The Philippine Online Chronicles

Tagged by Carljoe Javier to write about those NegativiTEEs or fashionable black shirts w/ one-word descriptions (“Karengkeng,” “Sugarol,” “Pikon,” “Kaladkarin,” “Bastos,” etc.) on them and variations thereof (such as what art director and occasional model Cara Gonzalez wears in the photo)—conceptual distillations, really, of statement shirts (one who regularly passes thru C5 is bound to notice the billboard shaped like a giant, folded t-shirt on whose chest-area is boldly written “OMG! Ang laki ng tee!”) that have become the flavor of the season in this Express Yourself era of exhibitionism (also known as the Assert Your Individuality w/ Declarations that have been Manufactured for You era or the Watch Me Enact My Neo-Liberal Illusion that My Participation in Earth Hour Helps Save the Planet when It Only Further Mystifies the More Systemic Issues at Hand era), as if these shirts picked up the rigor of privileging economy of words or the minimalist aesthetic of Aram Saroyan (an attempt: to allow the littleness of this essay to be analogous to the littleness of these descriptions w/o constraining their muchness or density)—I initially thought of the high modernist penchant for self-reference in the tradition of Kosuth &/or Bochner, in whose language-oriented works language’s foremost referent—if only to call out the opacity of language—is its own enactment, production, and circumstances or, in short, the very problem of reference itself.

Instead, however, I checked myself to pave way for this reconsideration: What if these words are not mere descriptions of the people who wear them—what if they were not only self-referential—but what Deleuze & Guattari would call order-words, linguistic imperatives or illocutionary impositions on the people who read or hear them? A shirt that says “Kups” does not simply describe its wearer as a jerk (“kups” is shorthand for “kupal” or “smegma,” a derogatory descriptor hurled at folks who turn their backs on a handful of social niceties), but imposes on its reader an entire linguistic order of what smegma is as a verbal assemblage, an assemblage of attitude, an assemblage of character. In the case of smegma, the word’s wearer enacts what s/he forces upon his/her reader to call him/her: s/he forces the reader to call him/her not what the word’s wearer is but what the word’s wearer becomes: smegma not because s/he is smegma, but because s/he forces someone else to call him/her as such. Each shirt not only carries the force of description but of inscription; the shirt is enforcement itself.

At the same time, one also wonders if this shirt is but another Lacanian purloined letter, perhaps even its more perverse incarnation. While the purloined letter w/c possibly contains confessions of dirty passions and myriad innuendoes need not be read in order to be read (one recalls letters that were never sent to their explicit addressees, for the implicit addressee is really the Big Other, or the entire Symbolic order of abstract laws & impositions), this shirt on the other hand is meant to be read by everyone its wearer encounters to the point of diffusion. Addressed to everyone, the shirt’s message ends up being addressed to no one but the Big Other, such that the jerk no longer hides his being a jerk beneath the façade of not being a jerk, but instead the jerk carries on being a jerk by hiding beneath the façade of precisely being a jerk. “I know I am a jerk, but being nice enough to confess that I am one, I will now continue being a jerk.”

Either way, this shirt is the perfect apparel for one who lives in this age of Earth Hour and other modes of fetishistic disavowal: “I know that by participating in this Neo-Liberal activity of overtly responsible individuals who make a show of their overt responsibility, I am not helping anymore when I am outside of the span of this activity or when this activity ends—but I will participate anyway. & more than just participate, I will enforce participation as well: for I will brand you irresponsible if you do not join the provisional responsibility of participating in this Neo-Liberal activity. I will brand you a jerk if you do not share w/ me this fetishistic disavowal.”

Photo: Some rights reserved.