The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
Arendt in her reading of Kant, of taste linked to the observer’s judgement.
Lotman admits, however, that he is unable to find a resolution for the
duality élite/mass in fashion, and thus he concludes that without, or
beyond, shocking the public, fashion loses its meaning. Freely interpreting
Lotman, the observer’s judgement would cause a constant explosion,
ferment and excessiveness in taste, whereas we know that, in spite of everything,
fashion can also be calming for the subject, and this characteristic
manifests itself in the mediation between individual taste and common
sense which fashion guarantees. How does this happen? How is this mediation
possible? The topsy-turvy process noted by Lotman surely plays an
important role here. Bakhtin, as we have seen, sums this up in the image of
the grotesque body’s semantic inversion.
Carnivalesque inversion is possible through the worldly modes of
fashion. The clothed body is grotesque; it is a semiotic category expressing
the way in which the subject is in the world, through his/her appearance
style, his/her relation to other bodies and to his/her own bodily experiences.
Moreover, the concept of the clothed body implies that a spectator
interferes with the image of the closed, ascetic body. This spectator must be
‘other’ than the body, though not as its disinterested or distant analyst, but
profoundly within it. The young heroine of L’amant expresses this well
when, speaking of her hat, she says: ‘I saw myself as another, as another
would be seen, from the outside, there for everyone, for everyone’s gaze, let
loose in the flux of cities, streets, and pleasures’ (Duras 1984: 18). This
seeing oneself as another, and as another would be seen, is for the heroine
a source of sensuous pleasure, linked to tasting, to savouring a new experience.
The clothed body savours itself as if it were savoured by others, as if
this tasting were the movement itself, the common, public circulation of
sense.
Notes
1. Translator’s note: common sense as used by Kant, and subsequently Arendt,
to indicate a general consensus of meaning.
2. Both in the narrow sense and the Kantian cosmopolitan sense.
3. The critical sharing of the conditions of the possibility of representation.
4. Pop style indicates the inclusion in élite cultural contexts of subcultural styles
and traits coming from restricted groups; see Wark 1992: 152–4. Worldly modes
indicate the forms in which these subcultural traits, together with ‘baroque’ experimentation,
are included in a traditionally ‘classical’ context of everyday clothing
and body aesthetics; see Calefato 1992a, 1993, 1994.
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