Reading Blog -- Oct. 29th

“Marx’s overcoat was to go in and out of the pawnshop throughout the 1850s and early 1860s. And his overcoat directly determined what work he could or could not do. If his overcoat was at the pawnshop during the winter, he could not go to the British Museum. If he could not go to the British Museum, he could not undertake the research for Capital.”

Marx’s coat shapes his entire life. The connection between Marx’s cloth and his life is not just a simple relation. There are more materials needed in Marx’s writing that is also connected to his coat. Marx needs writing material such as newspapers, books, pen, ink, and paper to write his book. The supply for these essential materials for Marx is relying on whether his coat is in the pawnshop or not. In Marx’s thinking, the functionality of his coat is not keeping warm; there is some other value of it. Marx’s coat explained not only the structure of the exploitation relationship between capitalist class and working class but also the on how tools effect workers.

Stallybrass argues that Marx’s theory on commodity should not be that straight and obvious. The study of materials around our life is the study of reaching human values and real life. Marx wrote about a cloth as a cell-form of capitalism in Capital. Stallybrass believes that other than the abstract value and the oppression of labor, clothes and objects construct people’s life and self-recognition. Marx’s clothes determine his everyday life. His coat not only controls whether he can go to the British museum but also control whether he has enough money to buy writing materials. We can say clothes have different meanings rather than just a cover of our body. Different age, social class, sex, occupation of the person who is wearing the clothes can make the clothes has varieties of meanings..

Along with the progressing of materials and the pattern of the clothes, people began to call this the language of the clothes. The multiple categories of the clothes and the social differences of the person created a reflection of our social world. But McKracken argues in his article that not every design is represented that significantly. For example, a dress is commonly known as a female’s clothes but a design that demonstrates the social status of a person will be relatively harder to categorize. McKracken thinks that describing clothing as a language is not accurate enough. The expressive properties of clothing will be vanished if we understand clothing as a language. In McKracken’s view, language is just a tool of communication. Which is not powerful enough to represents the cultural and social ability of the clothing. In my point of view, McKracken is taking the method of language of clothing too serious. The saying of “language of clothing” should be just discussing about the symbolic functionality of the clothing , not actually overlaying the method of language onto material culture.

        When studying on an object that is one or two hundred years ago. Illustrate what it is the first important thing to do. Giving the viewers the details of the object would be the first essential goal of presenting the object. These basic information such as the material used, who’s the owner, what year it’s made should be giving to the viewers before researcher start telling the story of the object. The story of the object I define is the most important in introducing an object. The social meaning of the object and the connection of the owner with the object are the two factors that are necessary.