RICHARD GILMAN
185
like a wind from nowhere. The world of appearances or behavior
recommends itself differently, new compulsions make themselves
known, old habits are deprived of status. Once a fashion is under way,
there is an irony behind its reign in every sphere, an irony of which we
are unconscious except in hindsight: the imitative, the derivative
appears as the original.
For the adamantly, the professionally fashionable, the " pace–
setters," new style seems an increment, something added to nature or
creation, although its roots can always be found in another fashion,
one that has been repudiated; fashions exist
to
undo one another. For
the rest of us fashions always bring a disturbing emptiness, an absence
of authentic choice (to be resolutely unfashionable is also to feel
coerced); a gap is present between being and gesture.
If
we submit, we
find ourselves carried along, acting in such and such a way or wearing
such and such a garment because it is being done or worn; if we hold
out, we find ourselves off-balance nevertheless, somehow jostled out of
the way by time.
Caught up in a fashion, you experience an inability to
determine-should you make the attempt-its true relation to yourself,
since fashion is, by definition, what has been set in motion and
maintained by
others,
what is meant by others. Fashion is also by
definition the ephemeral masquerading as the permanent, the arbitrary
as the inevitable. Fashion chooses rather than is chosen and imposes
"truth" instead of allowing it to be determined.
All this is most evident in physical matters, in dress, decor, styles,
in objects of various kinds-Tiffany lamps, Swedish modern, warm-up
suits. When it comes to impalpable realities such as ideas or speech, the
matter, naturally enough, becomes murky and complicated. Yet we all
recognize that there are fashions in thought and expression that are
every bit as imperious as those that rule in successive waves in the
material world; there are temporary reigns of genres of consciousness,
unstable but momentarily despotic systems of evaluation or interpreta–
tion. (There can even be a fashion of opposition
to
evaluation or
mterpretation.) Freudianism in its debased form (but of course all
fashions of an intellectual kind are a debasement) has been a notable
and flagrant example; Structuralism, or the Death of God, or the
notion of Camp have been more subtle ones.
"Decadence" as a fashionable term is one of the subtlest and most
elusive examples of all. Unlike Freudianism, or any body of thought or
way of perception or interpretation that has a provenance in
some–
body's
mind, but rather like Camp, whose status as a fashionable word
