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The centrality of postmodern fashion to the commodity culture of the museum is nowhere more obviously and daringly presented than in the recently erected Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, Canada. The museum, which opened on May 6, 1995, is devoted exclusively to the history and culture of shoes. It is a privately funded corporate venture and the brainchild of Sonja Bata, chairman of the Bata Shoe Museum, renowned philanthropist, environmentalist, and the marriage-business partner of Thomas J. Bata, who owns and runs Bata Limited. Not surprisingly, the opening of a private shoe museum by a shoe manufacturer met with a mixture of praise and skepticism. Canada's national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, lauded the use of private money in support of cultural development in Canada, a country where the arts are traditionally funded by the state and public sectors. Alternative, radical media sources such as the Socialist Worker wanted to "Give Bata the Boot" and took the occasion of the museum's opening to raise an issue that has circulated in Canadian media for some time: the questionable labor practices of the Bata corporation in Guatemala, Indonesia, and, especially, South Africa.1 The underlying problem expressed in these diverse media sources revolves around a desire to maintain borders-those of a geopolitical and material nature. What this privately funded museum has done by devoting itself exclusively to representing the diverse histories and cross-cultural life of shoes is to throw the boundary between shoe as commodity and shoe as cultural or aesthetic artifact into question.
In many respects, the Bata Shoe Museum is exemplary in dramatizing the increasing fluidity between aesthetics and commodification that Fredric Jameson notes is a telling sign of the condition of postmodernity. Aesthetic production, he writes, "has become integrated into commodity production generally," and the drive for "more novel-seeming goods" has become a structural influence in the desire to achieve "aesthetic innovation and experimentation."2 It is the instability of what were once certain distinctions that, in my view, prompted the media contest over the meaning of the museum.
"Boundary maintenance," to borrow a term from Donna Haraway, was high on the agenda.3 This fluidity and instability between commodities and aesthetic objects provide an occasion to examine what new material values emerge from this categorical crisis. The ever increasing commodification of the artistic or aesthetic domains at the turn of the twenty-first century has raised concern among progressive art movements that worry about whether the creative and libidinal forces feeding the desire for social change will be compromised by their commodification. Equally disturbing for conservative purists is that the high cultural values and money invested in art will be undermined by the accessibility and reproductive capabilities of commodity production and distribution.
The priceless will soon be subject to a readable and nonnegotiable price tag. If, as Jameson argues, "every position on postmodernism in culture-whether apologia or stigmatization-is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today," then it must now be possible to theorize with the commodity form, to deploy it for various, and sometimes contradictory, political purposes.4With the ends of style come multiple departures for the commodity form, including its entry into the museum as a pedagogical tool for multinational capitalism. The Bata Shoe Museum represents just such an example of the historical shift in the material values attributed to the commodity by postmodernism, or the epistemic reconfigurations of turn-of-the-twenty-first-century global capital.
A P O S T M O D E R N ( D I S ) P L A Y Postmodernism has often been characterized by a reverse millenarianism, a sense of "the end of this or that."5 This dead-end logic appears to be more typical of modernity, with its heroic quest for origins and teleological historiographic narratives, than postmodernity.
If, however, this sense of an end does indeed characterize postmodernism, such "ends," I would suggest, signify neither death nor new beginnings. The ends of postmodernity are best understood as the loose threads that dangle from the edge of the social textile, the remnants left on the seamstress's floor, usually swept away as so much rub- bish and debris. These remainders signal the ends of theory; they are an invitation to play with the residual aspects of cultural production, the parts that have remained unconsumable and survived fetishization. Ironically, the subject of this loosely gathered social textile-fashion-is, perhaps, the most notorious object of consumption and fetishism the twentieth century has ever seen. Until the poststructural turn toward a deconstruction of "nature" and the "natural," fashion existed largely in its feminine and masked form, principally in terms of style and related modes of artifice, deception, and dissimulation. Rarely was it taken seriously as a subject of knowledge with the capability of denaturalizing and unmasking what has become "naturalized," canonic, fixed, and binding. In other words, while so much has been written about style, little attention has been given to its conceptual powers as something to theorize with.
Jameson's inquiry into the difference between modernism and postmodernism, on the other hand, unfolds the dialectical capacities of style. His analysis of this historico- epistemological break is entirely predicated on the changing nature of style. He asks, "Does [postmodernism] imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style and fashion changes determined by an older high-modernism imperative of stylistic innovation?" Furthermore, he concludes his critique of the "waning of affect"-a study in the aesthetic commodification of shoes in which Jameson juxtaposes Vincent van Gogh's A Pair of Boots with Andy Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes-with a prognosis of the contradictory aspect of style under late capitalism: style is at once the very logic of late capitalism, and yet late capitalism is signaled by the end of style itself, "in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brush stroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction)."6
The question of style lingers at the margins of (high) modern consciousness as something trivial, feminine, and mundane, of mere symbolic value but lacking real political, social, and economic significance. Postmodernism, however, takes seriously the material effects of symbolic or stylistic power and in so doing opens up the theoretical capacities of fashion and, in particular, the commodity form.
It is in the commodity form that fashion plays a specific role as bearer, producer, or inscribed object of meanings and values-meanings and values that are material, social, and ethical, as well as monetary. Although the commodity is primarily produced and put into circulation to make money, it also produces surplus and residual effects, sometimes unanticipated, sometimes contradictory. Erica Rand's groundbreaking analysis of Barbie is a case in point.7 Here is an object whose status as a semipornographic icon of white femininity appears unparalleled and largely uncontested in feminist critique, yet in the hands of children-and in the cultural memory of some adults-it is an agent of freedom and fantasy. Do children learn best by being told what they should or should not play with or by being encouraged to exercise their imaginations in learning to play or (dis)play the objects the marketplace throws in their path? Learning to play with Barbie is like learning to theorize with fashion. It is my contention that feminist cultural materialist critique has a lot to gain from theorizing with fashion. Theorizing with fashion permits a transvestism of the spirit of the commodity; it allows us to turn it to other purposes, to inhabit its simulated flesh of sensation and uncertainty and see the world as products of our making and values, regardless of how the mainstream marketplace would like to contain and regulate our ways of seeing, knowing, and, of course, dressing!
To emphasize the act of theorizing with cultural objects is to dismantle a complex matrix of divisions among women. Within this matrix exists a set of all too common splits in the representation, for example, of middle-class women as objects or subjects of desire and working-class women or colonized women as objects or subjects of physical and material labor. The divisions are three-dimensional as it were, multilayered, imbricated by differences of class, "race," imperialism, and bodily representation.
Sometimes the lines are drawn between middle-class and laboring or colonized women. Sometimes the lines of difference emerge within middle-class women's bodies, whose sexuality is represented either as a commodity that can be produced, packaged, sold, or traded, or as a sign of power capable of representing and subjecting themselves and other women to acts of desire and desirability. Laboring and colonized women are similarly divided by a physical/symbolic material split. Their bodies are represented not by the vicissitudes of artifice but by the apparent muteness of nature, orality, and traditionalism. The inarticulateness of nature must then be brought into meaning as must the bodies of those women who represent it. To deconstruct hierarchical divisions among women does not create a unified field of women but reconfigures the field of difference in order to see and comprehend its complex and contradictory nature, to see, for example, that the bourgeois female consumer is at times laboring to secure her class and race interests and the laboring or colonized woman is often taking pleasure in securing her difference from those interests. Commodity culture is an arena in which such battles are fought.8