More PDA · 27 April 2008
So ok. I took the little animals to play at the store I have often ridiculed (more because of bad labor practices than cultural iconography, but see the footnote I'll post later I posted in the comments***). Did they get dirty? I don’t think they really did, even got as they rolled around on the floor of the yoga lifestyle mecca, temporarily seared with the post-OM loopdy-loop of the brand. If only chattel could remove their burned-in brands so easily as I did later, wriggling out of a corsetlike top that created the illusion of cleavage with my A-cups and left a line around my ribs where the elastic reinforcements had been.
The animals will probably get more dirty right here, as I confess I am mildly amused to have done this thing, and that it was pretty good practice.
So, this is the only remarkable thing: I had a deep practice, on a Saturday, on the floor of the Lulu store. I was expecting some kind of pre-performance jitters, but their edge was well removed by the experiences of earlier that morning, which left a kind of buzz that transcended even the apropos LCD Soundsystem record that accompanied my drive to the venue. I was expecting constant distraction and performance-awareness, but my experiences of practicing as a visitor in certain shalas has been far more outward-focused and performative than this.
When you visit a shala, you’re taking your goods in to a new house within your own community. The natives know the species of animal you’re offering up, and they know just how to evaluate it! Are the flanks in the right place, are the muscles of the belly indicating the right awareness, how straight are the legs here and do the hands reach the floor there? Edges edges edges.
In the land of pussy yoga (can I say that? No, really can’t say that), you have them from the transition to the first chatwari. Nobody has a vision of a Marichyasana D and there is no edge you can push there to impress make some mark on them. The animals themselves—sages, boats, turtles—probably don’t even count on that stage. Just the fact that you are moving on the breath is arresting, informative, interesting, maybe even educating… and least to the people who might notice in the first place.
I could write my best ethnographic fieldnotes here and fill you in on the most amusing details (which have to do with reinforced fabrics and a fussy assistant manager), but the details weren’t so important to the actual experience I underwent.
I lug my laptop to cafes all the time, because I focus better with a little ambient sound and commotion. I’ve always thought this is because movement around me reminds me of the passage of time—which gets lost behind the double doors of my office—and creates an urgency that makes me work better. Time is a shared category of the understanding, and the social nature of the now (the productive now, at least, is social) is unavoidable among others.
But after practicing deeply under a Justin Timberlake soundtrack and under the eyes of god knows how many passersby, surrounded by so much intensely overpriced lycra, I see that the social aspect of my focus in chaotic environments might be a bit more sinister. It’s that movement around me reminds me that the other is out there, and drives me to set the boundaries of my own attention very close. One-pointed, but in an almost protective—if not defensive—way.
Again, I come back to the mantra parable of the seven ten virgins who keep their lamps trimmed and burning.**** This is from the book of Matthew, which is why I resonate with the story so easily, but Tolle uses the story to talk about the ways you guard your awareness. Awareness is often depicted as a little candleflame in yoga and Buddhist commentaries, too. The preciousness of a focused presence, the cultivation it requires. But when there’s an external “threat,” at least in this case, it’s no trouble at all. Far more focused than most kitchen practices, in fact.
This disturbs me a little, but opens up some paradoxes about the social aspects of consciousness, the interaction of society and deeper layers self-awareness (below mere self-consciousness), and well, a certain—ok, limited—potential for doing contemplation in the marketplace.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: arbitrage
, astanga yoga
, beta state
, having a body
, markets-networks-society
, morality
, sound
Previous entry: SLI: Dirty Feet, Dirty Concepts, Ashtanga on Demand / Next entry: Who are the virgins?
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i forget, were you the only one practicing in lululemon? did any shoppers ask you anything? i would need bailey’s to survive.
Posted by: eeyore · Apr 27, 09:07 PM · #
I often studied for the bar in coffee houses. Forced focus.
I’d love to hear the story about the seven virgins (for reals).
Posted by: Anna · Apr 28, 05:10 AM · #
‘surrounded by so much intensely overpriced lycra’- very funny!
I liked how you were able to bring your focus in. My performance anxiety very often takes the best of me; but when I manage to take it under control, it feels like I am in a bubble of energy. Such an awesome feeling!
Posted by: Alfia · Apr 28, 08:24 AM · #
Our relationship to ‘other’ whilst demonstrating does seem easier. Especially when we are confident of what we demonstrate. And it certainly takes on a less enthusiastic tremble in the pit of the belly when the risk of humility is greater! I await the executive summary of personalities!
Posted by: Gregor · Apr 28, 08:39 AM · #
I used to take my laptop to Starbucks to work there sometimes, mainly so I could work without feeling so isolated. I live awone! Awwwllll awone. I like hearing conversations going on around me.
Why can’t you say Pussy Yoga? Call a spade a spade!
I knew I couldn’t “go back” to the gym when I tried practicing 2nd series during Crunch’s morning Mysore. People were staring at me open mouthed. The reaction was comical. Not that I was all that fucking great at it, but I realized I didn’t belong there anymore.
Posted by: Boodiba · Apr 28, 10:00 AM · #
Well done! That kind of intense isolating focus is impressive.
Posted by: Carl · Apr 28, 10:27 AM · #
For what it’s worth, I tend to have better practices around people, and it really doesn’t seem to matter which people (practice mates, gym bodies, onlookers in the street, college students and dog walkers in the park, etc etc etc). I think this comes down to more sophisticated focus/energy discussions than whether one is outer- or inner-directed, although that’s in it too. Now and then, of course, I also have stellar (maybe not achievement-wise, but energy-wise, see how tricky these qualifications get?) practices by myself, and those, I’m aware, often come from greater FOCUS, greater one-pointedness, whereas sometimes outside or inside with company, the power seems to come from attention and/or some kind of public energetic outreach.
And yes, many many communities—like even the vinyasa class here I like—have NO vocabulary for Marichyasana D or even the jumpback (not that that’s easy, either).
Posted by: patrick · Apr 28, 12:38 PM · #
Getting back to Lulu labor practices.
Lulu isn’t going to appeal to most ashtangis anyway—we need clothes for six practices a week and tend to want minimal coverage and minimal branding. So, many of us (several ashtanga teachers) were talking over a year ago about the lameness of Lulu and how we couldn’t conscience wearing it, especially since the now ex CEO was for a while vocal about the fact that Indonesian sweatshops were good for business. He was more interested in doing cutsie-cute literary fucking theory on the “concept” of “sweatshop” (something my dissertation does do, admittedly: there is a season for such things) than in cleaning up the company’s labor practices. In 06, I think, Lulu ran this hideous, “ironic” YogaJournal ad depicting adults dressed in diapers while sewing apparel… the CEO claimed this was his “humorous” attempt to get a conversation going about the politics of shopfloor practices. Didn’t happen, perhaps because he was just generally tone-deaf on this issue.
In those days, Lulu was producing mostly in Indonesia—where labor was I’m guessing under a dollar an hour—and charging a hundred bucks for yoga pants.
HELLO? It’s a yoga lifestyle store whose shopping bags are papered in cutsie-cute “transcendent” messages. The markup on the actual merchandise was enormous, and they were producing dirt cheap and then repackaging the sweatshop idea as good for business and somehow integrable with the broader “vision” and “ethic” of the company. What gives?
Where are the “yoga ambassadors” superstitious enough about their “karma” to wonder who did the sewing and for how much? Where’s the corporate ethics and monitoring? Sportswear companies like Columbia set a great standard for such things, but here’s Lulu selling morality with little more than a equivocations for backup.
Well, things have shifted somewhat at the lemon. It’s not great, but at least there is quite a bit of transparency about the details of the supply chain available online—Nike has set the standard for this after originally freaking out when activists demanded supply chain transparency. AND Lulu has instituted some monitoring for workers’ “rights.” It’s not quality, independent, worker-happy monitoring, but it’s more than they were doing and it’s more than others in the market.
There’s a whole other reason to be squeamish about Lulu—the symbolic “don’t need an outfit much less a brandname to do my practice” discomfort from bringing seasonal fashion into the shala, and the general uncoolness of the whole concept of overt branding—but I really don’t care about that in this context. Popular culture doesn’t interest me one way or another when exploitation like this is getting hidden in the supply chain… and if it’s getting remedied in the supply chain, power to the company to sell as many $70 tops as it can. It takes a combination of sustained profit, market safety and consumer pressure for companies to decide to pay their workers decent wages and provide humane working conditions—very few successful companies start out like Columbia, but some do move toward decency over time.
P.S. for those who wind up here googling this topic. I saw Steven Greenhouse, the only real labor reporter left in this country, speak about his new book, The Big Squeeze, week. He spends a lot of pages in the book profiling iconographic companies’ domestic labor practices—the stories about Wal-Mart and Columbia are fascinating. The book is a major document in the economic and cultural history of this era, and there’s nobody better to tell it than him.
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 28, 07:02 PM · #
Oh. So there is email and a comment from Anna asking about the virgins, and I see that I said seven rather than the actual ten when writing this last night.
A good sign that I’m blogging off the top of my head anymore, but now it seems I should draw that whole complicate story and my interpretation of it out more clearly, rather than just dropping virgins on you and saying this has something to do with consciousness and being present.
I want to read a couple of things before I follow up on this. More on the subject presently.
[I love the usage convention by which “presently” becomes a euphemism for “eventually.” Kind if like how in some Latin American countries “ahorita” (“exactly right now”) means “eh, pretty soon.”]
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 28, 07:24 PM · #
Thank you, Owl! It was very interesting! I knew nothing of it, and my obliviousness makes me very uncomfortable. My friend working at Lulu was very unhappy about how they treat their employees here, in the States.
Posted by: Alfia · Apr 29, 12:40 AM · #
Alfia, I’m very happy you brought it up. It is a topic that makes most people uncomfortable.
That is weird, isn’t it?
But yes, a definite conversation-killer my research is. At least among certain groups.
It shouldn’t be: this is just another way of realizing that everything is connected. It’s good to learn. And good to realize how much power accrues to anyone in our location in the market.
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 29, 11:37 AM · #
Oh, eeyore. It was me and another woman who happened to have the most wonderful viparita chakrasana. She brought the house down with it. A woman talked to me during the sun salutations and wanted to know where she could get some of what I had. That was a little odd. But then they moved us to right in front of the check-out area and maybe the formalism of the managers there made people not talk to us. Or maybe it’s just that after a few minutes, the attention bubble became just physical enough for people to stop tapping on it.
Maybe this is why, somewhere in the B’s, I had a flashed image of the girl in the tank in the entrance to the Standard. The thought Fuck the Standard passed through my mind and afterwards nobody even approached tapping on the glass.
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 29, 11:47 AM · #
Oh, I need to stop. Lunch hour is about over here.
But about Lulu’s domestic labor practices. I don’t know very much other than managers do get decent pay and benefits. The “ambassadors” who do PR for clothes seem to have a mutually beneficial if weird mutual-branding relationship with the company.
What this leaves out is the army of Lulu “educators” (I’m not going to start on corporate euphemisms for “workers”: the “booksellers” at Barnes and Noble or the “associates” at Wal-Mart… just another step in the massive legitimation project that is 21st century American consumer society). I’m sorry your friend is upset by the way she’s getting treated and really do hope this is the result of a local rather than a systematic problem. (Maybe I could interview her? I am always interested in workers’ experiences.) From what I’ve read online, Lulu expanded very quickly and so did have to hire a lot of inexperienced, unproven managers who then frequently abused their supervisees. This was a systematic problem, but hopefully it will settle down over time.
The main thing that domestic workers debate (to my knowledge) is Lulu’s encouragement that they participate in the Landmark Forum. This weekend warriorish self-help cult has been criticized for its links to scientology and its high-pressure culture, but from what I can tell (did one interview with a participant and read one well-conducted academic study) Landmark is benign. It’s even quite beneficial for people involved sales or fundraising. I like some things I hear about their program. It’s corny and culturally uncouth, but that’s true of most quasi-revolutionary cultures in capitalist environments. I’m too interested in the little subjective revolutions to write it off for that. :)
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 29, 11:57 AM · #
in your opinion, is it better for companies to manufacture offshore and have consumers pressure the companies to ensure that the foreign worker’s right/fair pay/enviro standards are promoted overseas or for goods to be produced in the US and sold at a higher price in order to keep the US manufacturing sector alive?
I’m sure you’re aware of the growing “made in the usa” movement not based on jingoism, but rather based on safety, local production (less enviro impact) and perceived craftsmanship.
Posted by: cody · Apr 29, 03:18 PM · #
I dunno. Consumer pressure is powerful when it happens, but consumers rarely mobilize.
They’re too selfish.
Free trade is great when it’s real, but it’s usually just a way of locking in historical inequalities.
So… I guess I don’t buy either the free trade or the protectionist ideologies. Both are just grand political narratives used to dress up self interest. What do you do?
See all people as equals.
Consume less.
Teach your students that their lifestyle has a price even if it’s hidden “overseas” among “foreigners” because there are no real foreigners and everything is connected.
Challenge the culture of entitlement in an open, sustained way.
Expose the new age tendency to treat only immediate experience as “real” as a narcissistic, self-defensive ploy to avoid seeing that everything is connected.
Consume less.
Consume less.
Consume less.
Give more.
Consume less.
Other suggestions?
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 29, 04:05 PM · #
A logical approach to changing conditions in the countries where the sweatshops are located is to market more product to the people of those countries. “Market forces” gradually would elevate them to a level of consumption that looks more agreeable from the Western viewpoint. You’ll probably think that sounds revolting. I have to admit that I do too. But that’s how it happens — they start out small and gradually blossom to consumer states.
It’s difficult to read about all these third-world assistance programs that really only are meant to draw underdeveloped countries into the worldwide marketplace, which is just a mechanism to fleece everybody at the low ends of the economies of the resources they produce/harvest. But that is how improved medicine, nutrition and education and whatnot are all bought to improve general “quality of life.”
So it doesn’t sound so nice that the answer to sweatshops is maybe to allow corporations to continue to exploit people this way for profit. Ultimately, though, it would even out. Maybe there is a faster way to affect this evening out of economic disparity but no one knows or no one is saying.
Posted by: Carl · Apr 29, 04:26 PM · #
well, it has certainly become an accepted notion that we can shop ourselves out of every problem in the world. of course, the root problem is excessive consumerism, but consumerism seems to have become permanently embedded in capitalism – and it’s spreading to india and china.
I’m not sure if market solutions (i.e. carbon trading) are ever going to stimulate true change.
Posted by: cody · Apr 29, 04:33 PM · #
Oh shit. You guys are going to be so annoyed at me for going to the dark INTJ side and saying this but… did I mention I sort of have a PhD in historical sociology?
God. Sorry guys.
If creating local consumers is the pathway to ending structural inequalities in the nation-state system, please show me where. (And in the cases you find, doesn’t it just lead to increasing inequality within-country? See for example, all of Latin America the past 10 years.) Carl’s is a totally legitimate theory and one that holds within eras and regions to a very limited extent, but I don’t buy it. Deeply not buying it. (Carl, you tend to think teleologically and functionally—you know this, right? I tend not to trust teleological or functional arguments.)
From our point of view it can be difficult to see the way in which capitalism depends not only on consumption but on inequalities that obligate certain people to be relatively exploited producers. Surplus extraction is the condition of profit and the condition of capitalism in perpetuity. Surplus is extracted from workers and also in a sense from the environment. Not everyone can be a consumer in the way we understand it. As India and Mexico become consumer societies, it is only because there is intra-state reordering of society so that some join the consumerariat and others become even more deeply enmeshed—10 or 15 hours a day—in the bloody breathing engines of the global economy.
A couple of well-written, eventful, easily accessible reads: Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long 21st Century and David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity. Not exactly my POV, but great overviews. Especially Arrighi on what happens when the dominant state in the world system outsources all its production and financializes its economy. Uh oh….
Oh and carbon trading is hilarious! You guys should read my dissertation!
I should write my dissertation!
(Bye.)
xoxoxoxoxoxo
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 29, 04:48 PM · #
Is consumerism necessarily evil? A companion to consumerism is innovation. Were it not for our consumer economics, we’d still be clubbing our suppers ourselves and living short lives dressed in animal skins. We can’t bundle up all our traits that appear to us at the surface to be less attractive and then walk away from this “dark side.” Religion tried all that already and failed. To denigrate “consumerism” is merely to turn economics into a new religion.
Posted by: Carl · Apr 29, 04:54 PM · #
“Telelogy” is jargon, which I distrust.
I try to find symmetry in things and maybe that’s what you mean. It’s hazardous to find things to be more sophisticated and less comprehensible than actually they are.
But this “theory” is the way things have worked, where political force wasn’t used to artificially depress nations.
Posted by: Carl · Apr 29, 05:02 PM · #
Silly Carl, you are being a smartass just like me! Ok man.
Teleology, jargon coined by Aristotle, is together with functionalism nicely treated in the work of Jon Elster… a philosopher with whom I disagree but who writes beautifully and openly. For me, functionalism is suspicious because it is extraordinarily conservative and thus shuts out much that is innovative and meanwhile short-circuits important kinds of critical thinking. There is a place for functionalism, but it is also logically precarious (because it explains means in terms of ends, backwardslike) and it keeps you from asking if another world is possible.
The question about consumerism is good. Again, if one sees a world of functionality, necessity and logical evolution, one assumes that what comes out of efficient, archaic divisions of labor and the eventual emergence of markets can only be “natural.” If it is anything but, it’s a “political” abberation. But there is always politics, and always nature. There are no two separate spheres of life, one of which is authentic and one of which is false. Politics is as real, and as complicated, as everything else.
By functionalist logic, there is no place in society (and perhaps also no place in one’s personal life) for cultural critique.
It’s all just how it is supposed to be, unfolding naturally.
My work is to show that we still have choices, and that our action makes a difference.
And that compassion can have consequences.
And that supposing that the way things are is the way they are supposed to be keeps us disconnected from other people and from our own capacities to act in meaningful, indeed sometimes revolutionary, ways.
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 29, 06:03 PM · #
I will ask my friend if whe wants to be interviewd. Last time I saw her she was heavily pregnant and working her last three weeks at Lulu, to which she was not going to return after giving birth.
“we still have choices, and that our action makes a difference” – Love it! :)
Posted by: Alfia · Apr 30, 05:15 AM · #
My comment was only halfway smart-assed. Half-assed smart?
‘Teleology’ isn’t a commonly used word. It seems to have found its niche in academia and because it’s not well used in the mainstream, it’s jargon-ish. Use of exclusive words makes for exclusive communication and since meaning often must be inferred, it therefore can be vague. I understood you to have said that I extend general cases logically from examples, which is pretty much correct, except that there’s some symantical intricacy in the way you state it.
Recognition of patterns is important regardless of intention to break them, adapt them, or merely understand them. Nothing productive happens regarding a patterned behavior until the pattern is correctly apprehended. There’s some subjectivity regarding what constitutes a pattern, however. I think it’s generally taken to mean a ‘preponderence of examples.’ That is to say, enough observations are accumulated that some generalizations can confidently be made. But then, “preponderence” would seem to be subjective, too.
I think what you said was that I find a few examples and use them to make abstractions. Mostly, I don’t care enough about the present topic to bother searching for too many examples so that’s partly true. I think the pattern does hold, though. It’s hard to argue with observation. As you point out, people are free to make choices. I don’t believe people make choices as freely as is their capability, however.
People emulate. People reproduce what they witness and experience. “People” are a muddle that can’t be analyzed as individuals. Lots of individuals break free of the morass. Most never break free but instead reinforce it, no matter how they perceive themselves as independent individuals. If bulk change is desired then it has to be affected en masse. Otherwise, if we rely upon each individual to change, it’d take too many millions of years and probably wouldn’t turn out quite how we’d like, anyway.
Posted by: Carl · Apr 30, 11:29 AM · #
I am SURE this is a beginners guide to social psychology, but Howard Gardeners book ‘The Five Minds…’ kinda airs out the missing links of whats wrong with most social interaction (speaking as a layperson!!!)... consumerism (or rather stuffing ourselves with stuff) being the ones discussed. The Respectful Mind and the Ethical Mind missing usually from the consumer, the ability to connect dots, to see it as a system, to apply ethical conditions.
Our capability for becoming change agents, as I think you point to, is to step back and ‘walk a mile in their shoes’. And if that doesn’t help, read ‘The Road’. :)
Posted by: Gregor · Apr 30, 12:56 PM · #
Agh! Why does The Road keep getting mentioned?
Posted by: Carl · Apr 30, 01:22 PM · #
Indeed; it’s not even, for my money, McCarthy’s best work, although critics seem to think so, for what reason I can’t fathom. The Road has all of McCarthy’s minimalism but very little of his maximalism; Blood Meridian is perhaps too much the other way around. The Road is what you get if you let Warhol direct 28 Days Later. To be less ironic, I think the appeal is that McCarthy most closely approximates a suturable version of his apocalyptic metaphysics, in The Road, and it comes over as high emotional impact with greater interiority (paradoxically), whereas in a story like No Country for Old Men, it doesn’t, not the same way. But, as I’ve said elsewhere better, that sort of thing doesn’t sell me. That’s not what I’m into. I found No Country to be cosmically anti-sentimental, and I like that about it.
Posted by: patrick · Apr 30, 01:42 PM · #
I’ve only read passage of The Road yet, but if you can go there with him mercy on your soul. Maybe CM’s just rounding out his offerings: if Meridian, the somehow florid story of what we came from, didn’t get you (as it did me), maybe it will take a story of where we are going.
I will check out this Gardener guy. Good to remember consumerism is interior-normative and not just socially structured.
Carl, that is not what I meant by functionalism (explaining relationships in terms of their ultimate “systemic” function) or teleology (telos + ology). I wish I had time to explain, but just because philosophical principles aren’t part of the vernacular (which these days is not especially deep or exacting) does not mean their illuminative capacity is parochial. This one I offer out there because I think it will be useful to you. Just because it’s a new word that doesn’t easily reduce to smaller words dosen’t mean it’s exclusive, right? I mean, maybe it’s expansive! That’s how I’m trying to use it… suggestively, in case your curiosity wants to roll with it. Sorry if the ideas came off as blunt trump cards/words and nothing more.
Anyway. Can we ever stop talking about Cormack McCarthy? People are writing me letters about William Blake’s stomach issues, because it’s related to the verse of the day (Proverbs 20:17).
William Blake, anyone?
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 30, 03:25 PM · #
Marcel Proust wrote sentences so dense that they became paragraphs of meaning once you read the dictionary. The gift is that when you do this often enough, you begin to inhabit his prose, and therefor connect without the brain. Hence I believe words like Teleology, Epistemology, Ontology are troubling for the beginner, as any difficulty is, but once past the discomfort, can afford to ‘pack’ for a short sentence.
As William Blake said:
You never know what is enough unless you know more than enough.
Posted by: Gregor · Apr 30, 06:22 PM · #
pssst… bringing The Road up (again, and again and again) is an inside joke. But it represents perseverance, carrying the (inner) light when all around is dark. Um, to the nth degree.
Posted by: Gregor · May 1, 02:35 AM · #
Hi (0v0)
Regarding the “ahorita” and “ahora”, to complicate matters more, they have the exact opposite meaning in Mexico and Central America than they do in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. For a Puerto Rican or Cuban, when they say “ahora”, it means “ya”, or immediately and “ahorita” means later. When I lived in Texas and interacted with Central Americans I was most confused, because if I said I would do something “ahorita” they understood, “ahoritita!”- immediately and “ahora” meant whenever. It’s subtle, but an idiosyncrasy of the differences in Spanish among Spanish speakers. (Hey I like that your blog device has spell check.)
Cheers,
Arturo
Posted by: arturo · May 1, 06:40 PM · #
Arturo, that’s really funny.
Ahoritita!!!
P.S. Imagine my chagrin when, at 18 and making things up as I went along by way of ad-libbing off latin cognates, I once, after gracelessly stumbling over my words, apologized for myself by telling a group at a party that I was “muy embarazada.”
Posted by: (0v0) · May 1, 06:51 PM · #
howling
cognates RULE, don’t they?
Posted by: patrick · May 2, 03:19 PM · #