Popular and its news to you
- Thread starter Corpsey
- Start date
shiels
_
If all this sounds overly complicated, remember how good we tend to be at the semi-instantaneous, micro-calculations involved in gauging social contexts and determining optimal responses, what Erving Goffman calls “face-work.” It’s the very premise by which we navigate social life. Still, people especially good at gauging cultural signification fields — and who have undergone the necessary data uploads of class-linked education and cultivation — often become artists, art being a field which manipulates and leverages soft meanings towards ends that run the gamut from comfortable to shocking.
shiels
_
Moreover, fashionability, or cool, or style, acts a passphrase, a shift key, a phase shift, a valuable proxy for speaker identity which then allows the speaker to communicate complexly, reflexively, with reference to self and modified by self. It is reliable because of the intense difficulty of faking fashion, which requires so much insider knowledge that any successful impostor is arguably no longer a fake. There’s a reason it’s tough to get into Berghain. Consider, by way of another example, the way true upperclass belonging, or highbrow aesthetic taste, is so impossible to convincingly fake for those outside the caste. So much of fashion is unquantified, subconscious, and ambiently soft that we are not even explicitly aware of the class and taste signals we send, or what alternative signals we might send to signal an alternative identity, and yet we send them constantly, through word choice, attitude, posture, interest, palette, reference, familiarity.⁶
luka
Well-known member
i literally cant read them. they repel the eye. they shut out light.
sus
Moderator
How'd it take ya so long? You're around as much as I am, but for... 12 more years?
sus
Moderator
Bang-on. Which is why, if you get it, I'm surprised you don't like it
