I no longer work at The Garment District in Cambridge, but while working there it came to my attention that about 1/3 of the population of our customers were certifiably insane. The droves of homeless and ultra-low-income customers were sometimes the scourge of our daily routines and at other times harmless distractions from our tasks.
What shocked me though was that out of that 1/3, not all of these crazy people were actually homeless. They were (maybe) fully functional human beings that, outside of our walls, may or may not have lived normal lives. But they were crazy.
How do I know? When someone spends over thirty dollars EVERY DAY on clothing, their psychic life must be in some kind of disarray; they must be filling some emotional void with linens and denim. This was not just one customer, but many. Every retail store has its quirky regulars, and I can remember many a weirdo haunting the halls of the Barnes and Nobles I used to work at. But the amount of disorder that went on in that clothing store was insurmountable.
We had customers hiding their clothing in corners of the store because they were paranoid other customers would get them. We had customers getting in physical fights over tube tops or jeans. We had couples come in who complimented each others dysfunction with fervent blindness.
My favorite was a group that we liked to call “The Family.” Three generations of women (two grandmas, two sisters, and three daughters) would come in, often separate form each other, and shop in the store for over three hours EVERY. DAMN. DAY. At first, because the grandmothers and one of the sisters had fairly heavy accents, I assumed they were sending the clothing back to less fortunate members overseas. It slowly dawned on me that they were each trying on the clothing for themselves, asking each other how it fit, if they looked fat, if they thought that designer was “in” or not. What their house(s) looked like, I could only imagine: their shopping bags lazily strewn in piles, overflowing into the kitchen, stacking up in the bathtubs. Something out of Hoarders.
Lets be real here: I have my fair share of crazy friends and I am in no way innocent of shopping compulsions. I am constantly buying stuff (toys, comics, books, clothes) and my addiction became increasingly apparent to me when I, alone, filled half of a seventeen foot U-Haul truck with my stuff, not my furniture. The U-Haul truck proceeded to crash, but that is a story for another time.
What concerns me here is that, I think, because of our entrenchment in the post-modern condition, we have commandeered the most innocuous of commodities to exist as extensions of our own emotional traumas. We use things and technology to compensate for our lacks.
This is a decidedly late 21st century problem, or at least, it is only coming to light because of the newfound prevalence of technology. What I mean to say is that we have disordered relationships with things. We have stuff-anorexia or commodity bulimia. In the same way that emotional problems can express themselves in eating disorders, we now use things to fulfill our latent desires and longings.
Our relationship with technology and/or other commodities (clothes, toys, books) can and do become disordered. I know many a person who feels incomplete without their blackberry and will communicate on it while communicating verbally, much to the chagrin of any company he/she may be in. This is a disordered relationship with a phone, something that gets in the way of actual socialization and actual life. Those customers (and, probably, myself) have a disordered relationship with clothes: we buy it to make ourselves feel better, binging and binging until, when we move and we have to purge and sell it all.
This is a post-modern (and, probably, first world) problem because we live in an age in which even tangible things are hyper-real. As I said in another essay: we buy the idea of things, not the things themselves. We want a BMW because it represents luxury, not because it is luxurious. The disordered person uses their laptop or iPhone because it represents a functional means of communicating when their real lives may not have one. The disordered person buys clothing because they may not be able to see themselves as complete without it: they buy the idea of what the new clothing will turn them into when they wear it.
If A.D.D. is a 21st century disorder, in that it may be a valid coping mechanism for dealing with the stresses of media hyper-saturation (if you stare at so many screens, eventually you learn a way to pay just enough attention to all of them but never a lot to just one) then the same could be said about compulsive shopping or communication addiction: if we live in a world where advertising and social conditioning tells us we are not complete unless we have things, then we will have all of the things until we finally feel complete.
Of course we never do feel complete and we never do pay enough attention. Perhaps this relates to Lacan and the object of our desire. We always want things in an infinite chain of desire, never actually getting the one thing at the end of the chain, always replacing and substituting different links in chain. One signifier attempts to represent the subject for all other signifiers, but a surplus is always produced: this surplus is objet petit a: Or as Slavoj Žižek puts it, “desire’s raison d’être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire.”
This does not relate to the expansion of the word disorder. Yes, it is easy to dismiss newly categorized psychological disorders as an obsessive need in our society to categorize, and texts like the DSM seem overly willing to split hairs on the differences between certain disorders. Yes, the definition of disorder is expanding to include all kinds of things (personality disorders already seem far-fetched to a number of psychology-skeptics), but still contains the idea that a behavior isn’t disordered unless it bothers the person performing it or impairs their life functioning. In that case, maybe a wanton shopping inclination or a vaguely obsessive phone dependence isn’t disordered, just strange or excessive.
I do not however think this is the case. A disorder implies that a certain behavior is out of the norm in a cultural context. While an increased dependence on our technology seems to be an inevitability, it may be, instead, that our culture as a whole is embracing some kind of disorder.
Of course, this line of argument breaks down into a game of semantics: a disorder isn’t a disorder if its culturally normal so a cultural disorder cant exist. But sometimes the actions of a culture seem disordered to another culture so isn’t that a disorder then? Alice-In-Wonderland logic.
The point is that I think we need to start seeing our relationship with not only food as a plane for our emotional problems, but our relationships with everything, tangible or intangible. The post-modern condition has rendered our entire hyper-realities as a landscape of dysfunction, a whole world falling apart to the sounds of our own private emotional traumas, literalized by our reliance on goods and technology. We are slowly falling into the Ballardian dystopia of high rise occupants whose luxuries are their disorders, who accept hyper-mediocrity, and who fetishized their own commodity related deaths.
And now that I’ve said all that: I’m going to go eBay shopping for a pair of brass knuckles and Slow-Bro figurine. Wish me luck.
-eric
