2 November 2009 :"Should I attend my local community’s most prestigious Hair and Makeup College?"

This post is about technologies of the self. In The Fashion System, Roland Barthes's important intervention into the semantic production system of contemporaneity, the French thinker writes that language "shatters" fashion's "rudimentary structure into a thousand significant species, thus building a system whose justification is no longer utilitarian...but only semantic; it thus constitutes a true luxury of the mind." Carles clearly has this dictum in mind in investigating the intellectual situation of haberdashery in late capitalism and its close connection with the sociocultural capital of its practitioners and of its educational institutions as they stand contradistinct to traditional universities. Imagining the dilemma facing a youthful member of the emerging creative class, Carles writes, "I don’t wanna go to normal college, learning the same bullshit over and over… I have always been more of a creative spirit." Traditional education institutions do not confront the paradigmatic nature of fashion for current information industries, the way in which trends and memes now drive epistemology, human understanding. They are trapped in a repetitive, redundant cycle, repeating sterile tautologies -- "the same bullshit over and over." Later he notes, "I want a real education."

And this institutionalized learning negates the true import and efficacy of the emerging knowledge industries, those that equip the self with advanced iterations of signaling, teach the self how to display itself to its best advantage to enhance its ontological heft: "I really want to learn something that will help me help other people in ways that people don’t usually appreciate," Carles has his novice philosopher state, commenting on the academy's underappreciation of the fashion system and its ramifications.

Barthes notes fashion's integral function in introducing diachrony into the system of meanings, offering a "dialectical solution" to the conflict between "event and structure." Carles grasps this implication, noting that one must be "using cutting-edge techniques to achieve some of the world’s most alt haircuts." The haircut must be achieved as event and rupture, harmonizing the social with the individual's need to experience novelty through the body, to embody the diachronic component of the social itself, as it were. Of course, this has Lacanian implications: Carles notes in conjunction with the fantasmic aspect of fashion that "some of the best highs I have experienced in life happen when I look in the mirror." Fashion brings the euphoria of jouissance to play in everyday flux of grooming --in confronting the Real of the self as routed through the spectral other, when the Other is properly coiffed in accordance to the implicit law of the father. (It's no accident that we speak of a hair cut, and that the threat of castration is mimicked many times over in the endurance of such an operation.)

In order to play such an important role in the construction of social reality, a would-be technologist of the self must be able to navigate liminal spaces with minimal dislocation: Hence Carles notes that his novice is "a bisexual emo tween" -- strung between sexualities, between emotion and reason, between demographics, and possibly between genders. Carles offers a telling prediction: "I honestly believe 1 day men and women will merge into 1 human." This androgyny will present a challenge to fashion, which plays off gender difference to achieve its semiotic effects. The question Carles leaves unanswered here, along with his usual red herring interrogatories, is precisely this, whether the self can survive a technology that efficiently does away with gender, or does gender constitute a fundamental category which fashion structurally requires in order to operate discursively. Carles, if he is reading, will hopefully clarify on this point further.