Morgan E.

Spencer Colloquium
9:30 AM
November 21, 2019
Structure of Discussion
& Topics Planned

Quick Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaGp5_Sfbss

“The True Cost,” Directed by: Andrew Morgan, 2015

Methodology
TERMS: Dialectics, Contradictions, Conception, Perception, and re-Perceiving, Praxis
Mao Zedong “On Contradiction” 1978
• “Contradiction is universal and absolute, it is present in the process of development of all
things and permeates every process from beginning to end,” (p. 318)
Keating Teaching Transformation: Transcultural Classroom Dialogues 2007
Possessive individualism is defined as “self-contained or self-enclosed to emphasise its
rigid borders, extreme detachment, and absolute isolation: each individual is entirely
separate from the external world, with permanent, inflexible boundaries dividing the self
from all other human and non-human life.”

Ethics, The Body, & The Soul

TERMS: Duality, Ethics, Justice, Embodiment, Equality, Materialism, Metaphysics,
Rig-Veda X, hymn 90 1500-1200 BC
• “The universal spirit, the Purusha, became divided, that his mouth became the priest, his
arms the soldier, his thighs the husbandman, and that from his feet was born the slave
(sudra).”
Plato’s Republic 380 BC
• “The best is to do injustice without paying penalty; the worst is to suffer it without being
able to take revenge.” (p. 35, 359).
• “I don’t believe that injustice is more profitable than justice, not even if you give it full
scope and put no obstacles in its way.” (p. 21, 345)
Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics 340 BC
• “The just, therefore, is what is lawful and what is equal; the unjust is what is unlawful and
unequal.” (1129b)
• “If doing the noble and the shameful things is up to us, and similarly also not doing them -
and this, as we saw, amounts to our being good or bad - it is, therefore, up to us to be
decent or base.” (1113b)
Mencius Excerpts from Mengzi 300 BC
• “Ethical choices can never be reduced to reason, as the Mohists wish them to be: every
moral choice is a response to a situation unique in its particularity, and no rationally
designed set of rules can ever exhaust the infinite conditions governing each context, or the
infinite contexts a person encounters in the course of life.” (p. 14)
Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier 1528
 • “The soul is far more worthy than the body, it deserves to be all the more cultivated and
adorned.” (translation p. 51)
Entwistle The Fashioned Body 2000
• “I argue that the study of fashion needs to analyse the way in which social forces framing
dress - such as the fashion system, social location, class, income, gender.” p. 15
• “Refers not just to the production of some styles as popular or elite, but also to the
production of aesthetic ideas which serve to structure the reception and consumption of
styles.” p 48
• “Dress needs to be understood as a situated practice that is the result of complex social
forces and individual negotiations in daily life.” p. 15
• “Fashion thrives in a world of social mobility, a dynamic world characterized by class and
political conflict, urbanization and aesthetic innovation, so it is not surprising that
fashion flourished in the nineteenth century, when social upheaval reached a new zenith
with the French and the Industrial Revolutions.” p. 48
Mao, “A Study of Physical Education,” 1917
• “When the body is perfect and healthy, then knowledge is also perfect,” and “sentiments
are also correct,” (P. 119-120)

Capital in Theocracy
TERMS: Ritualism, Biomorality, Ethnography, Material Culture
Hanging, 1 of 7 Pieces, ca. 1610-1620. Painted resist and mordants, dyed cotton, 108 1/4 x 37
3/4 in. (275 x 95.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Museum Expedition 1913-1914, Museum
Collection Fund, 14.719.2.
Ingold “Toward an Ecology of Materials,” Annual Review of Anthropology 2012.
• “Culture furnishes the form, nature the materials; in the superimposition of the one upon
the other, human beings create the material culture with which, to an ever-increasing
extent, they surround themselves.” p. 432
• “People create a material world that, in turn, provides a mirror in the reflection of which
they and their successors fashion themselves. ‘We cannot know who we are or become what
we are (Miller 2005, p. 8) writes, ‘except by looking in a material mirror, which is the
historical world created by those who lived before us.” p. 435
• “Things exist and persist only because they leak: that is, because of the interchange of
materials across the ever-emergent surfaces by which they differentiate themselves from the
surrounding medium.” p. 438

Capital in the Renaissance

TERMS: Visual Semiotics, Power Dynamics, Wealth, Politics, Extravagance
Bronzino, Agnolo di Cosimo, Eleonora di Toledo, 1545
Flugel “Sex Differences” The Psychology of Clothes 1950
• “The new social order demanded something that expressed the common humanity of all
men. This could only be done by means of a greater uniformity of dress, a uniformity
achieved particularly by the abolition of those distinctions which had formerly divided
the wealthy from the poor, the exalted from the humble; since these distinctions consisted
 largely in a greater elaboration and costliness of aristocratic costume as compared with
that of the lower classes, the change in question implied at the same time a greater
simplification of dress, by a general approximation to more plebian standards that were
possible to all.” (p. 113)
• “It is indeed safe to say that, in sartorial matters, modern man has a far sterner and more
rigid conscience than has modern woman, and that man’s morality tends to find
expression in his clothes in a greater degree than is the case with woman.” (p. 113)
Flugel “The Great Masculine Renunciation,” The Psychology of Clothes 1950
• “If, from the point of view of sex differences in clothes, women gained a great victory in the
adoption of the principle of erotic exposure, men may be said to have suffered a great
defeat in the suffen refuction of male sartorial decorativeness which took place at the end
of the eighteenth century.” p. 111
• “It is indeed safe to say that, in sartorial matters, modern man has a far sterner and more
rigid conscience than has modern woman, and that man’s morality tends to find expression
in his clothes in a greater degree than is the case with woman.” p. 113
Frick Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing 2000.
• A worthy woman “fecce onore a casa nostra, sempre.” (always brings honor to our home)
• “Parodoxically, Florence was a place where the wearing of its own finest garments was
prohibited, because the Commune continually passed sumptuary legislation that restricted
vestimentary display.” p. 3
• “I am interested in the irony that the making of clothing functioned to unite people across
class lines, while at the same time the clothes themselves were manipulated to amplify the
distinction between those classes.” p. 5

Capital in Industrialization (The French Rev/Colonialism/Post-colonialism)

TERMS: Social Mobility, Colonialism, Imitation, Extraction, Classes, War Capitalism, Industrial
Capitalism, Waste, Excess
Beckert Empire of Cotton: A Global History 2014
• “Instead of householders growing cotton and turning it into homespun thread and hand-
loomed cloth, millions of slaves labored on plantations in the Americas, thousands of miles
away from the hungry factories they supplied, factories that in turn were thousands of miles
removed from the eventual consumers of the cloth.” p. Xi
• “Latter-day capitalism rests upon the rule of law and powerful institutions backed by the
state, but capitalism’s early phase, although ultimately requiring state power to create
world-spanning empires, was frequently based on the unrestricted actions of private
individuals - the domination of masters over slaves and of frontier capitalists over
indigenous inhabitants.” p. xvi
• “Too often, we prefer to erase the realities of slavery, expropriation, and colonialism from
the history of capitalism, craving a nobler, cleaner capitalism.” p. xviii
• “I am centrally concerned with the unity of the diverse. Cotton, the nineteenth century’s
chief global commodity, brought seeming opposites together, turning them almost by
alchemy into wealth: slavery and free labor, states and markets, colonialism and free trade,
industrialization and deindustrialization.” p. xix
Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class 1967
• “Throughout the entire evolution of conspicuous expenditure, whether of goods or of
services or human life, runs the obvious implication that in order to effectually mend the
consumer’s good fame it must be an expenditure of superfluities. In order to be reputable it
must be wasteful. No merit would accrue from the consumption of the bare necessities of
life, except by comparison with the abjectly poor who fall short even the subsistence
minimum; and no standard of expenditure could result from such comparison, except the
most prosaic and unattractive level of decency.” p. 96-97
• “When styles and practices of the upper classes were imitated, when their fashions trickled
down to their social inferiors, the upper classes then changed the fashions to re-distinguish
themselves…”
Marx Das Kapital, a Critique of Political Economy 1867
“Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!” (ch. 24 sec. 3)
“A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its
analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties
and theological niceties.” (ch. 1 sec. 4)
“The value of a commodity represents human labor pure and simple.” (ch. 1 sec. 1)
“Work, thrift, and greed are therefore his three cardinal values.” (ch. 3 sec. 1)
“The instrument of labor [in] the form of a machine…becomes a competitor of the
worker.” (ch. 15 sec. 4)
“The agricultural folk [were] forcibly expropriated from the soil…turned into vagabonds,
and then…tortured.” (ch. 20 sec. 6)
Marx “Letter to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov” 1846
• “Without slavery, there would be no cotton. Without cotton, there would be no modern
industry.”
• “It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created
world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry.
Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old
World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an
economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most
progressive nation, would he transformed into a patriarchal country.”
Comaroff “Empire’s Old Clothes,”
• “In a commodity culture, identity is something owned apart from one’s self, something that
must be continuously ‘put on’ and displayed. This turns out to be a crucial aspect of the
remaking of African space and time, African selves and societies under colonialism.” p. 21
• “Natives who partially adopted…[European] dress were most susceptible to disease.” p.
30

Capital in Socialism/Production Schemes

TERMS: Nationalism, Production, “Figured Worlds,” Signification
Mukerji “the Territorial State as a Figured World of Power: Strategics, Logistics, and
Impersonal Rule” 2010
 • “A physical arrangement of the material environment that intentionally ratifies cultural
conceptions of reality” p. 408
• A “material regime inflected with cultural ideals and conveying a reality that seems
inevitable, natural, or true” p. 405
Parkins “Introduction: (Ad)dressing Citizens” Fashioning the Body Politic: Dress, Gender,
Citizenship 2002
• “[Fashion has become] organizing principle of modern collective life, which takes not as
the sign of decadence of the democratic ideal, but rather presenting as an opportunity for
democracies,” p. 5
• “…attempts to refashion the body politic through drawing attention to the significance -
and signification - of dress in political contexts.” p. 1
• “Only certain bodies can corporealize the state.” p. 2

Capital in Corporatocracy
TERMS: Monetary Imperialism, Conspicuous Consumption, Trickle-Down, “Class Slippage,”
Silverman “Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse” 1986
• “I feel impelled to stress as strongly as possible that clothing is necessary condition of
subjectivity - that in articulating the body, it simultaneously articulates psyche.” p. 147
• “If a given look is appropriated by the fashion industry from a subculture or subordinate
class, that is because its ideological force and formal bravura can no longer be ignored
because it has won not just a style war but a pitched cultural battle” p. 149
Thomas Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes 2019
• “Since the invention of the mechanical loom nearly two and a half centuries ago, fashion
has been a dirty, unscrupulous business that has exploited humans and Earth alike to
harvest bountiful profits.” p. 17
• “The old retail cycle is under mortal threat. Channels of power are changing.” p. 452
• “In 2017 alone, an estimated 8,640 mall stores closed…Credit Suisse projected that by
2022 a fourth of America’s remaining malls would shutter in five years.” p. 461
• “In 2018, five of the fifty-five richest individuals were fashion company owners. Not
counting the three Waltons of Walmart.” p. 20
• “NYU’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights published a study a week before my
visit that stated there were still $1.2 billion worth of repairs needed to ‘remediate
remaining dangerous conditions’ in Bangladeshi garment factories and called for a task
force to oversee identification and rectification of those infractions.” p. 124
• “If fashion production maintains its current pace, the demand for water will surpass the
world’s supply by 40% by 2030.” p. 141
Perkins The Confessions of an Economic Hitman 2004
• “Fear and debt drive this system. We are hammered with messages that terrify us into
believing that we must pay any price, assume any debt, to stop the enemies who, we are
told, lurk at our doorsteps.” p. 1
• “It isn’t about changing the mechanics of economics. It is about changing the dogmas that
have driven economics for centuries: debt and fear, insufficiency, divide and conquer. It is
about moving from ideas about merely being sustainable to ones that include regenerating
 areas devastated by agriculture, mining, and other destructive activities. It is about
revolution. The transition from a death economy to a life economy is truly about a change
in consciousness — a consciousness revolution.” p. 288
Ho Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street 2009
• “How most women, especially women of color, navigate not only hard work but grunt work
takes on the added dimension of what I call ‘class slippage.’” p. 53
• “They must police themselves and each other for such class infractions as wearing socks
over hose. This concern is even more pronounced among women of color, as racial
hierarchies threaten to “deprofessionalize” them even further.” p. 118
Arendt, Hannah “Introduction,” The Origins of Totalitarianism 1973
• “Our political life rests on the assumption that we can produce equality through
organization, because man can act and change and build a common world, together with
his equals and only with his equals...we are not born equal; we become equal as members
of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights.” p.
51
• “The paradox of democratic self-determination leads to the democratic sovereign to self-
constitution as well as to exclusion.” p. 66

Fashion as Cross-Cultural Interaction

TERMS: Elective Distance, the “Other,” Imperialism, Taste, Pecuniary Emulation
Polo The Travels of Marco Polo 1298
“The greatest place that ever was…” (p. 74)
Said “Orientalism” 1978
• “The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that
puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of
Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing th orient could not do was to represent
itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made
firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.” p. 283
• “There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated,
disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste
and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from
traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces.” p. 19-20
• “To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is to ignore the
extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the
fact.” p. 39
Tacitus The Annals of Tacitus 109 ACE
• “Oriental silks should no longer degrade the male sex.”
Hoganson “The Fashionable World: Imagined Communities of Dress” 2011
• “In their search for inspiration, French designers more commonly looked to the East,
crafting brightly colored Orientalist garments.” p. 66
• “Fashion served as a way to assert social belonging. It signified inclusion in an imagined
community of consumption,” p. 67
 • “American women tried to dress like European aristocrats to both signal their affinities
with the social elite and to signal their distance from those lower on the social scale.” p. 80
Bordieu “Introduction,” Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste 1984
• “The dominant aesthetic is rooted in an elective distance from the necessities of the
natural or social world” p. 6
• “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifiers.” p. 6
• “Consumption is in this case, a stage in a process of communication, that is an act of
deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit master of a cipher or
code.” p. 2
Kopytoff The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective 1986
• “Biographies of things can make salient what might otherwise remain obscure. For
example, in situations of culture contact, they can show what anthropologists have so often
stressed: that what is significant about the adoption of alien objects - as of alien ideas - is
not the fact that they are adopted, but the way they are culturally redefined and put to use.”
p. 66
• “Where societies differ is in the ways commoditization as a special expression of exchange
is structured and related to the social system, in the factors that encourage or contain it, in
the cultural and ideological premises that suffuse its workings.” p. 68
• “Most consumer goods are, after all, destined to be terminal - or so, at least, it is hoped by
the manufacturer.” p. 75
• “Thus, the economies of complex and highly monetized societies exhibit a two-sided
valuing system: on one side is the homogenous area of commodities, on the other, the
extremely variegated area of private valuation.” p. 88

Potential Solutions to Inequality Issues?

TERMS: Conscious Capitalism, Substantive Justice, International Law, Hyperlocalism, AI, Lean
Manufacturing, “Third Way” Investment
Sutton Law/Society: Origins, Interactions and Change 2000
• Formal legal rationality ignores substantive economic, racial, and gendered inequalities and
gives advantage to the economically powerful. Sutton would state, “formal law may come
under attack by marginal groups interested in specialized kinds of substantive justice.” (p.
51)
Thoughts? Opinions? Questions?