Cultivating political and public identity

Why plumage matters

Rodney Barker

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781526114617
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526114617
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Public and political life can no longer be seen as simply the pursuit of material gain or even as the struggle for enough food and shelter by which to live. The interests people pursue are shaped by the identities which they both inherit and cultivate. In generating identities, everything is important, from clothing to cuisine, from architecture to language, and to understand why and how people associate in groups and communities, and why they compete and conflict with each other, every aspect of identity has to be taken seriously. Whatever secrets may remain in people's minds or souls, who they are socially is what they say, what they eat, and how they live.This book is ideal reading for students, lecturers, and the general reader interested in the importance of identity in public life, and in the inherent political momentum in identity cultivation to both equality and inequality simultaneously.This title will be available as an open access ebook under a CC-BY licence.

1
Plumage

A strange creature in bright feathers; what you get is what you see

Replying to Burke's denunciation of the revolutionary regime in France, and his apologia for monarchy and aristocracy, Tom Paine famously complained that Burke pitied the plumage, but forgot the dying bird.¹ To which a reply – though not one made by Burke or other defenders of tradition, hierarchy, or the wisdom of elites – is that without the plumage, the bird is not a bird at all, and that observing plumage is one of the first ways in which we try to see what sort of a bird we are looking at, or even if it is a bird at all rather than some other creature entirely. Nor is the nature and function of plumage limited to making recognition possible. Plumage is just as necessary to the bird as it is to those who want to identify it. Without its feathers, the bird can neither fly nor swim, attract mates nor hide from predators. The feathers are neither additions to the bird nor expressions of the bird, they are part of what the bird is, as any bird spotter would have told Paine. But Paine was drawing on an ancient view of core versus superficialities, essence versus accidents, internal substance versus external display, which has served to set aside inconvenient evidence or dismiss some of what is seen as superficial or without significance, ‘mere rhetoric’ or epiphenomenal froth, while at the same time assuming an underlying but not immediately evident truth, nature, essence, or purpose. The disadvantage of such a view has always been that it provides an excuse for ignoring evidence, or explaining evidence which is acknowledged as the effect of some foundational feature or principle which is no more than a summary of what it seeks to explain.

What applies to birds applies with even greater force to humans, animals who wear not only their own skin and hair, but that of other creatures as well, adding to and extending their own plumage by creating for themselves second and third skins of clothing which are as much a part of who they are as are the feathers of the sparrow or the plumes of the peacock, and no more artificial than a sparrow's nest. Human plumage, as a tangible component of human identity, is not limited to clothing, however widely interpreted, but consists of the whole complex cultivation of both conduct and environment, from all the visible and audible elements of individual identity to the created physical environment which its members inhabit. Clothing and diet, language and architecture, all are part of the plumage of humans, which, being chosen and cultivated as well as given and received, can say even more than the plumage of the ostrich or the coot, since it is part of the cultivation of an identity which differentiates one society from another, one household from another, and one person from another. The plumage of a bird will show to which species it belongs; human plumage will show important elements not just of acquired or imposed but also of created and cultivated identities. If an initial impression is sought of what kind of society, government, polity, group, or individual is being looked at, then the visible, tangible, and audible expressions they give of themselves, and the ways in which they give them, are at the very least an essential first piece of evidence, the social anatomy of human identity. This elaborate human plumage is as much a part of who people are as the feathers of the crow are part of what makes it a crow.

The first answer to the enquiry, ‘Why does taking account of human plumage matter?’ is therefore informed by the distinction between free-range and battery data, and by democratic empiricism, the working assumption that whilst what can be observed does not provide explanations, it demands acknowledgment, and cannot be set aside as peripheral or epiphenomenal to some deeper or more parsimonious reality.² The second answer is that if there are consistent relationships between the cultivation of identity and other dimensions of public life, then plumage is one powerful indicator of other aspects of any society. The third answer is that it is important to understand identity as the ideological or cultural dimension of social life, a dimension which has always been there, but which was unduly neglected for much of the short twentieth century, particularly in accounts of political life. How people give meaning and justification for themselves, how they cultivate and present their identities, is a prominent element in the human history which both arts and sciences seek to describe, interpret, or explain. And the central paradox in that cultivation, between identity as association and identity as distinctiveness, is found in every component of identity.

This wider human plumage matters because it tells much about the character of the person, institution, regime, polity, or society which is being observed. In this view of things, expressed identity is not an instrument or shadow of some inner reality, but the thing itself; its powers and limitations are real, and are not under the control of some deeper self or purpose, but are the self and purpose, with its strengths and weaknesses. Acted out and observable identities, the ‘habitus’ of Bourdieu, have all the importance of the cloak which Clytemnestra threw over Agamemnon, in its constricting as well as its enabling possibilities. And like the one which enabled Agamemnon to be murdered, while it can be changed, precisely because it is a human creation it cannot be cast on and off instantly and at will. This lack of unfettered freedom in all the cultivations of identity is an important qualification to the view that since artefacts, whilst assigned meaning, are external objects they can be discarded and changed arbitrarily and at will. Cavallaro and Warwick have argued that ‘dress, by encouraging us to make and remake ourselves over and again, renders the very idea of essence quite absurd’.³ But it is not any illusory instant replacement of identity which calls into question the idea of essence, but rather the observation that when all the evident elements of identity have been considered, there is little if anything left to constitute any further reality.

Clothes construct the social person

It was in the tradition of Burke rather than Paine, though with rather different political intent, that Virginia Woolf included in her essay on gendered politics, Three Guineas, photographs of men in the elaborate regalia of their public roles – judges, generals, university vice chancellors, and bishops. Clothing, although it is only the most immediate aspect of cultivated identity, nonetheless is evidence and a component not just of personal adornment but of gender, status, and power. Each of the four roles is illustrated by Woolf with photographs of its full formal extravagance, with the judicial splendour of curls and scarlet unchanged in style since the eighteenth century; movement-constricting military uniforms weighted down with medals, braid, and ribbons; hats and cloaks and hoods in academic procession; and episcopal pomp laden with mineral embossment, the servants of God sparkling with the properties of Caesar.

The clothes people wore were for Woolf much more than superficial or insignificant display; they were significant social actions which anyone seeking to reform society needed to take seriously. The ceremonial dress of males:

serves to advertise the social, professional, or intellectual standing of the wearer. If you will excuse the humble illustration, your dress fulfils the same functions as the tickets in a grocer's shop. But, here, instead of saying ‘This is margarine; this pure butter; this is the finest butter in the market,’ it says, ‘This man is a clever man – he is Master of Arts; this man is a very clever man – he is Doctor of Letters; this man is a most clever man – he is a Member of the Order of Merit.’⁴

The clothing both claimed and constituted a status and transmitted a message. And whatever the practicality of the clothing that might be worn when a particular job was being done, the clothing which was worn when the status of the person doing the job was being proclaimed was of a very different character – flamboyant, dramatic, and ceremonial, wholly impractical but no less functional: ‘Military uniforms, the non-functional kind which are not worn for fighting, glorify war and make a military career appear attractive.’ For women who identified themselves as opponents of war, therefore, refusing distinctions, honours, and uniforms would both present a public identity which corresponded to the rest of their beliefs and actions and would ‘do something, indirectly, to discourage the feelings that lead to war’.⁵

Woolf's account illustrates graphically that far from humans being, as Desmond Morris described them, naked apes,⁶ they are clothed apes, and often very elaborately clothed ones. Their clothing is one of the things that distinguishes humans from other animals, and the clothes and all the other manufactured, constructed, and cultivated things with which people surround themselves, which they inhabit and in and through which they live, are essential components and constituents of identity, of status, function, and authority. The remarkable thing about the naked human ape is that there are possibly only two examples of the species, Adam and Eve, and even they did not remain without clothing for long. The transition from the Garden of Eden to the post-paradisiacal world was marked by the putting on of clothes. Even before their expulsion, Adam and Eve were provided with garments made of skins, thus marking them off from all the rest of creation: other animals wore their own skins, humans decked themselves in those of other animals. And not ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Plumage
• 2 Cultivating identity
• 3 Top people are different: association and distinction in politics and religion
• 4 Caps of liberty: the oddity of democracy
• 5 Reformations, revolutions, continuity, and counter-reformations
• 6 The plumage of Britannia
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index