If you were forced to wear one outfit over and over again, what would it be?
This question hurts.
The terms used are difficult to get your head round. That you are ‘forced’ suggests coercion, perhaps backed by possible sanctions for not obeying the rule implied in donning the outfitting of yourself. After aĺ, one is made outwardly to fit someone else’s vision of how you should look and act when you accept outfittitting. Fitting yourself to some particularly individual inner vision of oneself is out of the question.
However, the phrase omits the agency implementing the coercion or ‘forcing’. It has to do because agencies that coerce the out-fitting of the inner person to fit their wish to control how they are represented in the outside world minimise choice in that case. These agencies may be employers or the state, the owners of your whole body if you are a slave, of part of your time if you slave for a wage. Such agencies want to force you into a homogenised self, representing themselves. Being that imposed self is about more that outfit – outwardly fitting into their prescription of you but carries with it other behavioural or attitudinal claims on your self-representation.
A soldier’s uniform carries with it the implication of obeying orders from above blindly. We call them ‘uniforms’. Uniforms ensure you show that outfitting is actually infitting the person to an external standard. The self in this case is, at least in part, bound; moulded to a standard. The standard’s unifomity may vary, but it ensures within that variation that its bonded representatives must ‘represent’ the values it espouses. They are the values of that sgency which owns its bonded persons time when they are working for it or as it’s outward manifestation. They take away choice, as much as is required, at least bt their mission, to replace it with their automated logo. CHOICE is a difficult term to use in such circumstances.
However ‘forced’ may suggest an abstracted agency that constrains one’s choices, being, for instance, ‘forced’ by circumstances, such as poverty or rationing of the materials from which clothing is made, something outside ons personal control just as much as an employer’s demands but less visible as a force. But even here, it is difficult to see how such constraints offer choice. If I am poor in wealth and resources, that is already a constraint on fitting myself out to be seen as I would prefer to be seen.
I can then see no way in which I could have a choice over my outfit in either of these circumstances.
The outfit that I wear
Is that in which I'm seen.
I do not let it bear
What I sense inside. Lean
Out I must to others,
Allow a glimpse or more
Of what I must not seem
To those whose role smothers
Freedom to show some sore
Partial being, whispers
The unsightly, but true,
Impact forming blisters
From blows,outfitted new
By violence, blood red.
No choice there, but let the confident sounds
Of the world infit you to its bounds.
If I had the choice, by which I mean, if choice, other than the very limited allowances of buying within what I can afford, existed I would clothe myself in openness to the world, that forced no-one, nor forced me, to adopt the roles of an unpleasantly structured external world. Is that why Adam and Eve were naked in Paradise?
With love
Steven xxxxxx
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