unlike Barbara Kruger’s famous art work I shop, therefore I am. The post-modern condition has thus been celebrated as well as criticized for its flexible identities and free floating signifiers; a game that fashion is particularly adept at playing (Baudrillard, 1993 [1976]). – p11

For Richard Rorty, the linguistic turn signified a paradigmatic shift in Western philosophy. Such a dramatic turn of paradigm does not happen so very often, and Rorty (1967) only signals three in the history of Western philosophy: from things in antique and medieval philosophy to ideas from the seventeenth till nineteenth century to words in the twentieth century. However, we now 12 Thinking Through Fashion live in a time where one turn follows the other more quickly than we can keep up reading about them: the visual turn, the experiential turn, the spatial turn, the cultural turn, the performative turn, the affective turn, the material turn, and so on. This not only signifies that the term ‘turn’ suffers a huge inflation, but also that we live and think in a time of fast change, a period after post-modernism that is not yet clearly defined (Vermeulen and Van den Akker, 2010). – p12

• I like this idea of inflation.. I think this interestingly intersects with Nixons connects of contemporary culture inability to engage with amorphous temporalities that lack visualisation and ‘shock factor’ spectacle…

In all their differences, such a sociological approach allows us to understand fashion not only as a signifying system, but also as an embodied practice that takes place in a collectively shared social space.

The material turn reopens highly relevant issues for fashion studies, such as practice, embodiment and experience. Our agency takes place through material things and objects – such as clothes. As Appadurai argued (2013 [1986]), people’s relationship to objects is socially and culturally dependent, which in turn implies that things themselves have a social life. We mediate the social relations to objects, and social systems through which objects become meaningful (or not). Our identities function within a material culture, as we know all too well from our emotional relations to objects, whether it is a chocolate bar that soothes our anxiety, a song that reminds us of a lost love, or a particular dress that makes us feel sexy. Food, music or inTroducTion 13 clothes have a value. Of course, in high capitalism the value is always financial, but, as Karl Marx demonstrated in Das Kapital (1990 [1867]), the value is mostly a surplus value because of our affective relations to material things. Matter, objects, have an intrinsic social quality. ‘Stuff’ – as the title of Daniel Miller’s (2010) book runs – does not merely exist, but is always transformed by social interaction into a certain value: ‘I shop, therefore I am’. Putting the emphasis on materiality therefore does not preclude an understanding of matter as symbolic; rather, it shows that there is a constant negotiation between the material and the symbolic.

Daniel Miller (1998) argued for balancing theories to take on the specificity of material cultures. Ethnographic approaches are important methodologies for understanding what people wear and why (Woodward, 2007). Entwistle (2000) has argued for an empirically grounded sociology that takes the embodied practice of dress seriously. Because these diverse approaches have always been vital methodologies for fashion studies, the claim of novelty of ‘new materialism’ seems a bit singular. In that sense it may be better to speak of ‘renewed materialism’.

• time to look at Joanne Entwistles ides of ’embodied practices of dress…

As Daniel Miller writes, to study the things and objects of fashion means to enjoy ‘luxuriating in the detail: the sensuality of touch, colour and flow. A study of clothing should not be cold; it has to invoke the tactile, emotional, intimate world of feelings’