This chapter interprets the results of a three day observation of the dress of students at a college event. Categories for the analysis of tee shirts were generated by participant observation. The analysis of clothing is located in the larger process by which social reality is constructed. Clothing is one of four information media over which a young person still has control. As students are processed through the routines of mass bureaucracies, voice, body, and behavior are repressed as language media. As young people fail to find an institutionalized medium which expresses their concerns and their responses to the contingencies of life, they invent one.

The Tee shirt is the uniquely post-modern medium which young people have found to speak out. We can read these Tee shirts as text, deconstruct them and thus, help reconstruct a world in which young people can give voice to those concerns.

To deconstruct a discourse is to think about how it fails its own project and interferes with the competent practice of social life. While this seems unnecessarily negative, one assumes that its positivities are registered in the knowledge process; in the socio-cultural process and will survive such a critique. Deconstruction of a topic requires that all its privileged assumptions are desanctified; returned to the human hand and the human mind which gave them birth and thus repoliticized...made part of a radical democracy of ideas and a rich democracy of decision.

In deconstructing, one illuminates the inconsistencies, the omissions, the easy assumptions and the failings of a theory, a practice or a concept; not in order to prove it false but rather to remind its practitioners and its users that the truth value of a statement is variable while the utility of it fades as conditions change...that in social science, there are no finalities, no boundaries, no iron laws nor are there eternal truths. Life is always larger than theory and always richer; always more connected; always messier and more chaotic. Deconstruction opposes itself to all claims of permanence, objectivity or authoritative finality.

As Leitch suggests, deconstruction challenges every boundary, every frame, every margin, every inscription, every border in order to reconnect a topic to its rich social past and its wide ranging consequence (1983:261). As Culler asserts, deconstruction holds a discourse responsible for the philosophy it asserts (1982: 86). As Derrida proclaims in the Gaze of Oedipus, the self-knowledge of a science, of a critique, of a theoretical tradition is always disqualified as a final arbitrator of its own worth and validity. As Derrida asserts in La Verite' en peinture, deconstruction always meddles with solid structure, with 'material' institutions; it always goes beyond mere discourse and into the social dynamics that call forth and give form to discourse.

All this is part of a knowledge process which contributes to the self-reflexivity of an academic discipline, a political economy or a social relationship. The point is not to destruct such a theory or concept; such an institution or social formation, but rather to set it in its socio-historical context and to reconnect it to its history. As such, deconstructionism is part of the post-modern methodology that abjures all talk of value-free theory; all talk of objectivity; all pretensions to grand, unified concepts and theories as well as all claims to modernity with its implications of finality and of perfected social relations.

What is done with such an analysis is, of course, dependent upon how good the political process might be. How well such knowledge is produced and how widely it is distributed; how well it is connected to an interactively rich and democratically oriented public sphere. At its best, deconstruction sets the stage for a patterning of social life oriented to the human project....it is part of praxis, a reconstructive process. At its worse, deconstruction is endless, petty, defeating self-doubt. The first leads to the dialectics of life; the latter to isolating nihilism or simply cynical withdrawal.

The foreclosure of linguistic capacities alienates young people from the process by which social reality is constituted through symbolic interaction. Students regain control over that process, sometimes in pretheoretical and privatized ways, by the political, sexual, status, and economic messages on display to anonymous others in mass recreational events. Some theoretical foundations for the alienated use of clothing are suggested.

Speaking Out All over the world young people collect and display tee shirts. In the Untied States, the wearing of tee shirts is a national phenomenon. The typical middle-class youngster has from five to ten such tee shirts with which to communicate its special message of style, gender, affinities, politics, status, interests, beliefs and value preferences.

Mope, an employee of the Copy Center Service at Central Michigan University, has about a hundred such tee shirts which he wears on appropriate occasions...that is to say, everyday. Even though he runs the copy center, he has no voice in the politics, economics, or education at any level of government including that of the university.

Symbolic Systems. In the constitution of shared social life worlds, each individual has four language systems available with which to interact, symbolically. There is first and foremost, the voice. The voice is a complex modulation of sounded plosives which are used to create variations of meaning. With control of pitch, tone, volume, sequence and color of sound, an infinite number of voicings can be used to create an infinitely complex symbolic universe in which to live.

In mass societies, the voice is stilled. The structure of mass media is such that most information flow is not communication...i.e., the interactively rich product of two or more persons creating a special shared social event. Rather the flow of information is one-way. Symbols are generated, edited and transmitted unilaterally from a few persons interested in the unilateral shaping of ideas, attitudes and activities of a set of minimally known others.

Where there is face to face exchange of voiced plosives, the rules of mass organization are such that a set of lower echelon functionaries elicit information from a set of anonymous persons processed uniformly by those rules. Information other than that required by the functionary to know how to apply the rules is defined as noise in the system and excluded from the final social product.

Thus, in mass society, is the voice stilled as an instrument of symbolic interaction.

In the long years of education, young people are taught to repress their vocal abilities. They are to sit silently through the long hours of the school day. They are to speak only when called upon to speak. They are to talk only about that which the teacher sets as a topic. They are to suppress that which is of passing or pressing importance to them; divorce at home, new love and recent rejections, money problems, animosities and other private concerns. Still less may they speak about the injustices, animosities and contradictions which abound in the classroom; the metaphysics of discourse are out of bounds to the student...they may not criticize teacher, topic or administrative policy.

Employees in business, science, school and hospital are required to flatten out their linguistic capacities and to use a mode of speech that mimics the deadness of mathematics; the lifelessness of machine. Tee shirts reawaken the capacity to speak in the kodachrome shades of life...why should a computer monitor have 12,000 colors and the human voice but one? The human voice can speak with rage, compassion or with tenderness. Mass institutions are oriented toward profit, control, efficiency, and productivity...they are not oriented to the human forms of culture.

In mass politics, in mass medical, in mass welfare, in mass marketing, in mass education, in mass sports, in mass religion as in mass communications, the individual is alienated from a very important means by which social life could be created.

That leaves the other three media by which social reality could be constituted.

The second language system is the body itself. There are two ways in which the body can be used as a speech act: one is by body adornment; the second by movement of body part.

For most of history, for most societies, the body is adorned with jewelry, hair style, is painted, scarred, twisted and deformed, clothed or left bare to inform all present as to the gender of a person, to denote its age grade, its political place, its sexual availability, its religious character or its occupation.

In mass societies, the body is hidden behind the standard identity kits of the mass occasion. The scars, cosmetics, shapes or hair arrangements of the human body are information poor carriers but even those few bits of information which the body could carry to signal social identities; social meanings other than those officially prescribed by the rules of the mass organization are forbidden.

In the army, the hospital, the school, or in business, body adornment is demoted as an informational carrier.

Employees whose body speaks a various language risks firing and certainly pay a price in denial of wages, salaries or promotions. There are important qualifiers to this point, of course. In those employment situations where the body can't be seen...or if seen, irrelevant to corporate goals, then one can recapture one's body and adorn it as one wishes.

Body talk is a system of speech that complements and augments voiced speech. The meaning of a vocal act is amplified, modified or neutered by the body act which accompanies it. The face itself has some 100,000 information bits which can be used to help convey meaning. The arm position, the hand gesture, the turn of the body, the upturn of the mouth, the tone of large muscles all tell us what is happening in the drama of social life, how to interpret the voiced sounds, the degree to which the other is engrossed in the social occasion at hand.

The twist of a hand, the tilt of an eyebrow, the lilt of a step, the slump of a shoulder, the curl of a smile or the tapping of a foot, all are read by others and responded by others in the delicate endeavor of shaping each other's activity.

The use of body talk is carefully controlled in mass institutions. The soldier is trained to hold its eyes, mouth, hands and feet still while the officer speaks. The clerk is trained to use its eyes, face, and head to attend to the task at hand. The student is taught to sit quietly and demurely, to watch closely and to nod attentively to the voiced interpretations of teacher. In other alienated social occasions, women would have been taught to do the same in the company of men.

When body and voice say the same thing, we know the meaning of a thing. When voice and body say different things, we are put in a double-bind...we don't know which language system to read.

In mass institutions, body talk is also silenced. In the class, in the army, in the church, or in the office, the wonderful power and grace of the body to dance, to gesture, to punctuate, to scoff or to embrace life is deadened.

That leaves two other symbol systems.

Behavior is a third language system merging subtlety and powerfully with the other three to create a shared symbolic environment. The larger cycles of behavior have meaning which may be read by the skillful, intimate others who build and embody social reality.

In Africa, princes walk with a gait and demeanor that tells all who watch that they are princes, proud warriors who yield to none. In Kansas, men walk with their hands in their back pocket to tell strangers that they are reserved, cautious, secure in their own skin without the need to reach too soon for connection. In Tibet, women stride along with a sword in their belt telling men that they hold up half the sky.

When a hostess wants to signal the end of a dinner to lounging guests, she may begin to remove dishes. When friend wishes to signal danger to another, she may become very quiet. When a young man wishes to communicate extreme displeasure with a parent, he may engage in destructive behavior, the message of which is that something is wrong and must be remedied.

The psychiatrist become adept at reading the meaning of long cycles of behavior in a patient...repeated shopping binges; alcoholic and other addictive behaviors; cycles of love and disenchantment tell of their own private compulsions in their own private configurations.

Mass medical establishments, mass educational institutions, mass political organizations, large corporate entities, vast public bureaus, mass electronic churches have no capacity nor have they any interest in reading out the meaning of these cycles of behavior so important to the health and joy of life.

A fourth language system available to a person with which to create the infinitely rich and varied social life worlds found in authentic social action is clothing.

Every society in history has used clothing for more than mere physiological function. Clothing has, for most of human history, been used in infinite permutation with voice and body to help define a situation, to help sanctify it, to help keep it going within its own logics and to help end it. Each special social occasion demands a separate costuming. If a person is involved in very many special occasion, s/he will have a closet full of meaningful clothes.

People who have five different kinds of shoes, jackets, hats, trousers, ties or belts have transcended the physiological meaning of clothing and have entered into the symbolic worlds of clothing. For each set of clothing, there is a separate and distinct social life world that is to be constructed somewhere sometime. There are clothes for sports; clothes for work; clothes that speak of romance and there are clothes to wear in the quiet and holy places of the world.

Fashion and style further expand the closets of the world. Those without secure and significant social anchorage for their self system can buy instant identities from a fashion boutique. Many shopping malls include stores which sell an identity to those who have none in which they can take pride. Young men and women, disconnected from the society in which they find themselves buy, steal, and borrow clothing with which to project an image of status; an image of human worth.

Super-efficient textile factories; super-productive sweat shop industries; super-aesthetic advertizing firms combine to colonize the desire of young men and women for social honor. They create and recreate fashion with which to do so...and thus garner super-profits.

In mass education, mass marketing, mass religion, mass sports, mass medicine and mass politics, clothing comes under the control of a clothing police and loses its vocabulary.

Dress codes for the patient, physician and nurse are set by the singular logics of mass medicine...not by therapeutic logics. If a patient and a doctor knew each other as distinct human beings, there would be no need for white jackets or blue pants. Mass hospitals process masses of patients through the fragmented routines of mechanized medicine. In such a way, hundreds of patients can be mass produced by the deskilled labor of unknown others.

Dress codes for the military or for the police are set by the logics of partisan conflict not by the logics of law or justice. Dress codes for children in school or their teachers are set by the logics of social power not by the logics of pedagogy. In business dress codes are set in such a manner as to submerge alternate...and human...potentialities of clerk and customer alike. Even in the factory, field and mine, some of the codes of clothing are set more by the administrative interests of management than by the logics of safety or of task.

Every society in history has used clothing for more than mere physiological function. Clothing has, for most of human history, been used in infinite permutation with voice and body to help define a situation, to help sanctify it, to help keep it going within its own logics and to help end it. In mass education, mass marketing, mass religion, mass sports, mass medicine and mass politics, clothing comes under the control of a clothing police and loses its vocabulary.

Mass institutions subvert the individuality of language systems; the individuality of meaning construction; the individual contribution to the social occasion at hand even as mass societies proclaim the ascendancy of individualism. What is meant by individuality in that context is that each individual should come before the bureaucracy one at a time rather than in organized collectives...and that any activity to act autonomously should occur outside the mass occasion at hand.

Dress codes subvert the capacity of human beings to embody desire and to focus in on distinctly human beings and human endeavor. Tee shirts recapture and express this alienated desire to their own purpose.

Clothing, voicings, body decor and behavior are the four symbol systems used, in manifold and subtle variation, to create meaning by the participating individual within a collective enterprize. That is, these four information flow systems are used by the individual in informationally rich and interactively rich social occasions with which to share in the creation of social reality. In mass society, the speech carrying capacity of voice, body, clothing and behavior are sharply reduced. The means of producing meaning are alienated by the rules of mass society.

Mass society itself arise from the interests of a few persons consolidated in an elite to preprogram the behavior of a mass enlarged as much as possible, in ways compatible with the interests of that elite. A special set of persons, hired and trained by the elite, process the mass through the routines of the mass institution in ways compatible with the rules of the organization.

The mass is processed as individuals in questions of power and as standardized blocs in questions of status. Historically, the structures of mass organization arose with bureaucracy in prehistoric hydraulic societies of which China and Egypt may be the prototypes. In modern history, the mass armies of France in Napoleonic times are, perhaps the prototypic form of mass organization.

For our purposes here, we are interested in the ways in which students reclaim control over their own clothing as part of an interest in how media are alienated and liberated in given social occasions. In the study at hand, we will find that students use the tee shirt not as a physiological device by which to help regulate body temperature but rather as political device by which to give voice to their anguish, their ambitions, and their needs in a world where their voice counts for little in the process by which social reality is created.

THE STRUCTURE OF MASS SOCIETY. Mass societies are comprised of organizations controlled by a few persons, managed by a few more to control the activity of large numbers of people. The name we give to most of these organizations is bureaucracy. A bureaucracy is a stratified system of power in which an elite employs a cadre to process masses of people through standardized routines. The structure of a mass society serves as the social background and the theoretical soil out of which comes the growing interest in the tee-shirt as a medium of discourse.

The rules by which people are processed...in education, in medicine, in sports, in theatre, in politics, in industry, in marketplace or in religion; these rules are ordinarily set by the elite. And ordinarily the elite set the rules for their own convenience or purpose. The convenience or advantage of those persons processed may be considerable but is incidental to the purposes of the elite. The rules themselves are set forth and enforced without the rich dialectics of symbolic interaction. Interaction is reduced to the voicing of the rule and the control of deviation from the rule.

The one-sided nature of these rules require considerable political effort on the part of the cadre. They organize the lines of action to reduce to a bare minimum the use of symbol systems by the individuals processed en masse. Modern policing arose to accommodate the interests of the few in controlling the activity of the many. Modern administrative science arose as a scientific alternative to the use of force in the shaping of behavior.

Unfree Speech In the class room, the student must raise its hand in order to be permitted to speak. In the hospital, the use of body adornment with which one signals status, gender, sexual availability or age grade is sharply curtailed. In the fast food shop, the clerk is instructed to use its voice in friendly manner and to say only the words set forth at headquarters by industrial psychologists. In the military, the complex wardrobe of the civilian used to create a dozen different social occasions is removed and a uniform set of clothing issued. This clothing says but one thing: I am to give orders; you are to obey my orders. In the professional sports endeavor, the use of behavior to say something to the crowd or to the other team not previously set forth by coaches or by management is forbidden. Five yards for dancing in delight.

Bureaucracy destroys the use by the individual of one's own personal language systems. And yet one cannot be alienated from one's own voice, from one's own body, from one's own clothing or one's own behavior easily. In the back of the classroom, students whisper; on the factory floor, bets are made; in the fast food restaurant, youngsters giggle; in the prison, inmates tap out messages.

Unfree Media There are information flow systems which more readily lend themselves to alienation than those under the direct control of the individual. Electronically based systems designed to put only a cadre in control of the switch, the mike, the speaker, the copier, the printer or the modulated electronic impulse do so and in that doing, alienate the mass from the wondrous ability of the human to create, in cooperative process with others, the incredibly complex and varied social occasions reported by ethnographers from around the world and throughout history. In a bureaucracy, mass production of meaning replaces the art and craft of human interaction.

The advent of mechanized media in elitist societies gave control over symbolic interaction to elites. In capitalist societies, the costs of access to magazines, television, radio, or newspapers give the rich a louder voice in which to shape the economic environment than the poor. In bureaucratic organizations, access to the media give the bureaucratic officer control over the symbolic environment in which the faceless client, supplicant, inmate, student or patient must live.

Free Speech Outside of mass processed social endeavors voice, clothing, body, and behavior remain the private property of the individual to use as it sees fit. When there is no organized, mass mediated occasion which requires the political control of symbol sets, and when young people are left to their own devices, shut out of the organized world of the adult and cast adrift from the more private arenas of social life, symbol sets may be used in quite idiosyncratic ways.

Out of the politics of mass society, come the privatized use of the graffiti that young people put on their bodies, upon walls, trains, clothing and, in particular, tee shirts.

More generally, when existing communication systems are used for purposes alien to the human project, parallel and underground structures of communication arise (Young, 1983). The phenomenon of the tee-shirt, as with other graffiti, are parallel symbolic systems by which people, usually young people, attempt to create a social life world which resonates with their own preferences and affinities. And often these same symbol systems are used to express rage, contempt, rebellion or are used to plea for redress of grievance.

One must bear in mind that what is said here about the structure and use of symbols and interaction do not hold for the fully open and collective creation of social life. The rules are very different for interaction and the results are very different. Generally, for the shared creation of social life, each person defined as situationally present has a turn at shaping the activity of others present and, generally, the benefits of such a social life occasion are shared on the basis of need. Collective needs especially are served in social life. Massified forms of organization benefit first the elite, then the cadre, and only incidently, the mass.

Tee Shirts as Text This section reports the results of a three day observation of the wearing of tee-shirts over a school holiday called 'College Days,' at Colorado State University. The holiday, incidently, received considerable national news coverage as a 'riot.' The riot is not, in the first instance, the subject matter of this study, but passing comment will be made in the analysis here. Riots, too, are a form of language in which the voiceless get the attention of those who are "hard of listening."

The study of tee shirt display arose out of a class in sociology entitled Public Opinion and Mass Society. The point of the course was to think about and explain the differences in symbolic interaction as between mass society on the one hand and

interactively rich social occasions rich in information on the other. The point of the assignment was to locate the tee shirt culture in the larger social context in which it appears; to deconstruct the origins of the tee shirt that we may reconstruct the larger meaning of their popularity. If we are to read tee shirts for the full meaning they carry, we must read them as a collective event in a socio-historical process.

The research team reported to the class that the students observed at the parties, concerts, and later, at the riot wore tee-shirts which bore a wide variety of messages. One of the students took slide photos of the tee shirts to add visual depth to the report they made. The observations of the research team were first put into a classificatory scheme. The categories generated included:

brand names, exotic vacation places, morality messages including religious sentiments, sexual concerns and action, and youth culture themes oriented to music.

Commodity Fetishism Most were brand name shirts; little more than walking advertisements for shoes, beverages, beers, and sporting equipment...all high profit consumer items. Stroh's, Henry Weinhard, Dos equis, and other beers showed up on the chests of young men. The Banana Republic is, I was informed, a clothing chain. Sole Suckers was, it seems, a shoe advertizement. One person advertized camel cigarettes on his chest.

The naturalness of wearing brand names implies a naive commodity fetishism which, for many would be distasteful. Materialism and possession has permeated the consciousness of these young people without the shame it might bring in other settings.

It is the intent of the 300,000 ads seen by preschoolers that they become walking commercials for cereals, toys, burgers, clothes, electronics and other high profit, mass produced goods. The adornment of one's body by commercials is testimony to the success of the advertizing industry to colonize the very bodies of their victims.

Status Quests and Proclamations A second most popular motif was the display of exotic foreign place names. Many students are widely traveled. Central America, Europe and Asia were represented in the tee shirt parade. A shirt with the logo of Bear Surf Boards not only indicates one's hobby, one's socio-economic status but also one's choice of vacation place: We were told that shirt came from Hawaii.

As with commodity fetishism above, the display of vacation place names bespeaks a social status and serves as an opening device for similarly traveled persons. In a mass of unknown others, one can dramatize one's potential affinities and thus, invite overture from those unknown others.

Only in those societies where the social self is cut loose from social identity would such pathetic efforts to proclaim status be found. The social identities available in mass sports, mass education, mass religion and mass markets are too fragile; too flimsy; too short and too narrowly focussed a social take upon which to ground the richness and complexity of a whole human being. Young people as do older people understand this and do not ground their social standing on mass institutions.

One would not say that 'I am a K-Mart shopper,' or 'I am a Channel 7 Viewer,' in answer to Kuhn's Twenty Statements Test about the social anchorage of self identity. Sad enough to adorn one's car with bumper stickers saying 'I heart New York,' or 'I heart Shelties,' or 'I heart my VW.' Sad, sad commentary on the locations of love in mass society.

Morality Lives! The third most commonly observed tee shirt messages were a wide assortment of morality statements. The environment, religious values, friendships, comments on peace and war, as well as social philosophical comments were displayed. For the most part, a profound concern with brotherhood, sisterhood and fellowship across social boundaries were, to their credit, dramatized on their bodies. Communion with the forms of nature spoke loudly, publicly and dramatically of concern with pollution and ecological integrity.

"Life is a beach," was, perhaps, the most cynical philosophy noted. There was a tee shirt which suggested that one partied until one died...a particularly nihilistic philosophy. One understands that the message is not to be taken literally but, at the same time, there is the question of the quality of life in school or at home which makes such a shirt wearable.

A particularly innocent shirt said simply, 'Senor Frog.' We assumed the allusion was to Kermit and to the delights of magic and make believe put forward in the Muppets. I was reminded that, after all, the people who wear such shirts were, only yesterday, children.

There were several shirts among the hundreds seen telling unknown others of the benefits of a life dedicated to Jesus. On a young woman was a cross encircled by a wreath and printed words informing the world that she was a 'national member.' Such tee shirts are close cousins to the bumper stickers which say, 'Jesus Saves,' 'Honk if you love Jesus,' 'God is coming...and is She pissed.'

One wonders if one will ever see such bumper stickers or such shirts used by Muslim youngsters, Jewish youngsters, buddhist or shinto devotees or ever those still practicing animistic religions. There must be something different about the ways young people are fitted into religion in Christianity and the ways they fit into other religions that they would have to say such a thing on a tee shirt.

In other, more devout societies, such membership would be a background assumption. Only in secularized, technicized, and atomized societies would such tee shirt make sense.

Other morality statements had to do with touching one another, smiling at each other, helping each other, or showing concern for others at home or abroad. One particularly effective shirt for making contact in a friendly sort of a way was called the 'ten questions' shirt. The students explained to me that shirt had ten questions on it one was invited to answer: 'how old are you?, 'what is your major?, 'where is your home?' and such. There was also a tee-shirt from Copirg, a public interest research group, advising students to 'take it to the streets', presumably because institutional politics were closed to the voice of the student or to the public interest.

In mass society, morality is programmed out of the grasp of the individual. An elite claims control over moral questions in factory, shop, stadium, school, marketplace, and church. The location of morality is so remote from the worker, the guard, the soldier, the student or the professor that each is reduced to the tee shirt as a feeble cry for a just and decent world.

Just coming into the fullness of their morality, young people find no social role, no social occasion, no social institution in which morality can mediate their situated behavior. Rules, orders, policies, programs, commands, as well as reified social relations preprogram behavior and reduce the self system to the mechanical robot which embodies those rules, orders or commands.

Bourgeois Freedom Local places also were displayed, especially shirts from other universities. 30 years ago, it was forbidden on campus to wear shirts, sweaters, and jackets from high school or from other universities. Such items had been used to define a rite of passage into a community. Now mass educational routines have no time for such a thing as community...too much reciprocity; too much concern for individual problems; too many costs are entailed.

The taboo on the use of solidarity clothing such as uniforms, beanies, and tee shirts faded. They become vehicles for the exploration of private relationships, mostly short-term. In such a lonely, disconnected mass, the individual can do pretty much as it pleases with clothing as long as it is outside the boundaries; outside the logics of the mass institution.

The freedoms of bourgeois society are the tiny freedoms of display and disport carried out in the nooks and crannies of social space...in the anonymity of a crowd.

Sexuality Lives! There were a few shirts with sexual content. Most were of a good natured sort but one was distinctly chauvinist. The front of the shirt had two cherries on the shoulder over which was superimposed the international symbol of negation. It took us about two seconds to figure out what it meant...then came a chorus of groans. The next slide showed the back of the same shirt. It said, "Busting makes me feel good." The classroom became very quiet.

The group reported that the young man who wore that shirt was observing the norm that one wore such outrageous shirts only in the company of friends. In this case, the shirt was worn at a fraternity party. The party members were all from the same frat or their dates together with a smattering of friends. Even in that company, the person who wore the shirt was made uncomfortable. He was made to understand that few if any of even his close friends appreciated the humor of the message. We were told that he did go in and change shirts after bearing for a while his discomfort.

Elsewhere in this collection, I have mentioned the well known practice of commercial advertizing to colonize desire and to relocate it in a beverage, a car, a CD, or other commodity. In our society, sexuality becomes a highly privatized activity disconnected from family, community or gender solidarity concerns as was the case in all previous history.

As a mass society displaces community, human sexuality is liberated to be used for quite personal...or commercial purpose. This idiosyncratic use of sexuality offends those who think such a thing as sexuality is too valuable a solidarity tool to discard; who think that community too valuable a social form to discard. However, the logics of mass society are that solidarity is too strong a social glue to use...and all such solidarity supplies need be made private property.

The privatization of human sexuality permits it to be vested in commodities while the outrage at privatized sexuality by those still oriented to solidarity concerns means that one must avoid an open, honest display of one's sexuality...but that part of the population still too lively or too unsocialized will proclaim that their desire still aims at living human beings...or parts of them at any rate.

Against Mass Culture A great many tee-shirts proclaimed the merits of musical groups. 'Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band' as well as other popular and/or exotic musical groups were promoted. In an earlier report, the students noted the rich interaction between musicians and audiences at rock concerts, jazz festivals, and blue grass affairs.

These cultural events contrast with the highly organized, formalized and ritualized behavior of the musicians and audience in musical concert out of the eighteenth century were attire is formal and the conventions of applause and response well regulated by convention.

Such cultural events also stand against the deadness of mass education, mass religion or mass sports. When young people are given a choice between watching and doing, they opt for the forms of living. When not given that choice, they feign interest and involvement...then find parallel or underground cultural events in which to embody the forces of life. They will act as zombies; as vegetables in the class room but in the halls, in the game room, at parties, or in riots, they act in more human size.

DISCUSSION. The class as a whole reflected upon the semiotics of tee shirts. We wondered how one was to understand the place they had in the overall organization of the lives of young people. We agreed that the major way to understand the wearing of tee shirts was as a way to find voice in a mass society.

We agreed that one tried to tell unknown others what one believed, what one liked to do, what another person could talk to one about if one wanted to make human contact and told others as well, what one was worried about at a college event at which most people did not know most others. The anonymity of mass events strips one of most of the language systems one could use. Of the four unalienable symbol systems mentioned earlier, clothing has the particular virtue of speaking when the other media; voice, body, and behavior are silenced.

The tee shirt can be seen from afar. It can speak over the din of a concert, a party, or a sports event. It can carry a concise and lucid message in ways body and behavior cannot. It is fairly inexpensive and can address a comment to a faceless mass without the expensive electronics or printing equipment ordinarily used in such situations. The tee shirt is the modern equivalent of the poster in prerevolutionary France, wall graffiti in Latin America or the flaming cross in antebellum South. It is a billboard for those struck dumb by the alienation of mass media in mass society.

We agreed that in a society in which status is based upon one's labor power as a commodity, and at a stage in one's life cycle in which one could not easily sell one's labor power in a way that reflected an acceptable presenting identity, that some young people sought other foundations upon which to base status.

In a mass society, the structure of self is freed from the ancient social anchorages of tribe, gender, occupation, religion or age grade. Those who have no social base for their identity outside of the mass institution turn to other sources of self. Astrology, electronic as well as exotic religions, exclusive clothing, body building, and such cultural semi-worlds as Punk, Hippie, Yuppie, country-western and college tee shirts provide the structural basis for a quite privatized self system as the social sources found in mass institutions become too alienated and too trivial a foundation upon which to build one's life.

The wearing of brand names, of exotic place names, of expensive tee shirts all resonate with the materialism of a consumer society. Such shirts say to all who will look that the wearer is well located in the class system. There is the discretionary income available to the wearer which clearly the wearer did not earn which permits travel in style to far away places. One can say, if it is money which gets your attention and enlists your company, I have it.

The tee shirt says to anyone who will look, 'I am a person worthy of notice...you are to orient your approach to me upon the clues given off by my shirt.' By extension, the shirt informs others that the person will be hard to approach if these basic interests are not respected. The possibility of impromptu formation of affinity groups...dyads, triads, and quartets arose out of such artful presentments.

Morality shirts say to all who will listen that the wearer is an estimable person of moral worth. Concern for the good earth, for the oppressed of the world, for the morality of others, for the fellowship and love of each other is a central value in the life of the bearer. One may expect something of real value in a relationship with such a person.

Shirts carrying sexual messages carry an invitation to embark upon a short term, impersonal sexual venture. It says that, in my life, my essential sexuality is a matter of great concern...that I am in the process of developing my sexuality, and that I invite you to explore the possibility of exploration together.

Tee shirts which have the name of a musical group, or the marijuana leaf or the death's head say to their age group that they are angry at the stupidities of the adult world, that they join with others in a protest which can't be lightly ignored and that they fully intend to stay in the youth culture until the message is heard. One might agree that such a protest is pretheoretical in its self destructiveness...that young people should engage in more constructive forms of resistance and rebellion but such a view asks that children be wiser than the adults who criticize them.

At the same time, one wonders about the need to use the information deficient tee shirt as an opening gambit. Given the mass, anonymous character of State Universities in general and College Days in particular, one can understand that more traditional sources of information about how to respond to another are lacking. One cannot be certain that one will have a common friend who will provide the necessary opening clues. One appreciates that one misses out on meeting others whom one might like to meet and get to know. The living graffiti of the tee shirt helps bridge the social distance between unknown others when more traditional bridges are missing.

We talked about the curious fact that young people feel the need to make contact with unknown others. Most people for most of history felt no such need. Even today, many strangers will walk away from casual openings and most will make little effort to initiate them. But here are a large number of young people, mostly Americans, Europeans, and Canadians who will make the effort and...take the risk. It is easy to say that Americans are friendly or that they are open or that they are assertive. The more interesting question is why they feel the urge to be friendly...why are they?

The short answer lies in the systematic displacement of young people by their society. They are displaced persons trying to make the most of the cultural resources available in the effort to build a parallel social life world that resonates with some of the best of human hopes and some of the worst of human avarices. The society that discards its young will find cause to regret it. The society that values profits and budgets above persons and work will find the costs very high...both in human waste and in dollars.

MOPE'S TEE SHIRTS*

I think you're cute
But then I think I'm cute.

My idea of camping out is when
room service is late

Stupidity should be Painful

Yesterday was the Deadline
For all Complaints

The difference between dark and hard
is that it stays dark all night

Sticks and Stones Break My Bones
but whips and chains excite me

All Extremists should be Killed
Joan of Arc is Alive and Medium Well

Not everything that sucks
is necessarily bad

The older the wood
The hotter the fire

Built for Comfort
Not for Speed

Ready, Willing & Still Able

Where there's a Will
I want to be part of it

* Mope runs a Copy Center at Central Michigan University.

On the day after Bush was elected in 1988,
Mope wore the following tee shirt message:

When I was young
They told me anyone
Could be President.

They were right.

Valley Girls

Valley girls and valley boys

seem to make a lot of noise

without saying much, I think

except to ask for more drink

or for a pot or two to smoke

and blow their brains with some coke.

Valley boys and valley girls

lips of gloss and hair of curls

loins of fire and kisses sweet

give us pause when in the street:

Teased' hair and fitted jeans

lots of 'you know-s' or 'I mean-s;'

'fucking' this and 'fucking' that;

not much mind below their hat.

Read their shirt and read their cars

you can read of their desires.

In the space between their breasts

you discover where each invests

all their wants and all their hopes

voices for a million Mopes;

you can read their primal curse

written in some simple verse.

Sweet and easy; nice young kind

was it this we had in mind;

was it this for which we prayed,

was it this for whom we laid?

Salt in coffee

sand in tea

these were never meant to be.

Was it this for which we planned,

Adam delved and Eve had spanned?