Fort / da: notes on metonymic desire, object permanence, and a pair of pleated pants

“At the mall, I would select my own pair of Z. Cavaricci pants, which were to young men as a plume is to a peacock, featuring roughly the same coloring and incongruous relationship to the owner’s body. Toxic in color and monstrously pleated, the pants materialized as if a vision from Arabian Nights. They ballooned at the thighs but by the time they reached the knee, the legs narrowed severely. The inseam continued another yard past the ankle, so as to be rolled and pegged to rest on a high-top sneaker. Z. Cavaricci spared no material, for these were luxury items made in years of prosperity. My longing for them approached the obscene.  

But if the pants were the nominal object of my longing, they were not its ultimate aim. To inhabit the pants was to inhabit the ranks of their wearers — the people who, in the months of careful surveillance, were the most handsome, successful, and popular in school. The Z. Cavariccis did not merely carry meaning: they contained within them the promise of transubstantiation.”

An issue of the journal Dichotomy, published annually by the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture, called for essays under the rubric of “Hungry,” which I loosely interpreted as a cluster of desire, consumption, and elusive satisfaction. So I wrote a lengthy meditation on subject-object relationships: about how we impermanent human subjects begin to form our identities at the moment that Freud thought was pivotal to development: the discovery, in early childhood, of object permanence.

To think these heavy thoughts, I recruited two adversaries: Walter Benjamin, whose classic essay “Unpacking my library” posits that the accumulation of books is central to the identity of a collector; and Marie Kondo, whose gospel of tidying up imagines selfhood hiding underneath a pile of household clutter, waiting to be revealed. I also donned, metaphorically, an old pair of Z. Cavaricci pants that, in my teenage years, represented not merely an article of desire but a potent instrument of self-realization.

The essay was inspired by my time studying at the University of Chicago with the late queer scholar Lauren Berlant, who encouraged students to view the process of identity formation as a dynamic, an ongoing negotiation with competing versions of oneself and with the world. Remembering Berlant, I wrote:

Back then, we thought that identities were constructed in a dizzyingly complex process that was part free will, part social pressures that bear heavily on our choices, and part alchemy. Selfhood looked more like a gradual becoming — a trying-on of tactical, temporary identities, some of which fit as generously as a new pair of Z. Cavariccis, and others that did not. Long before Lady Gaga told us otherwise, we were not born this way, or that. In an ongoing project of becoming ourselves, we exercised the power of choice and had power exercised upon us, forming our identities by way of gradual accumulation. What we would become depended on a sum of ideas, beliefs, nervous tics, designer pants, sexual partners, allergies, mannerisms, superstitions, friends, and enemies that we were to collect in our lifetimes. Not only were we inseparable from our junk, this view held, but we were exactly contiguous with it. Such additive identity is rooted in the notion of performance: we act out roles that are required or desirable in specific situations. I may act like a fuddy-duddy around my colleagues and like a party animal around my fraternity pals, but neither of these identities defines me fully. Moreover, the way I perform does not correspond to the way I am, which is happy news. In other words, my behavior does not determine my identity, meaning that I may be liberated from the tyranny of self-identification: for example, that I perform sexual congress with someone of my own gender need not oblige me to identify as gay.

Since Berlant’s untimely death in 2021, I’ve come to read this essay as a tribute. I think my former mentor would have been pleased with the uneasy assemblage of identity politics, post-Marxist epistemology, self-help literature, consumer desire, exigencies of fashion, and personal narrative that this essay tries but fails to contain. Berlant might have called it, approvingly, “excessive.”

And I am gratified that this issue of Dichotomy received the Douglas Haskell award for academic publications.