Socks are beautiful, quite simply. But what does that mean? What does the act of saying “socks are beautiful” do? If it is said in a certain way that I think there is an object that it points to that is eternally graspable, then I create a narrative of endless desire—infinitely pushing or pinching me. If I am saying it in a certain way that it points to the way it is a text, then something else happens: the sock is more and more viewed as performance, repeated, re-treated, re-seen, revisited, stretched, worn out, put on, etc.
“Text” does not necessarily mean literal words on a page; it refers more to a set of performances. The ways that socks are worn, worn out, put on, removed, etc. are practices. To look at socks is part of that practice that endlessly proliferates and causes new permutations in turn. Does this render it all “boring”? Not really, since boredom is only the obverse of desire: it is the waiting for an essence to “emerge” from nothing, when there is no eternal essence whatsoever that one can grasp. Some kinds of images operate in ways that we believe that they are eternal: something about a curve, for example, might lead one to think of a culturally reinforced geometry that is touted as universal.
The “ultimate” suffering is believing in the essence, which is none other than the reification of all that is produced in mind and actions. If I fall into the trap of essentializing beauty and form, it’s not long before I start to build a world around all of that: the world of “what things out there stand ‘in the way’ of what I most desire?” The world begins with desire, which begins with the fundamental error of seeing things as having an essence. But this too is a false “universal” to speak in this way. Because no matter what (essence or no essence, belief in an essence or denial), these are also performances.
boysocks318 