spring unfolding

A Good Organum of Fabric

Pennina Barnett in the introduction to the first edition of Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture

Interdisciplinarity is increasingly regarded as essential critical practice, for a discipline that builds walls around itself, just like a country that becomes a fortress, is likely to stagnate. Here the philosopher Michel Serres offers a pertinent image: I believe that there is boxthought, the thought we call rigorous, like rigid, inflexible boxes, and sack-thought, like systems of fabric. Our philosophy lacks a good organum of fabrics. The dictionary defines cloth as a “soft, usually pliable fabric.” Serres also argues for “soft logics”—modes of thought that are open and inclusive. Textile aims to encourage new ways of thinking about cloth that resemble this soft, loose weave. The metaphors of cloth, its weave and texture, have proved a rich source for many philosophers.

quote: Michel Serres, Rome, The Book of Foundations (1983), trans. Felicia McCarren, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1991, p. 236

forever folding in curling skin

touch dust textiles

Dust chronicles
Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture Volume 8, Issue 3, pp.260–269  Deborah Valoma 2010

The formation of a cohesive whole from minute, disparate, yet equally valued elements is achieved though multiple points of contact. As an organizing principle, textiles offer a blueprint for thinking about interconnecting structures inlinguistic, political, and scientific discourses.

The disobedient limpness of cloth and the gravitational sink of dust lend an abject horizontality to both. Bedclothes and shrouds wrap prone bodies and disintegrate into loss and longing—the residual materiality of the uncontrollable and the undone. And so, because the bodies of textiles ultimately fail as our own fragile bodies do, we must arm ourselves with the thought of textiles—the delicate conceptual nuances of this humble yet poetically charged medium. p.262

folding light

fold light