You have to wear clothes. But you don’t have to come up with Dior dresses or Doc Marten boots or Chanel little black frock, whatever it’s called. You can tell I haven’t got one. So, once again we have an essential need – clothing ourselves – which we then do with intense sort of interest. We stylise and embellish and ornament and decorate.
Movement. We have to move. But we don’t have to do the rumba, the tango, the Charleston and the twerk. So even something as straightforward as movement we, as humans, elaborate it into area of stylistic activity, essentially. So the basic activity is movement. What we like to do with it is to stylise it in lots and lots of different ways.
And communicating is the same way. You know, we all have to communicate, because we’re humans and we live in co-operative groups. But, in fact, we do a lot more than just communicate: we write epic poems and pop songs and symphonies and advertising and so on and so on. So, again, with communicating we do a lot of additional stuff on top of just communicating.
And all of that stuff, what’s characteristic of it is that it’s highly stylised. And it’s not only highly stylised, but it’s not randomly stylised either. We care a great deal about what we’re doing. For instance, people will say to you – and almost mean it – ‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in that’. Or they might say, ‘I don’t think I could live without my Bjork albums’. Or similar things like what. ‘What colour shall I dye my hair? It’s a real crisis.’ So people invest a lot of their thinking into how they style themselves. And, in fact, we all show that. Nobody here is dressed randomly and nobody – I can’t see you very well – but I don’t think anybody has a random hair cut either. If anybody does, I would really like to see it.
