A Clothing as a Mediator of Experience

Approaches between Ciro Marcondes Filho and Peter Stallybrass

Abstract

This paper addresses clothing as a mediator of communicational experience, reflecting on its participation in experiences in which body, memory, materiality, and perception are articulated. It draws on Ciro Marcondes Filho’s conception of communication as an event and on the metaporo as a perspective for approaching sensitive experience through narrative. The discussion takes Peter Stallybrass’s (2016), to reflect on the relationship between clothing, body, memory, and absence. The account of Allon’s jacket shows how bodily marks, such as creases, stains, smells, and traces of use, participate in an experience in which the presence of the absent is actualized and produces shifts in the author’s perception. The essay thus proposes thinking about clothing beyond its utilitarian or representational function, as a relational materiality that may participate in the sensitive conditions of an encounter in which something emerges and transforms experience.