Abstract
Fashion reveals how antithetical interests between the individual and the collective in the domain of taste are reconciled. Fashion also helps further the progress of individual freedom, contributing to the development of history toward freedom. In order to apprehend the attributes of fashion in relation to freedom, this chapter draws on Theodor W. Adorno’s account of spontaneous impulse, the unreasonable territory of freedom. The traditional definition of freedom in philosophy is that freedom, free behavior, is equivalent to behavior in tandem with reason, as regarded by Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant. However, Adorno offers a strand of reasoning about the mechanism by which impulse plays a decisive role in triggering our actions, through the process of which we feel autonomous, thereby illuminating that our feeling of being autonomous, which has its roots in bodily impulse, is as crucial as rational freedom. Grounded on Adorno’s philosophical analysis of the dialectical aspects constitutive of the concept of freedom, this chapter unpacks fashion’s relationship to the unfolding of freedom in modern times.
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Notes
- 1.
Here “psychological” actually means “meta-psychological” as one can see from the development of Adorno’s argument. He first uses the term “psychological” before introducing what he calls “meta-psychological.” This transformation is found in History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965. (2006, pp. 190–238), described as meta-psychological (ibid., p. 220), extra-mental (Ibid., p. 220), or prior to the thinking (Ibid., 216). Adorno argues that this “additional” domain is where the ideas of freedom and unfreedom within the subject are shaped, for it is the place for the “prehistory of individuation as such” (Ibid., p. 213).
- 2.
Refer especially to the lecture 25: “Consciousness and Impulse” in Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965 (2006).
- 3.
Regarding this topic, Adorno expresses his concern as follows:
I can imagine that many of you who have not been trained or are disinclined to think dialectically will want to object at this point. You will want to tell me that I am appealing to an element that is supposed to be absolutely crucial for the constitution of freedom; and at the same time, if I trace the genesis, the origins, of this element back to its ultimate roots, I find myself back at something that has been determined by blind nature. It is my belief that this objection, which I have raised on your behalf, brings us to a point that is of crucial importance for philosophical thought as such. . . . you need to free yourselves completely and utterly from the idea that everything that has ever existed is able to preserve itself in a form identical with what it once was. (Ibid., p. 236)
- 4.
For more explanation by Adorno on this topic, see Lecture 25: “Consciousness and Impulse” in History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965.
- 5.
See Lecture 25: “Consciousness and Impulse” in History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965, especially, 234–238.
- 6.
Both Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno share negative views on the eternal sameness that is linked with the modern era.
Modernity, the time of hell. The punishments of hell are always the newest thing going in this domain. What is at issue is not that “the same thing happens over and over” .… but rather that the face of the world, the colossal head, precisely in what is newest never alters—that this “newest” remains, in every respect, the same. This constitutes the eternity of hell and the sadist’s delight in innovation. To determine the totality of traits which define this “modernity” is to represent hell.” ˂G, 17˃ (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. R. Tiedemann, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 842–843).
The intertwining of eternal sameness and the new in the exchange relation manifests itself in the imagos of progress in bourgeois industrialism. What seems paradoxical is that these imagos grow old and that anything new should ever make its appearance at all, given that technology ensures that the eternal sameness of the exchange principle is intensified to the point where repetition prevails throughout the sphere of production. (Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965, 171).
What parades as progress in the culture industry , as the incessantly new which it offers up, remains the disguise for an eternal sameness; everywhere the changes mask a skeleton which has changed just as little as the profit motive itself since the time it first gained its predominance over culture. (Theodore W. Adorno “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” In Theodore W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Edited with an introduction by M. Bernstein, 98–106 [London and New York: Routledge, 2005], 100).
- 7.
The following is Svendsen’s account.
Pluralism in fashion does not necessarily make us any freer. …For Lipovetsky, fashion represents the opposite of tyranny: fashion promotes freedom rather than coercion. …The objection can of course be raised to Lipovetsky that even if the freedom to choose between brand x and brand y, between two, three, four buttons on a suit, or between two lengths of skirt, is undeniably a form of freedom, it is one based on a choice that does not constitute any real difference. Despite this, we apparently allow ourselves to be convinced that these actually are important differences. Our consumption, at least, would seem to indicate we allow ourselves to be so. (Svendsen, Fashion: A philosophy, 156).
- 8.
This catchphrase has survived since 1973. See Sydney Finkelstein, Charles Harvey, and Thomas Lawton, Breakout Strategy: Meeting the Challenge of Double-digit Growth (2007: 132–33).
- 9.
It is not surprising nowadays to find such irrational decisions in fashion. Under the logic of fashion, bags made of synthetic fiber can be much more expensive and more sought after than those of genuine leather; for example, a nylon Prada bag is far more expensive than a leather bag of an obscure brand name.
- 10.
See chapter 26. “Kant’s Theory of Free will” in History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965 (2006).
- 11.
According to Walter Benjamin, via “nowtime” the moment of political turbulence becomes intensified while transcending the linear construct of temporality. See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 261.
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Kang, E.J. (2019). Fashion and Freedom: An Adornian Critique. In: A Dialectical Journey through Fashion and Philosophy. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0814-1_3
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