Fashion, Luxury, and the Necropolis

"Fashion, turn to the left" - Stephanie Germanotta

The generation and display of surplus can be a galling thing to those the do not have access to it. We, the broke bitches of this world, may on look on in longing at the fine representations of wealth in this world; conveying a contradictory, and often mutually antagonistic, mixture of desirable characteristics; youth, independence, wealth,luxury, freedom. We think of those who exist on the precipice of death, and how that must feel to see the price of a year's worth of food used to exchange for a handbag, or belt. It is the foundations of death that i argue the very value of these objects is predicted upon, and that in the displaying of such wealth lies a much darker, dialectical impulse for recognition in the eyes of those dominated.

“Someone has just bought a handbag for 280,000 dollars”, my friend tells me over lunch. A landmark sale of an hermés birkin bag; crocodile skin with diamond detailing. There is an air of obscenity surrounding it, an aura of dazzling malevolence, a totem of the caesarian. The presence of the crocodile leather is telling enough; the technological dominion of man over one of the most terrifying of beasts, diamonds a dominion of man over the foundations of the earth, and the price paid; a value that could only be obtained by the exploitation of surplus; man's dominion over other men, and the modes of production.

capital, domination, the erotic and luxury are all inextricably linked. the fashion model is the image of venus in furs; the cruel and opulent (are they different?). In this sense, as in venus, Capital is a post-modern manifestation of a pre-modern desire to enslave, a pagan life force ritual given access to the entire world. It is a mystical priestess unable to survive on her own, without the warmth of her fur in the cold of christian modernity, but in her comfort sees no contradiction in tauntuing the very subjects that keep her alive. Moreover, it is their lives, their deaths that sustain her.

Thusly Capital is a necropole. it is built upon the bodies of those who have died to create it. The body without organs is a force of death and decay, harnessed to support, however unsustainably, this dazzling display of power. it is an erotic fixation with her despotism that keeps people entranced with her; keeps themselves throwing their necks under her stillettoed shoe. The libidinal, as is the realm of luxury, is leveraged to keep people in their position of subjugation.

But if there is this erotic exchange then is the state of subjugation so cruel at all? Is the repressive slave morality of christianity, as argued by nietzsche, transformative of subjugation into a greater goal? is pain truly bad if it sustains the functioning of the whole (and creates a kind of perverse pleasure in its own right)? Think of the working class conservative, who stands to gain nothing from his political beliefs but a faith in the continued functioning of the necropolis his house stands on?

the answer, of course, is "it depends". Wherein the erotic withholding moves us to somewhere better, then surely it is a positive thing. If society is improved and perfected by these taboos and repression then this erotic exchange is not only necessary but its dark pleasure is actually reflective of a sublimatory act; giving oneself over to a greater force or purpose.

Greatness, is of course, a slippery concept. Great-er-ness is less so, as we have some intuitive notion of a comparison between states of being and the world, but still the idea is seen to be relativist and poorly defined. What is known is that there are certainly two common aspects to everyones notion of better or worse, even if we take the relativist premise of this; namely those of value and risk. Value can be thought of as situated at a point in time and reflecting how everyone is affected by the right now; affected in a broader massumian sense but including the flowing of desire, of pain, of nihilism, of peace. In this sense it can be thought of as a vector quantity; a tangent object at a point in materiality in that it not only describes the state of the world right now but a view of the direction in which it is changing. There is a nietzscherian-theological notion in the evaluation of this: if you were to be stuck in this state forever, is there another state you would prefer? How would you move if situated at this point? This notion of value is not entirely separate from the capitalist notion of value, but exchange value functions as a scalar quantity and thus flattens all possible evaluations of objects, states of being, states of affect into a single metric. If we think of log-utility of exchange value, we get something like a vector quantity of positive and negative value only, thus creating some notion of directedness, but this is quite literally a one dimensional valuation.

On the contrary risk is the integral of this valuation over or up to some time horizon; specifically risk tolerance being how far into the future you may want to reasonably compute this. This tells you a person's tolerance for future pleasure/pain, states of consciousness, political listlessness, philosophical intensity and gives you a distribution of pointwise directions through time up to some ultimate point beyond which cannot be seen. These follow lines of flight up to points of rupture; where discontinuity overtakes flows and alien forces, like free will, reveal themselves. We can foresee these points of rupture and imagine how me might choose to process at those points, all adding to the computation of this generally highly intractable problem. We can understand this too as a vector quantity, since we can think of ourselves as accumulating the components of our value vector over time.

How then, can we reason a comparison of states of existence from these two concepts? Well each individual has a tolerance for each. Some prefer the moment, some prefer to project the moment some way into the future. But anything that improves both can surely be agreed to be greater than the previous state. This process of iterative distributuionalnot just positional optimisation should then be the goal of any society. This remains true if we replace humans with any kind of affective (and, indeed effective) automata, who choose actions based on their world models. The automata may have their own respective forces of subjection and affectation, but these forces coalesce into a vector of value that moves through time. Once we understand this, we can move past the relativist notions of value and see the whole of the human race acting as one body, with each individuals valuative directedness becoming one vector of movement. This is human-chauvinist, of course, but as a human I am inclined to prefer this over other philosophical perspectives. There is room for the non or liminally human in this, insofar as they aligns with a progressive goal for humankind as, in a sense, humanity is the only counter-entropic force we know of and as such the only body capable of this progress at all.

To return to the original line of argument, this search for great-er-ness is clearly not the case with capital. A series of crises have revealed to us the unfettered desiring of the capitalist body- perhaps moreappropriately body wiithout organs- to be corrosive to the very conditions our lives are predicated upon. the ecological, the distributively unequal, the viral; our accelerative connectedness giving rise to instability, entropy and unsustainable chaos. Whatever someone's appetite for risk and value, immediate death and destitution is not preferred by anyone

What, then, should our response be to the luxurious? In the same distinction just outlined, we should divide our response. we should allow ourselves to valourise the truly good; the well made, or the beautiful, or inspiring, and cast aside novelty for the sake of itself, or the vulgar display of wealth on its own, and especially the ugly. In short, to resist the degeneration of our souls under capital it is necessary to cultivate /taste/ - a discernment of the truly good from the profane; this is the ethical response to art. and in a sense this is what the elites truly want. they want us to give a critical eye to their display of dominance so that our recognition of it truly means something; in a dialectical sense. and in this sense taste is the only way to navigate and ultimately survive the necropole.

Luxury is an act of performance like any other, of representation and as such invites memesis. The desire to make the viewer want be like the signifier is the very point of signifying. This is the dialectical structure of wealth; the wealthy need recognition in the eyes of those they have accumulated from, and so to prevent the pointless and endless production of objects, concepts, technologies that will ultimately lead to everyone's demise.