By introducing the notion that there is "no style inside" and that [wherever it does then come from] style needs a 'stage' in the outer world, you certainly did introduce acting as a central premise to your original post on this thread. You mentioned that a meeting (presumably a business meeting), might be such a 'stage' but, surely, what people really want from business meetings is business results. All other things being equal, I suppose that, generally, people will prefer meetings with congenial colleagues and advisers, who also happen to be well presented and, maybe, also suggest a stonking place for lunch. But I have known many examples, in the past, of brilliant but socially awkward and scruffy people who have attracted 'business' because, regardless of the fact that they are socially awkward and scruffy, they bring the business results. People should be looking for more real rain-makers and fewer fashionistos. There is far, far too much importance, in modern life, attached to 'presentation'; having the chat; being 'client-friendly' and knowing the 'in' jargon and, perhaps this is why many countries are in the economic mess that they are in: because the real brains have become side-lined as eccentric.Gruto wrote:I wasn't the one who introduced acting and actors as a key to style, but clearly there is an element of acting in style. Acting doesn't have to supend authenticity. It can be a way of letting it glow.NJS wrote:talking about 'creating' style; making it incarnate, and then staging it as a kind of visual or dramatic art form
The difference between you and me on this is that you see 'style' as 'bizazz'; 'chutzpah'; 'swank'; the ability to engineer an occasion to make a mere impression - and I don't. Of course, we all live in the outer world, as well as in our own minds and we take action (rather than act-out) in the outer world, according to our thoughts and feelings and values, which we generate and accumulate and modify (as we go along), in our minds. But, still, to have access to some shy, scruffy genius, who might initially appear to have a screw loose but who thinks of something that everyone else has overlooked in a problem-crunching session and, maybe, even makes or saves a situation, is far more fundamentally important than being able to reflect upon a pointless, but swanky, business meeting.
There is enough banality, inanity and fatuousness in the world; too many labels (from bastardized language and jargon to designer labels) and empty, good-for-nothing, shiny bubbles floating about, without encouraging it all.
All sorts of things are going on inside. Trying to locate style inside is like locating the center of the oceans: a meaningless endeavor. Style is a wave hitting the coast. Style is a glimpse, when man meets the world. Style is an ongoing becoming.