The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
Both like and unlike bodily experiences lived in the flesh, today’s digital,
computer and mass media cultures propose spaces and forms for the transmission
and reproduction of music and dress experiences that no longer
concern the typical ‘live’ concert or the copy of a ‘live’ performance on
record. The use of electronics, which in rock goes back to the 1960s, video,
CD or DVD, Internet sites, a TV channel like MTV amassing viewers from
all over the world to experience the latest sounds and dress styles, all show
how the production and enjoyment of music is ‘wired’, hooked up to a
machine, part of an interface that uses the human body as an adjunct to a
wider nervous system, made up of cables, optic fibres, satellites and microchips.
Talens has expressed these notions using Baudrillard’s definition of simulacra,
and emphasizing the fact that the function of the media is that of
producing sense, establishing norms of communicative exchange and creating
spectator, or social subject, typologies (see Talens 1994). With simulacra,
writes Talens, we are in the presence of a radical change within an
epistemological paradigm: representation has been substituted by simulation.
The binary relation between a thing and the sign that represents it –
for example, between a musical score and the live performance or analogous
recording – has been substituted by the synthesized reconstruction of
the thing, the serial reproduction of the event, or its direct creation through
the impulses and infinitesimal units of digital information.
Yet simulation still has to do with the body, and the virtual nature of
communication today is not something immaterial consisting only of bytes
and not atoms (see Negroponte 1995). It is rather made up of semiotic
material that populates social imagery and taste; the stuff of which, for
example, the mutant, postmodern icon of pop, the ‘material girl’
Madonna, is made. Her body is ancillary to her gear and mutates through
time to serve an image. She is the new Zelig: fat, thin, blond, brunette,
shaped by grotesque pointed breasts in a Gaultier corset, or wrapped in a
sweeping black cloak for the video ‘Frozen’, where the woman is transformed
first into a crow and then into a Doberman in a desert scene
inspired by The English Patient (see Tancredi 1999).
In terms of this type of semiotic material, we may like to consider the
construction of simulacra as contemporary myth, which deprives the sign
of its direct representational quality and substitutes it with a serial interchangeability,
as in the case of Madonna. On the other hand, our present
condition leaves room for sensory forms, especially in fashion and music,
geared toward excessive modes, even though they can be created and
reproduced serially. Three of these modes are particularly interesting: postcolonial
identity, ‘surfing styles’ and revival.
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