DRESSING UP A SELF: FASHION AND KRISTEVA'S "SUBJECT IN PROCESS".

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Grant, Megan
• Date: 01 January 1997

Ways of thinking about people who dress fashionably usually start from assumptions about the symbolic content of the clothing in question or the agency of the person who wears it - often locating a lack of either. The feminist response to fashion has often been dismissive and feminism's stories about fashion have an implicit subject who is usually regarded as an uncomplicated participant in a process outside her control; which, in fact, controls her. Susan Brownmiller argues that the pleasure and affirmation of "trivial feminine activities" like fashionability have a "cost;" "a deflection of energy and an absorption in fakery."(1) This paper begins with a question: What is really at stake in the assumption of a mode of dressing that is influenced by fashion? It's (incomplete) answer is informed by the proposition that fashionable clothing is not simply frivolous and that through a discussion of the ways in which fashion is taken up by individuals an exploration of modern subjectivity is enabled.

I began the research project to which this paper refers with the assumption that the fashion industry - as it is represented in magazines like Vogue and Harpers Bazaar through seasonally changing dicta of "in" and "out" - was an insidious conspiracy imposed on a deluded (female) public. This way of thinking has a simple idea of the role of the individual and her relationship to fashion. It contains what John Thompson calls the "fallacy of internalism;" the conclusion that in consuming the products of the culture industry individuals are expressing their adherence to the social order.(2) It assumes that under "the system" any identification with the fashion industry is complete. Only absolute opposition - like Brownmiller's - might indicate a critical stance. There is little room for partial identifications and no consideration of what (innocent?) pleasure might be at stake for the person who uses fashionable dress. Not through a change of heart about the industry, which I would still argue relentlessly promotes celebrity and conspicuous consumption in order to sell billions of dollars worth of clothes, perfume and accesories, but through a rethinking of the theory of identity implicit in the notion of "fashion victimhood," I have come to recognise that an insistence on this theorisation of fashion subjects is a flawed and unnecessarily rigid interpretation of complex phenomena.

The outright rejection of the fashion industry relies on the belief that there is somewhere, perhaps underneath the forms imposed by the fashion gums, an authentic self. This paper rests on the proposition that there is no self which is prior to the distortions of culture. It is informed by post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theories of the subject which state that the individual person does not have a unified and coherent "inner core" but is "fragmented" or "decentred."(3) Subjectivity is a process whereby an individual's interactions with social practices, individual and social phantasies, and institutions and the discourses which erect them, produce the experience of "being." The identity which one assumes is actually a narrative which holds together numerous and contradictory identifications.

In this paper I discuss the issues of social and individual identity which can be read off the fashionably dressed body by exploring the way that two women negotiate the (im)possibility of coherent selfhood through their clothes. In seeking to determine whether "ordinary" people felt themselves to be affected by the fashion industry I interviewed five people.(4) In the following exegesis of their answers I make use Kristeva's "narcissistic structure" to posit an identity paradigm which might overcome the limitations of standard notions of the (fashionably dressed) subject.

Identification and Identity

The work of Jacques Lacan is highly evocative for theories of fashion since he argues that it is in the "mirror stage" that the idea of the stable and unified ego is born.(5) Judith Williamson and Kaja Silverman, using Lacanian theory, discuss the identificatory pleasures of advertisements and "retro dressing," respectively.(6) Lacan theorised that the image of itself in the mirror (imago) gives the "uncontrolled" child an idea of herself as stable and unified. The child makes a "jubilant assumption of his specular image," but the self with which he identifies is a "mirage." The imago provides proof of things that are available only in phantasy: It promises, and produces a belief in, unitary, undivided selfhood yet the subject only ever knows himself as an object. The decentred subject, alienated from the image of "perfection" the mirror produces and thrust into a similarly alienated relationship with the "I" of the Symbolic order or language, is the basis of Lacan's conceptualisation of the individual.

It might be argued that Lacanian theory makes sense of the subject's relationship to, and potentially explains why she would desire to buy, the imagos of Vogue. Williamson argues that advertising works by provoking insecurity whilst offering an identificatory image (and a product to purchase) which will calm that anxiety.(7) This fashion subject may be imagined as like a cardboard cut-out doll which comes "alive" only when its tabbed outfits are attached. However, Lacan's theory of the subject and of language does not explain the process of pursuing an identity that I wish to suggest the individual negotiates through their dress. If clothing is a language then Lacanian theory suggests a vocabulary which positions and divides the subject but where each individual is like the next in relation to these social symbols. By contrast, Kristeva's narcissistic structure allows me to imagine a speaking subject for whom symbolisation is (in part) particularised and creatively owned. Kristeva's theorisation of the subject in Tales of Love allows for an analysis in which identification is ameliorated by a relationship with the body, and subjectivity is both a social construction and a process. It invites a conceptualisation of the individual as one who uses the indentificatory images of the fashion industry in dynamic and sophisticated ways.

Kristeva argues that the narcissistic structure pre-exists the mirror stage about which she asks "what are the conditions of its emergence?"(8) She suggests that prior to the mirror stage the capacity for "incorporation" produces and protects the emptiness at the core of the subject that "is intrinsic to the beginnings of the symbolic function," the assumption of an "I."(9) The infant's first "archaic, semiotic identification" (with the mother's breast) is actually an incorporation; identifying with the breast the child becomes it and takes it into itself.(10) Incorporation is the logic of all object identifications. The epiphany of the subject's assumption of the imago is contrasted to the process of constituting a coherent selfhood through incorporating parts of the other which become the building blocks of the self. Through the narcissistic structure, founded on the ternary relationship between the self, the abject maternal, and the paternal ego ideal, the individual creates the psychic space to become not a fixed subject in serial relationship with images of wholeness, but a subject-in-process which through identificatory becomings is capable of creative self-articulation.

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