Précis Week 3: Media and Infrastructure: Domesticating the Sublime
Writing
about what he considers the ‘colonial sublime’, which used technology to impose
a political hierarchy amongst colonized and colonizer based on an
ideological-based technological superiority, chapter one of Brian Larkin’s book
has been useful in my own thinking about clothing, especially the suit. As can
be traced visually and historically, the suit has been around for about 500
years. David Kuchta’s work on the three piece suit and modern masculinity
between the years of 1550-1850 specifically highlights the ways in which the
three piece suit was a realm of aesthetic and political contestation. One of
the key insights that I got out of his piece was actually the fact that British
masculinity as seen through the simple three piece suit was juxtaposed against
French masculinity and fashion which were seen as extravagant, superfluous, and
overly adorned. In historicizing this particular connection, I’ve come to
suggest that the spectacular quality to which fascinated discourse about
British men’s wear occurred between 1550-1850 was precisely in its alleged simplicity.
Perhaps in
reading Larkin’s chapter, we can also understand the integrality of
clothing—the visual and material apparatuses through which advertisements
represent images of Nigerian ‘men of tomorrow’—to the process of producing a
liberalized colonial sublime. Although the colonial sublime is indeed to incite
awe amongst its subjects and to subject particular populations with a status of
otherness hanging by a logic of liberal sameness/progress, the efforts to
domesticate and make familiar these sublime processes, to me, speaks volumes to
the way that clothing mattered to these projects and indeed carried the
technical processes of how clothes are made, the apparently static political
distinctions between colonizer/colonized, as well as the ideological
apparatuses that defined colonization and racism. The images on pages 44-46 are
clear indications to me about the visual, ideological, and material role of
clothing to re-instating the colonial sublime. If indeed the colonial sublime
was manifest partly through the creation of factories, then the clothes
mass-produced by sewing machines become part of the technical logics to mass
produce and also the material processes through which progress in postcolonial
nations can occur, carrying with it many ideological functions.
Rather than
introduce David Kuchta’s work as my media object, I am actually thinking about
contemporary applications of suits in advertisements through a company called
Indochino. Functioning as an online tailoring business that creates suits for
men overseas in Hong Kong and shipping it back to the global consumer, I am curious to
understand how the remnants of the colonial sublime in relations of clothing
production function in Indochino’s particular video that outlines their making
of an Indochino suit. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NGewUMrKMg )
is one that attempts to showcase via its subliminal qualities of the easy, intricate,
and thorough ways that their company can make clothes for “the modern gentlemen”.
Although they do not forefront factory work insofar as sweatshops go—there’s
statements by the founders that explicitly state that is not their mission—the processes
through which these suits are made are highlighted in this video, suggesting a
particular role that technically understanding the construction of a suit has
for its viewers, a presumed modern gentlemen.
What indeed I am questioning
based on just a simple reflection of Larkin’s work is what role does the
colonial sublime play when these governing logics are rearticulated in our
current economic, political, and cultural climate especially in looking at
these clothes and its production? I am curious here in what Indochino’s video
actually contributes to our understanding of techno-politics, especially if as Larkin
points out “techno-politics rests on the idea that liberalism is a mode of
politics that functions through invisibility—meaning the lack of overt
intervention by governmental bodies in everyday affairs [and] in their place,
liberal seeks proxies in technological regimes”. If
the presumed understanding is that anyone with online access and a steady
paycheck could access the ideological value of suits, then what does that
necessarily say about the colonial legacy clothing played in postcolonial sites
and also in this online clothing company?
I am reminded of Larkin's discussion about the ways in which folks would have differential access to electricity, some using cellphone monitors as light while others use and own personal electric generators after the colonial project in Nigeria. In some ways, it appears that suit wear, ownership, and purchasing fall along similar logics. Taking heed from Larkin's mission, where he looks at what happens when media gets dislodged from state projects, Indochino's work seems to perhaps perform this work as well. Not particularly bound to the confines of a singular unified state project, Indochino's work in advertising to a Western liberal subject and also housing their showrooms in the US and Canada are clear examples to me of the ways that suit production, consumption, and circulation are not bound to any one state project. Rather, it is a business that ships clothes internationally and selectively markets its clothes to the US and Canada. In some ways, although suits were created for particular national projects like how the British three piece suit in distinction from the French, suits particularly as its produced and sold by Indochino are not entirely bound to this state project model.
Rather, in our particular historical conjuncture, suits as they have come to be seen within the last two hundred years seem to become more domesticated as an image that doesn't evoke the colonial sublime anymore. If Mrázek was describing the ways in which the madame sought to create a colonial sublime via Dutch clothing, then I wonder if the purchase of these suits are potential ways that colonial sublime quality gets challenged. I wonder if there is something to be said about the affective meanings these objects may evoke for individuals who have lived during and after the colonial projects. Although the linkages between modernity, masculinity, and progress were articulated in Indonesia and also in Nigeria as can be seen here, the same tropes were evoked again perhaps in a different way in this Indochino video. Whereas the others were about linking the subjection of modern, liberal, and progressive masculinity within the colonies in relation to the metropole, Indochino's configuration of the modern, liberal, and progressive masculine subject (e.g. 'gentleman') isn't confined to an overtly national or colonial relationship. Rather, it is enabled by the political, economic, and cultural networks that were built on top of the colonial infrastructure. Where the residual remnants of coloniality function to direct its implications but are denounced with the current project of (neo)liberal economics and politics, Indochino's evocation of the 'modern gentleman' seems to create another kind of figure of a liberal, globalized citizen-subject.
I am reminded of Larkin's discussion about the ways in which folks would have differential access to electricity, some using cellphone monitors as light while others use and own personal electric generators after the colonial project in Nigeria. In some ways, it appears that suit wear, ownership, and purchasing fall along similar logics. Taking heed from Larkin's mission, where he looks at what happens when media gets dislodged from state projects, Indochino's work seems to perhaps perform this work as well. Not particularly bound to the confines of a singular unified state project, Indochino's work in advertising to a Western liberal subject and also housing their showrooms in the US and Canada are clear examples to me of the ways that suit production, consumption, and circulation are not bound to any one state project. Rather, it is a business that ships clothes internationally and selectively markets its clothes to the US and Canada. In some ways, although suits were created for particular national projects like how the British three piece suit in distinction from the French, suits particularly as its produced and sold by Indochino are not entirely bound to this state project model.
Rather, in our particular historical conjuncture, suits as they have come to be seen within the last two hundred years seem to become more domesticated as an image that doesn't evoke the colonial sublime anymore. If Mrázek was describing the ways in which the madame sought to create a colonial sublime via Dutch clothing, then I wonder if the purchase of these suits are potential ways that colonial sublime quality gets challenged. I wonder if there is something to be said about the affective meanings these objects may evoke for individuals who have lived during and after the colonial projects. Although the linkages between modernity, masculinity, and progress were articulated in Indonesia and also in Nigeria as can be seen here, the same tropes were evoked again perhaps in a different way in this Indochino video. Whereas the others were about linking the subjection of modern, liberal, and progressive masculinity within the colonies in relation to the metropole, Indochino's configuration of the modern, liberal, and progressive masculine subject (e.g. 'gentleman') isn't confined to an overtly national or colonial relationship. Rather, it is enabled by the political, economic, and cultural networks that were built on top of the colonial infrastructure. Where the residual remnants of coloniality function to direct its implications but are denounced with the current project of (neo)liberal economics and politics, Indochino's evocation of the 'modern gentleman' seems to create another kind of figure of a liberal, globalized citizen-subject.
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