It seems more suitable to talk about shortages as something firstly felt, which happens to people; mainly because we have trouble imagining 'a short of supply'¹ as a proper end, as an exhaustion of resources – at least not in our times of profound 'Stuff,' of endless consumables scattered everywhere and pilling up.
Upon a series of such personal encounters, a question over the shape of things-to-come had motivated what thinking with shortages could mean. An 'out of stock' is simultaneously a provisional state and an end of sorts. Though, in the larger scheme, who gets to stock-up, how shortages manifest, or how scarcity gets apprehended, are all culturally and geographically embedded. Fashion/dress and design make here for loose references. Points of departure for the 'elusive stuff' wrapping and brushing against bodies, they deal with the vast material of our everyday life, from images to materiality, to technologies, and habits. 'Manners of doing and shaping’ – matters of tactility and communicating –, fashion and design are ambivalent surfaces, processes of imagining and a sort of 'rebellious agents.' What we wear is not only political and shapes our lives, but extends bodies (and objects) beyond the limits they've been confined to.
As one who has lived mostly from a suitcase, in a country that even if listed in the European Union fails the Schengen Area², I couldn't but wonder what certain sensibilities emerging from a (still) eastern-European realm could make of it. Thus, 'Out of Stock' became a speculative quest of reframing scarcity and shortages as notions that could address empowering imaginaries of future(s) and ways of living. How can speculations and the subtleties of everyday life meet? What kind of openings are already at hand, and what could be 'invented'? What kind of economies – for dressing-up/ design/ fashion-up bodies – would they outline and respond to? What will these found future(s) ‘wear’?
Meanwhile, the world has happened. And shortages as a felt phenomenon, both on material and societal level, made room once more for awareness over issues of inequality, those so closely manifested onto bodies – from the depth of our stomachs to the core of our identities.
Since, it was an ongoing-late-year, the kind that has decided to tumble around, creating blobs in our time-keeping measures. It was the year of a pandemic. A heavy fog made out of data machines and the spores intertwined, drifting, gave everybody intoxicating blurred visions. Possessed by a sort of bio-piracy. Despite the turmoil, the landfills growing, and the few terrae running free, the year was advertised to us as still liveable. Yet, for most, it felt as if we ran out of stock, and when the mending started, we did not know.
What follows is a series of notations, something like a mood to further accommodate the mind-map of this particular 'stock' and its sending 'out,' where pastness/ presentness/ futurity intertwine.
the first notation
Theorist Judith Butler pointed out that "it seems that we survive precisely in order to live, and life, as much as it requires survival, must be more than survival in order to be liveable."³ So, what does exactly mean, to be 'liveable'?
In our world, always switched on, "all potential for production must be realized right away, the faster, the better." ⁴In such an embedded production, proliferating on data, technologies, energies, and resources, what is to come – the future – has become a sort of 'fata morgana.' As if not there at all or just an already predetermined reflection engulfed by neoliberal strategies and measured by risk analysis; as if you can't even smell it.
Upon a series of such personal encounters, a question over the shape of things-to-come had motivated what thinking with shortages could mean. An 'out of stock' is simultaneously a provisional state and an end of sorts. Though, in the larger scheme, who gets to stock-up, how shortages manifest, or how scarcity gets apprehended, are all culturally and geographically embedded. Fashion/dress and design make here for loose references. Points of departure for the 'elusive stuff' wrapping and brushing against bodies, they deal with the vast material of our everyday life, from images to materiality, to technologies, and habits. 'Manners of doing and shaping’ – matters of tactility and communicating –, fashion and design are ambivalent surfaces, processes of imagining and a sort of 'rebellious agents.' What we wear is not only political and shapes our lives, but extends bodies (and objects) beyond the limits they've been confined to.
As one who has lived mostly from a suitcase, in a country that even if listed in the European Union fails the Schengen Area², I couldn't but wonder what certain sensibilities emerging from a (still) eastern-European realm could make of it. Thus, 'Out of Stock' became a speculative quest of reframing scarcity and shortages as notions that could address empowering imaginaries of future(s) and ways of living. How can speculations and the subtleties of everyday life meet? What kind of openings are already at hand, and what could be 'invented'? What kind of economies – for dressing-up/ design/ fashion-up bodies – would they outline and respond to? What will these found future(s) ‘wear’?
Meanwhile, the world has happened. And shortages as a felt phenomenon, both on material and societal level, made room once more for awareness over issues of inequality, those so closely manifested onto bodies – from the depth of our stomachs to the core of our identities.
Since, it was an ongoing-late-year, the kind that has decided to tumble around, creating blobs in our time-keeping measures. It was the year of a pandemic. A heavy fog made out of data machines and the spores intertwined, drifting, gave everybody intoxicating blurred visions. Possessed by a sort of bio-piracy. Despite the turmoil, the landfills growing, and the few terrae running free, the year was advertised to us as still liveable. Yet, for most, it felt as if we ran out of stock, and when the mending started, we did not know.
What follows is a series of notations, something like a mood to further accommodate the mind-map of this particular 'stock' and its sending 'out,' where pastness/ presentness/ futurity intertwine.
the first notation
Theorist Judith Butler pointed out that "it seems that we survive precisely in order to live, and life, as much as it requires survival, must be more than survival in order to be liveable."³ So, what does exactly mean, to be 'liveable'?
In our world, always switched on, "all potential for production must be realized right away, the faster, the better." ⁴In such an embedded production, proliferating on data, technologies, energies, and resources, what is to come – the future – has become a sort of 'fata morgana.' As if not there at all or just an already predetermined reflection engulfed by neoliberal strategies and measured by risk analysis; as if you can't even smell it.
In the overwhelming chain of crises, from the economical to the looming environmental one, of news already obsolete, business as usual means being stuck in an indefinite present. Could scarcity make us hesitate, run out of this ennui shaped by a desire for accumulation?
There's a distinction we first need to make, the one between scarcity and the more familiar term infusing the slang of political talk: austerity – as architect Jeremy Till has usefully signaled. The tag of last decades' measures (and times of crises), austerity is a fixed ideology that keeps the capitalist machine of production going, by just 'feeding' it with less. In it lies the promise that such a state of drastic endurance is only temporary. You only have to wait – a bit longer, and a bit longer, and a bit longer… until the economy gets in better shape. Scarcity, on the other hand, touches upon the inescapable condition of something being depleted; it makes us ask "what if, instead of adding, one redistributes what is there already?" Thus, it challenges the understanding of growth as continuous accumulation, as a matter of fact (material and easily measured) – and turns it into a matter of concern, namely the dynamics and ethics of a society.⁵
Designer and theorist Marjanne van Helvert argues that scarcity itself is an ambiguous concept, no less run by market evaluations. Manipulatively inserted, it is meant to raise 'the attractiveness,' especially within consumer culture. Limited editions⁶ may go from luxurious goods to basic needs. At play in our contemporary world, this duality is something we should keep in the back of our mind: how shortages are implemented as strategies of desirability, efficiently 'designed' and past on, while keeping the wheels of consumption turning. Just as the ethics of a society can be sold on sustainable products where what is actually 'affordable' and how redistributions function, are always up for frictions.
lines of visibility, lines of enunciation
Scarcity, however, 'hits home' differently in Eastern-Europe. The area has been shaped in collective memory as 'the societies of shortages' and need, as if pleasure, desire, and style couldn't find a proper place here⁷. The socialist/ communist pasts remain haunted by scarcities: with both everyday goods and freedoms ‘running out.’ The Great Transition, which all post-socialist countries experienced, might have raised hopes and bodies of freedom, only to crush them under capitalist markets' invasive rules. The corporate 'shock-therapy' urging everyone to abide by the liberal system, soon made space for the swamp of privatisation, credits, and loans. The promise of wellbeing fell short within economic drawbacks and poor life conditions.
Unable to fully grasp the 'wonders' of western dreams, we got trapped in the geographically elusive construct of the former East and a stereotype of (always) 'lacking' something.
There's a distinction we first need to make, the one between scarcity and the more familiar term infusing the slang of political talk: austerity – as architect Jeremy Till has usefully signaled. The tag of last decades' measures (and times of crises), austerity is a fixed ideology that keeps the capitalist machine of production going, by just 'feeding' it with less. In it lies the promise that such a state of drastic endurance is only temporary. You only have to wait – a bit longer, and a bit longer, and a bit longer… until the economy gets in better shape. Scarcity, on the other hand, touches upon the inescapable condition of something being depleted; it makes us ask "what if, instead of adding, one redistributes what is there already?" Thus, it challenges the understanding of growth as continuous accumulation, as a matter of fact (material and easily measured) – and turns it into a matter of concern, namely the dynamics and ethics of a society.⁵
Designer and theorist Marjanne van Helvert argues that scarcity itself is an ambiguous concept, no less run by market evaluations. Manipulatively inserted, it is meant to raise 'the attractiveness,' especially within consumer culture. Limited editions⁶ may go from luxurious goods to basic needs. At play in our contemporary world, this duality is something we should keep in the back of our mind: how shortages are implemented as strategies of desirability, efficiently 'designed' and past on, while keeping the wheels of consumption turning. Just as the ethics of a society can be sold on sustainable products where what is actually 'affordable' and how redistributions function, are always up for frictions.
lines of visibility, lines of enunciation
Scarcity, however, 'hits home' differently in Eastern-Europe. The area has been shaped in collective memory as 'the societies of shortages' and need, as if pleasure, desire, and style couldn't find a proper place here⁷. The socialist/ communist pasts remain haunted by scarcities: with both everyday goods and freedoms ‘running out.’ The Great Transition, which all post-socialist countries experienced, might have raised hopes and bodies of freedom, only to crush them under capitalist markets' invasive rules. The corporate 'shock-therapy' urging everyone to abide by the liberal system, soon made space for the swamp of privatisation, credits, and loans. The promise of wellbeing fell short within economic drawbacks and poor life conditions.
Unable to fully grasp the 'wonders' of western dreams, we got trapped in the geographically elusive construct of the former East and a stereotype of (always) 'lacking' something.
