The Wrong T-Shirt

We probably would not know what a wrong statement would be if we did not know what a pair of ill-fitting pants felt like. (Peter Sloterdijk)

Bagginess

I’m in the gym. The workout is going ok. The weights feel … ohhhhh-kayyyy… ish. But something feels wrong. I’m not feeling right. It’s not ‘in’ me. What is it? I realise. And the realisation feels ridiculous. But still, I could kick myself. It’s this t-shirt. The t-shirt is wrong. It is ruining my workout.

How preposterous is this? A baggy t-shirt ruins a workout?! But, hang on: I once read about a study which concluded that wearing tight clothes (such as compression tops, BJJ rash-guards, or running ‘base layers’ – Lycra, basically) assisted in the learning of new physical skills. The argument was that the added pressure enables you to become conscious of and to feel parts of yourself that you otherwise might not be able to feel, enabling you to develop a stronger mind-muscle or mind-movement ‘connection’ or awareness.

In some contexts, it’s obvious that the right clothes can oil a practice, and that the wrong clothes can hinder it. The sleek second skin of a BJJ rash-guard enables rolling without things getting tangled, without the sweat making the clothes heavy and floppy. By contrast, the ridiculousness of the BJJ gi (the pyjama-style uniform), with string fasteners and loose tops, all unsuccessfully tied together by an ever-unloosening belt, seems to do nothing but constantly interrupt and frustrate rolling. But, arguably, they might say, that’s all part of the game.

But a baggy t-shirt, when lifting weights… Am I saying we must lift weights in tight clothes? No. I am a great believer in training in whatever feels right. I have dabbled in wearing specific clothing for the gym. When I first joined this one, after quitting BJJ, I would wear my BJJ no-gi gear, but I gradually weaned myself off this. Other than that one blip, I have always tried to resist the idea of wearing specific clothes to the gym. I was a teen in the 1980s, and we’d train in combat pants and boots in winter, tracksuit bottoms and trainers in summer. We once bought some of those funny baggy pantaloons that bodybuilders used to wear back then, but quickly backed off from that. Nowadays, at the gym in the morning, I will be wearing whatever t-shirt I was wearing yesterday.

It’s just that this time, I was wearing the wrong t-shirt. This t-shirt was doing something, or preventing something. This t-shirt was too baggy. And baggy in the wrong way. It was making me feel… baggy. I could not feel the swell of my back, shoulders and chest as I progressed through the workout. I was not getting enough sensory feedback. It felt like the workout wasn’t ‘working’.

Tightness

We often imagine that the gymgoer wears tight clothes simply to show off, to parade, like a peacock, or as philosopher Alphonso Lingis has it, like an orchid – at others. That is, we tend to think of our clothing choices as purely semiotic – purely about communicating with others, sending out messages: ‘Look at me! Aren’t I gorgeous?’ There is definitely some truth in this. But what kind, and is it the whole truth? If we focus on this semiotic/communicative dimension, we maybe don’t notice certain other kinds of ‘communication’, internal to ourselves, or certain effects of the clothing, certain affects. In the right clothes, I can myself in the right way, I am present, I exist; this region of myself, it is present, it exists.

Of course, if tightness is what we need, then it must be the right tightness. Tight to just the right degree and only in the right places. My social media captors have, for the last year or so, been feeding me adverts pitched at older men (like me) who still workout (like me) but who wear terrible t-shirts (like me). The t-shirt I need, it says, is one that is loose around the waist but hugging around the shoulders and arms. This will make me attractive, it says, and happy – sometimes literally: in at least one of the adverts, poor old ‘dad’ has been overlooked by women until he wears these new t-shirts, and then the women can’t take their eyes off him. And their hands. And so on.

Loose at the waist, tight at the shoulders and arms, says the advert. Show the right things off, conceal the wrong things. In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the main metaphor for plenitude, power, self-security, dominance and so on, is ‘phallus’. And notice that I said ‘metaphor’, not ‘referent’ or ‘thing’. For those who do not work regularly with metaphors, or phalluses, the simplest way to get a handle on what this means is to take the classic way of clarifying what a metaphor is (‘my love is a red, red rose’) in distinction to a simile (‘my love is like a red, red rose’), change ‘love’ to ‘phallus’ and ‘red, red rose’ to whatever the important thing that makes you feel secure is. So, for instance: ‘My phallus is a loose waist, tight shoulders t-shirt’. Choose your own examples. It might be your car, your partner, your biceps. It might even be your six-pack abs, or even (unlikely) your phallus. Whatever it is, it is crucial that the phallus must be in some sense concealed, covered, veiled, or at the very least, curated. In short: clothed. Your phallus must be wearing the right t-shirt. It would not be the phallus were it not for the t-shirt. In effect, it only becomes what it is when in the right t-shirt. Without it, it’s not it, and neither is the t-shirt.

When the phallic thing is laid bare, revealed in a stark nudity without the correct staging, without the right t-shirt, all that appears is shame. As a variable metaphor, ‘the phallus’ can ‘be’ anything, can migrate anywhere. But it must be curated. It must be staged. Managed. Manscaped, so to speak. Without this, it is just flesh, or fabric.

I am aware that Lacanian concepts like this are normally deployed ad hominem, to state or imply that certain kinds of men are insecure. I’m sure they are. Of course they are. In Lacanian theory, lack is constitutive. Lack leads to desire leads to attempting to become coextensive with plenitude and completeness. But none of us can get this, because we are not this. So, the ultimate lesson is: those in Lacanian houses shouldn’t throw stones.

And anyway, sometimes (admittedly, rarely) it’s not just about ‘loose at the waist, tight at the shoulders and arms’. It’s not just tightness. It’s rightness.

Rightness

More recently, I have taken to wearing quite oversize long sleeved tops to the gym. This is because I recently decided that I needed to go back to basics and rebuild myself. (I do not take such major epochal and existential decisions lightly. I only make them occasionally – about once every fortnight or so.) So, for the new me: only the big lifts: squats, deadlifts, barbell rows, straight-bar curls, shoulder press… I realise I ‘should’ be doing bench press too, but because my shoulders are banjaxed, I need to be creative. So, instead: close-grip/parallel incline dumbbell press with fly. (Never seen this before? That’s because I pretty much made it up in the quest for something that could quickly and completely hit my chest while sparing my shoulders from undue stress.) Calf raises. Home.

So, big overhaul to training approach. Big exercises only. Few sets. No complexity. No small or fiddly little exercises. Against the backdrop of what felt like my new-found, principled (ahem), old-fashioned simplicity, I seemed also to be drawn to simple and non-fussy clothes. As I did my big lifts (ok, with small weights, but hey, I’m old, I’m creaky), I focus only on the outline that my big tops show to me, of me, as I brace for squat, or reach the top of the deadlift, or clench my glutes and abs to try not to cheat in the straight bar curl. First time I wore one, I thought: this top is perfect. It allows me to see and feel my body only as one unit. It was not tight. Quite the opposite.

Of course, the big top while lifting is nothing new. There has long been a ‘big-top aesthetic’ in bodybuilding and other kinds of lifting. When you wear your big tops, you still need to see the topography of your traps and deltoids. In a way, that’s a large part of the point, or the value.

Between sets, I confess, I have more than once looked around at the youngsters in their tight vests doing set after set of single arm tricep-pushdowns, or bicep cable curls, or whatever fiddly little thing they are doing to make their bicep or tricep or pec or delt pop out just that tiny little bit more. And more than once I have thought: if they covered up a bit and wore a big top like me and focused on the feel of their entire bodies, and focused on the big lifts, they’d progress faster to where they want to be. The big, baggy, long-sleeved top makes you not so much a body without organs, as a body with fewer details. A body without fussiness.

They say that the actor Tom Hardy acts with his shoulders. He displays his emotions and his character’s personality through the sag of his head as it hangs (yes, hangs) on top of huge traps and weighty round deltoids, as he looks up, almost through his own lips, to allow the rest of his body to start acting. Something like that, perhaps.

But then, that specific thought about the youngsters in the gym is just one thought; just an everyday fleeting negative evaluation of basically everyone else in the gym – which is perfectly normal for me. Whenever people in the gym aren’t doing what I am doing or not doing something the way I would do it (which is most of the people most of the time), then my first reaction is to judge them negatively and very critically. Of course, given how often I change my own things around and do things differently from last time, this means that were an older me to witness a newer me doing something in the gym, he would think ‘what an idiot!’ And he would be correct.

Indeed, have I not just argued for two completely different things in the space of this little reflection? First, the necessity of tightness. Second, the necessity of bagginess, looseness, largeness. Yep. But that’s ok. I guess, if pushed, I’d say that my point is that a baggy t-shirt is always bad, while a baggy long-sleeved top can often be good. It’s about rightness. It’s about the feel. But what does that even mean?

Pants

In a fascinating section of the book Infinite Mobilization, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argues that before the homogenising logic of the modern world fully took hold of language, there were myriad notions of truth and correctness, each tied to the ideals and objectives of a specific trade, activity, or practice, and its feel. We can see their traces today, if we unpick the metaphoricity (technically: catachresis) at play in our most literal-seeming words.

Sloterdijk starts his exploration of rightness with the image of the oasis, and hence rightness as being when good things come together. From there, he proposes that culture at root amounts to making more and more things into oases. From here, culture becomes agricultural:

The oasis is a place where things are ‘right’; it is the privileged place where things that correspond to each other fuse together. Culture is the art of creating oases – places where the cultivation of correspondences is intentionally carried out. Having initially begun as an agricultural culture, it owes its existence to the ability to cultivate fields and soils as the ‘right’ habitats for selected plants. Its secret is the correct correspondence of plants and soils, and the right alignment of the action of sowing and harvesting to the seasons. It was only by way of metaphorical seminars that it later spread through other ‘fields’… (107-108)

But, of course, there is more than one kind of rightness: ‘The multifaceted economy of small instances of rightness precedes the monoculture of the great truth’ (108). There are ancient, still enduring, and always current forms, such as ‘the “truth” of hunters and shooters, for whom the right is what hits the mark’. Elsewhere, there is the ‘discovery [that] you can take with you is what is right, according to the act of gathering’, which is the ‘rationality of gatherers and seekers, which occurs only when they find what they “can use”’. Thus, claims Sloterdijk there are two enduring but ‘archaic truth functions’ which derive from our hunter-gatherer ancestors – ‘the hitting of the mark and the discovery’. In addition to all of this, he continues:

the ancient arts and crafts have bequeathed us a wealth of inconspicuous concepts of correspondence that establish rules, rations, and appropriateness within local practices. Thus, there is still a concept of truth of pharmacists, where what is right is what helps; a tailor’s concept of truth, where what is right is what fits; a musician’s concept of truth, which is measured by what is in tune; a carpenter’s concept of truth, where what is right is what joins together; a mason’s concept of truth, where what is done right is what stands and holds soundly. In all these fields, people gather experience with sub-truths that are inconspicuously pre-sorted into an equivalence between sentences and circumstances.

Drawing equivalences across a wealth of everyday and praxis-specific ‘rightnesses’ is what constitutes the bedrock and foundations upon which our modern concepts of universal truths have been built:

In this way, hitting the mark, discoveries, fusions, fittings, effects, harmonies, cohesions are regional variants of corresponding phenomena that become clear to every life as soon as it gets a bit more acquainted with them. With the gentle violence of the self-evident, they tune and orient all the complex functions of the human mind in the fields of theory, praxis, and art. It is only because the diverse cultures of correspondence and adequation had already inconspicuously prepared the ground that the higher truths of science, metaphysics, ethics, religion, and aesthetics were able to build their imposing buildings on it.

But, before universalisation, sentences – in the sense of semantic units of words and judgements – derive from circumstances. Just because we do not think about the possible pragmatic origins or fundamental metaphoricity of our words about correctness and truth does not mean that they are not irreducibly embodied and tied to practices. Their sensory and physical nature may have become inconspicuous to us, but:

This inconspicuousness is at the same time a criterion for the soundness and sensation-free consideration of these sectoral truth functions. It is only because they are already recorded and assumed to be vital that the later effort of the intellect to find perceptive evident equivalences to things also becomes plausible and self-evident.

All of which brings us back to my t-shirt that day, and my long-sleeved tops on other days, and indeed back to my epigraph: ‘We probably would not know what a wrong statement would be’, says Sloterdijk, ‘if we did not know what a pair of ill-fitting pants felt like’.

Rightness is a felt sense that we no longer notice as a felt sense. Sometimes we forget how much we sense, all the time, even such supposedly secondary matters as our clothes, and what a huge role they play in establishing rightness and enabling activities and experiences.