Is There a Psychology of Cosplay?
Cosplay and cosplaying is very much a fact of life that goes well beyond the one-offs of dressing up that happens at, say, Halloween. It is now its own culture or cultures that embrace popular culture and alternative identities. Everyone who has dressed up has felt a sense that to be in a costume, in masquerade, wearing a mask, tends to alter your view of the world to a greater or lesser degree. Is there a psychology of cosplay? The answer is a resounding yes: instead of just dressing up, the cosplayer assumes a new identity while putting his or her 'everyday' identity to one side.
Via Wired
Cosplay as Rebirth
Cosplay (‘costume play’) communities and the psychology underpinning them are based on numerous non-reality and disavowal levels. Yet ‘disavowal’ is not meant here as a criticism that implies that someone needs to be more truthful or authentic. It's not saying that people are escaping from their 'real' selves with the implication that they aren't true to themselves.
No: what I am saying is that cosplay is a form of rebirth into a place of endless possibility and delusion, but the delusion is conscious, and played out across different fields of life, from physical presence to virtual worlds. It is a play for the posthumanist subject since the absence of myth seen in their sheer quantity is a cause not for mourning but celebration.
Unlike Masquerade of the Past
It is through the very disavowal, the killing off the true mythic self through an adopted myth that the subject can then be permitted mobility for expression. Unlike the masquerade of the eighteenth and mainly eighteenth centuries, licentiousness is not the motive or the concern.[1] The erotic in cosplay is either one factor among many or stretched to considerable limits.
“A Masquerade” - depiction of a group of figures dressed as jokers, devils, Turks and other characters. 1795. Via The Museum of London
Unlike eighteenth-century European masquerade, which was a ritual to escape everyday rules and mores, cosplay is driven by rules in which the body is seamless with image, narrative, myth, and community. Such rules are necessary when the subject has foregone the psychology of 'normal' interiority and has literally turned him or herself inside out.
The cosplay subject exists across the fabric of rules. These rules arbitrate between the subjects and the narratives that define them. Cosplay, in many ways, the realization of the Pre-Socratics: it is a play of surfaces. The humanist self is annulled for the skin, the shell, to enter into a solipsistic relationship in which depth is no longer that of subjective choice but rather only a matter of narratives connected to the character.
Let's turn to the dark tale told before the world of cosplay by Edgar Allen Poe
First, it is worth turning to a story written well before the era of cosplay, which is only a few decades old, to highlight the relationship between masquerade and death, which can be read in a sinister way, or as a passage to transformation and rebirth.
One of the most memorable of Edgar Allan Poe’s chilling tales, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ opens with a scene during ‘the supreme madness of the carnival season’.[2] The narrator tells of an unnamed betrayal at the hands of a friend, which he intends to address.
His rival, unaware of the narrator’s machinations, meets him with excessive warmth: ‘for he had been drinking too much. The man wore motley. He had a tight-fitting parti-striped dress, and his head was surmounted with a conical cap with bells’.[3]
So dressed, the narrator lures his friend, Fortunato, deep into a cellar with the promise of sharing an especially rare and delicious bottle of Amontillado. In the course of entry, Fortunato is seized with a cough for which the narrator offers a draught of Medoc Bordeaux.
Revived (‘The wine sparkled in his eyes and the bells jingled’),[4] he makes a series of 'grotesque' gestures meant to signify his belonging to a masonic brotherhood. Fortunato questions his belonging, at which point the narrator produces a trowel, meant as a masonic talisman.
Passing further into the abyss of the cellar, they find themselves in catacombs, where the narrator entraps him in a niche in a crypt with a chain and a padlock, then walls up the area. After his former friend's pleading sounds subside to nothing, he obscures the new wall with the bones piled throughout the vault.
Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Cask of Amontillado" by Harry Clarke (1889-1931), published in 1919. Via Wikimedia Commons
The fact that the murder occurs during a carnival is central to the story. On a more obvious level, it provides the narrator with the circumstances to carry out his plan, owing to the many distractions of a mostly drunken crowd.
But on another, less strategic and more symbolic, level the carnival has his future victim dressed up, playing someone else. It is left purposely ambiguous whether Fortunato—the irony inherent in the name is hard to miss—comes dressed as he is, as permanently dressed up and dissembling, or whether on this occasion his costume allows him license and freer abandon to do what he would perhaps not in everyday clothes.
These speculations and hypotheses share all these instances because the clothes allow for a displacement of commonday conditions that then allow the staging of the extraordinary event, death.
Alternatively, the extraordinary conditions allow 'ordinary' things to be seen for what they 'really' are, namely, mendacious and masked. It is the mask that allows for disclosure of some measure of truth. But this comes at the expense of a certain self-nihilation; the revelation of the true self comes at the expense of the prospect of death.
Cosplay and Play-Acting
Such observations are not limited to cosplay, but rather extend to the very ways in which we perform ourselves as subjects. They are internal to interpersonal relations, language and socialization.
If co-play is seen as having a particular role within the broader topology of play-acting and masquerade, it is to be understood under three main categories. The first is as continuous with traditional role-play; the second is a mass-imaging product, social media, and virtual identities; the third is according to the posthuman and the cyborg.
All three have discernible, in some cases overlapping psychological templates. At the most fundamental level, dressing up is a double play in which the self situates itself through relating to an idea perceived as external. This is basic transference.
But there is also something qualitatively different from dressing up as someone who does not exist, and in cases of superheroes, cannot exist.
The rituals of cosplay have erotic undertones, to be sure, but these are highly encoded and placed at a remove from any explicit act. This is one of the basics of the psychology of cosplay: it courts eroticism and death but at a particular remove that introduces a new, post-millennial factor of the cyborg.
The orgy can be undertaken clothed precisely because these figures are not human. It is a death of the ‘original’ self that sublimates the death of which the character, with his or her extraordinary persona or powers, is capable. But the first step in this itinerary is a short examination of the relevance of dressing up to the modern psyche.
Costumed attendees at the 1982 San Diego Comic Con (today called Comic-Con International). Photo by Alan Light. 1 July 1982. Via Wikimedia Commons
A Short Reflection on the History of Masquerade
A social practice, masquerade grew out of the Renaissance with the relaxing of the religious mores, particularly the sensitivity to idolatry. It must also be seen as beginning together with the distinction between public and private persona, with public celebrations and pageants which, in turn, saw the birth of new, challenging musical forms such as opera by Claudio Monteverdi in the sixteenth century.
And by roughly the middle of this century, the beginnings of a wholly new dramatic form, the commedia dell'arte. While it is true that the highly physicalized improvisatory theatre did have its antecedents in the Oscan drama of Rome, otherwise known as Atellan farce, it differed in several different respects, such as the exaggerated and quasi-mechanized stylistic movements of many of its characters, and relative conformity of costumes that mark out each character type.
This was different from just dressing up to play at someone else, but never before was there such stylization of dress and character. Oscan comedy used masks, but next to nothing is known of their costumes, which we inconsequential. With the media, the bodily costume, in a sense compensated for the obscured face.
Most importantly for this discussion, and as I have argued in detail elsewhere,[5] the rise of the commedia dell'arte coincides as that of the modern Cartesian subject.
It is vital in terms of the argument that cosplay represents a new turn in the conception of self. Suppose Descartes introduced a break between mind and body. In that case, cosplay reintroduces this break, except in reverse, since the psyche is subordinated to style, surface and body, something that is indeed already incipient in the commedia.
And to continue the language of watersheds and traumatic breaks, the commedia dell’arte is also characterized as a pre-eminently Mannerist phenomenon. Mannerism has more than one definition but overall is understood as a shift away from the harmonies and aspirations evinced in Renaissance art toward a more discordant aesthetic.
Commedia dell'arte troupe, probably depicting Isabella Andreini and the Compagnia dei Gelosi. By unknown artist. Circa 1580. Via Britannica
In painting, this was expressed through extreme elongation and contortion of limbs, in music, it was the introduction of dissonance, the result in both were beguilingly other-worldly effects, an anti-naturalism that suggested uncertainty and a need to escape.
One of the historical markers in this change is frequently cited as Rome's sack in 1527, where, following the sudden death of Charles V, caused his troops to go out of control, leading to Pope Clement VII being driven from the Vatican and thousands of priests perishing in the fray.
Already Luther in 1521, had incited both Charles and the church by refusing to retract his Ninety-Five Theses, and the sack of room proved decisive in fomenting dissent and distrust and placing the inviolability of the church into question.
This period of tension met with some reprieve with the signing of the treaty of Cantu-Cambésis between France and Spain in 1559, a period of relative peace, which resulted in more splendid festivities and what would come to be called the commedia dell'arte.
It is worth dwelling a little into the commedia dell'arte because it marks a particular turning point in the staging and masking of identity that can be paralleled later to cosplay. For while there had always been forms of dressing up, there had up until then been nothing so stylized: it was as a system of universalizing visual signifiers that, while originating in Italy, spread across Europe.
The costume conventions were instantly identifiable according to character—Harlequin, Scaramouche, Polchinelle, and so on—each of which was accompanied with a particular disposition to work within an improvised and highly physicalized theatrical dynamic.
It is instructive that this form grew out of an era of religious and then philosophical doubt. For whereas carnival of the middle ages and Renaissance, the kind of carnival famously described and analyzed by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and his world,[6] is festive, convulsively chaotic, the commedia, for all its own festive bawdiness, was an institutionalization of masquerade, a dressing-up with a pre-emptive structure and set of rules.
The Early Modern Subject
That it coincided with the early modern subject is no mistake. Dressing up as compensation for the modern subject's horror vacui, fear of the void, but also how modern subject's subjective excess sought containment and some relational logic to other-selves.
In his analysis of the birth of the commedia dell’arte in relation to Mannerism, Paul Castagno relates that hallmarks shared by both art and theatre included ‘typification of form (lack of individuality, conventionality), focus on surface treatment (costume, excessive ornamentation), lack of dimensionality or depth, exaggeration and distortion, and emphasis on parts versus the unity of the entire design’.[7]
He observes that the commedia is also an early progenitor of modernist art in which the relation between form and representation is increasingly tenuous. [8]
In his classic study of Mannerism, Arnold Hauser explains that ‘all things presented themselves in distorted forms, under a cloak of concealment that made their true nature impossible to ascertain. The mask was never laid aside, the cloak never thrown off’.[9]
But this deception was also a means of entertaining and disclosing things for which the real and authentic self was then (if ever) adequate. It is a reversal no different from the classic psychoanalytic insight about disavowal: ‘I don’t care what he thinks’ means the very opposite.
Modernism’s subjective particularism, the rise of the autonomous Romantic subject is stalked by, and indeed enabled by its opposite: the stereotype. Through the stereotype that categories of identity are regulated, but most of all give relief to the tension of subjective particularism by showing that the self is not entirely particular and that there is no atomic core, no 'pure' self.
The beginnings of the commedia dell’arte were also accompanied by a growing presence of masquerade parties and balls. Again, this is the result of roughly three interconnected factors. First is the expansion, ritualization, and centralization of courtly life; second, the expansion of trade resulted in courts being flooded by new items and new guests, and the wonder to imitate them. Third, and less mentioned that the first two is the decentered modern subject.
As Terry Castle in her extensive study of masquerade in eighteenth-century England notes,
Like the world of satire, the masquerade projected an anti-nature, a world upside-down, and intoxicating reversal of ordinary sexual, social and metaphysical hierarchies. The cardinal ideological distinction underlying eighteenth-century cultural life, including the fundamental divisions of sex and class, was broached. If psychologically speaking, the masquerade was a meditation on self and other. In the larger social sense, it was a meditation on cultural classification and the organizing dialectical schema of eighteenth-century life. It served as a kind of exemplary disorder.
The issue of disorder will be dealt with later, but for now, the point in focus is the self-othering. And central to all of this was Orientalism.
Adopting the Clothing of the Other
Very much caught up in this was the cultural other, made more present to everyday life and imagination by imperialism and trade. Adopting the other's clothing and guise was a form of what Castle labels ‘primitive ethnography’, which, she argues, need not be understood entirely as imperial brazenness.[10]
It is undoubtedly true that the penchant for Orientalist dress in England (and in France and elsewhere) coincided with expanding its colonial empire. By the eighteenth century, the taste for Oriental costume was entrenched, and something of its own niche industry with specialist masquerade tailors in with the bargain.
Decoration for a Masked Ball at Versailles, on the Occasion of the Marriage of Louis, Dauphin of France, and Maria Theresa, Infanta of Spain where many of the attendees were in Turkish and Chinese costumes. 1764, reprinted ca. 1860. By Charles Nicolas Cochin. Via The Met Museum
As Castle relates, there were whole costume catalogues devoted to foreign dress:
John Tinney’s Collection of Eastern and Foreign Dresses (1750) and Thomas Jefferys’s Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Ancient and Modern (1757), both used as sourcebooks by masquerade dressmakers, suggest the prevailing emphasis on the Oriental and the primitive…One hoping to pass for an Arabian sultana or Turkish janissary could find the necessary information in such catalogues, as well as a measure of pseudo-anthropological detail suggesting ways to act one's unfamiliar part to perfection.[11]
Perfection is no doubt meant ironically here since it was all a big improvisatory theatre. While it was an exploitation of the other in one sense, a logical outcome of imperial overconfidence, it was also ‘an act of homage—to otherness itself.
Stereotypical and inaccurate though they often were, exotic costumes marked out a kind of symbolic interpenetration with a difference—an almost erotic commingling with the alien'.[12]
The role of the erotic in shaping the culture of masquerade should not be undervalued, especially concerning Orientalism, which continues, albeit updated and mutated, to be a regnant component to cosplay. To the eighteenth century imagination, exoticism was always to some degrees erotic, and inseparable from the pleasures of the flesh.
The quintessential site for Orientalist desire was the harem, the place of erotic congress closed to white men’s eyes, and all the more wanted because of that. The erotic made one part of the instincts explored through masquerade, which also included what usually is inhibited or proscribed, but also as with Poe's Fortunato, what was dangerous.
The relationship between masquerade and desire is also eloquently expressed by Alexander Pope in ‘Rape of the Lock’:
What guards the purity of melting maids,In courtly balls, and midnight masquerades,Safe from the treacherous friend, the daring spark,The glance by day, the whisper in the dark,When kind occasion prompts their warm desires,When music softens, and when dancing fires?[13]
Having entered into the language of art and literature on one hand and the burgeoning popular press on the other, masquerade had become something of an independent meta-language commenting and parodying the omnipresent institution of social appearances and an enabler of expressions not freely transacted informal society.
Dressing up for a Portrait
Dressing up was not limited to balls and fairs. By the middle of the eighteenth century, a convention had crept into painting of women dressed up and playing a role. Perhaps the most famous of these was by Marie Antoinette's court painter, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, who executed a portrait of the queen as something resembling a well-to-do shepherdess holding a rose. This informality raised eyebrows at the time.
Marie Antoinette in a Muslin dress. By Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. Salon de Paris 1783. Via Wikimedia Commons
As Gill Perry observes, there was a prevalence of portraits in England of women in dress-up or semi-dress-up, a strategy that allowed them personal mobility that was harder in real life, and which enabled them to engage with the myths and stories that they suggested: 'In art as in literature then mythological, historical and literary disguises were part of common currency of symbolic meanings through which the female subject could acquire an aesthetic and cultural identity, and through which social rituals were gendered.'[14]
By inserting themselves into pictorial allegories, women availed themselves of a symbolic power, which was both that of escaping one’s position but at the same time bringing certain personal features and ambitions to the fore.
When we turn outside of Europe, similar or parallel traditions, can also be found in Asia, particularly Japan with matsuri (festivals) that mark various occasions throughout the year.
Japanese Noh theatre, originating in the fourteenth century, can be compared to the commedia dell’arte on the level of both farce and stylization. Bunraku, Japanese puppet theatre emerged from Noh, much as the European marionette theatre emerged from the commedia and uncanny historical symmetry.
Noh performance at Itsukushima Shrine. Photo by "Fg2" Frank Gualtieri. 15 May 2005. Via Wikimedia Commons
The first appearance of Polichinelle in France is reported as being 1649 and was soon after transformed into the marionette and puppet, best known as Punch, still loved by children today. In Japan, the first Bunraku performances appeared in Osaka in 1684.
This originated only a small-time after kabuki, dance drama, which began in the early seventeenth century. It is kabuki that is often considered to be the wellspring of modern and contemporary Japanese popular culture.
Masking
Psychology begins with the past. It is the set of representations in which memory, desire and fear and interlinked. In other words, how one recollects one's past and configures oneself in the present is a result of how past experiences order themselves according to the kinds of experiences associated with them.
We choose to forget or repress harmful experiences, while those that have delighted can have talismanic importance to how we believe ourselves to be. In his poem at the death of Sigmund Freud, W.H. Auden wrote that
He wasn’t clever at all: he merely toldthe unhappy Present to recite the pastlike a poetry lesson till sooneror later it faltered at the line wherelong ago the accusations had begun,and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,how rich life had been and how sillyand was life-forgiven and more humble,able to approach the Future as a friendwithout a wardrobe of excuses, withouta set mask of rectitude or anembarrassing over-familiar gesture.[15]
This gives us much to dwell upon and eloquently describes psychoanalysis as a moral lesson in re-ordering the conception of experiences that have been knotted out of shape because of misadventure or our human failings.
Psychoanalysis is seen as cleaning the slate, emptying the 'wardrobe', and lowering masks.
So far, the discussion has been directed at why masks are worn, be it as a reflection of a modern condition or to court forms of expression and behaviour that would typically not be admitted in everyday life.
Thus particularly in the latter case, the conscious adoption of a mask is enabled certain character traits and thereby to be true to oneself. <<If the representations of consciousness mask the unconscious, it requires another mask to bring it closer to the surface.>> This is a relatively well-traversed territory, but it reaches greater amplitude with the birth of social media, a form of communication essential to the understanding of cosplay.
As Slavoj Zizek explains, the masked identity of social media can be the more authentic self:
…in the gap between appearance (mask) and my true inner stance, the truth can be either in my inner stance or in my mask. This means the emotions I perform through the mask (the false persona) I adopt can in a strange way be more authentic and truthful than what I really feel in myself. When I construct a false image of myself which stands in for me in a virtual community in which I participate (in virtual sexual interaction, for example, a shy man often assumes the screen persona of an attractive, promiscuous woman), the emotions I feel and feign as part of my screen persona are not simply false: although (what I think as) my true self does not feel them, they are nonetheless in a sense 'true'. For example, what if, deep inside, I am a sadistic pervert who dreams of beating up other men and raping women; in my real-life interactions with other people, I am not allowed to enact this true self, so I adopt a more humble and polite persona—in this case, is not my true self much closer to what I adopt as a fictional screen persona, while the self of my real-life interactions is a mask concealing the violence of my true self?[16]
The barriers made possible by online encounters, the aliases and the ability to curate carefully one’s identity has generated a new subjective topology in which certain people can have multiple online identities, and are become freer and more themselves when interacting through a digital portal or interface.
The psychology of cosplay is related to this topology. While it shared many of the qualities typical to historical masquerade, it differs to the extent to which it is tightly linked to identities forged over the Internet.
Digital Identities, Virtual Communities and DIY
In terms of the portmanteau word of cosplay, so far, there has been discussion of costume and dressing up, but not so much on play per se. Predating Bakhtin, one of the earliest people to theorize play was the Dutch historian, and one of the main forerunners of cultural studies, Johan Huizinga.
With his doctoral study in 1897 on the jester in Indian theatre, Huizinga maintained a vital interest in how societies comprised multiple role-plays, and the levels of interaction in social gatherings.
Writing in a period when psychology and sociology were in their infancy as disciplines, Huizinga observed the extent to which play stood outside everyday practices of so-called ordinary or real life.
In his important study, Homo Ludens: A study of the play element in culture (1938), Huizinga emphasized that play is an alternative to the seriousness of life, the life that is caught up with the proverbial care and maintenance of self and your immediate circle. By contrast, play is driven by gratuitousness as opposed to a link to intrinsic rational relationships.
In play, norms of social behaviour are suspended, perverted, parodied, and have the potential to be made strange, straddling both charm and grotesquerie. (When this is taken into account, the murder in Poe's tale and the de facto involvement of costume is rendered more sinister and more understandable.) In Homo Ludens Huiziga went so far as to argue that play was central to the formation of cultures, and in its many destabilizations, actually a stabilizing force. [17]
While Huizinga drew a sharp line between his contemporary technologies—which in light of the First World War and the emergence of Nazism he viewed as enforcing artificial social organizations inimical to those previously generated through ritual and play— and play, his work has been referenced when it comes to how people react to certain digital platforms.
For instance, Valerie Frissen argues ‘that digital technologies are essentially playful technologies, not only as apt tools for play, but also as being the result of playful practices’.[18] For her, such operations merge to create a frame of mind that she believes is homologous to the 'savage mind' as considered by the anthropologist Claude Lévi Strauss.[19]
She observes that computers and the Internet dispose of users to tinker about, navigate, and explore hypothetical options, all components to creative play.
The virtual world is one where the amateur and expert and increasingly hard to separate (and by analogy, the same tension is occurring with your casual blogger and the professional journalist).[20]
The 'savage mind' is invoked through Lévi-Strauss's associated term of the bricoleur, a concept that combines tinkering, do-it-yourself, and re-invention to apply to objects as much as concepts. Lévi-Strauss challenges the imperial European view that 'primitive' minds are less developed than theirs, but instead, they configure the world in an entirely different way.
Moreover, such people show evidence of a very detailed understanding of their environments, with language systems and vocabulary to match.[21] Similarly, anyone with first or second-hand experience of people with a passion for digital communities—social media, online gaming, global collectives—will know that a specialist language, or idiolect, is spawned from these, with their own special synecdochy and acronyms, let along with the detailed lexicon of participants, real and fictional.
These linguistic structures are essential elements of fandom and the congregations of virtual groups. It is noticeable that strong analogies can be drawn between the classic reproach to the savage as with the Internet geek, which is that they inhabit a world that is mythological, not real, and that their lives are structured to artificial rules.
While the same can no doubt be said of 'rational' cultures, particularly in the indissoluble relationship between myth and ideology, what needs to be retained for now is the fact that it is viewed by a socio-psychological model that has taken flight from the rational universe and has built itself around something imaginary. (True again of the rational mind, but such claims are only made in specialist circles.)
Cosplay: Virtual vs. Actual
The play and general participation in cosplay exist across two basic poles, the virtual and the actual. That is simplistic enough. But the nodal point in this binary is how digital tinkering, virtual acts of DIY, overlap with the physical, craftsmanly/crafstpersonly acts of DIY.
A group of cosplayers on stage at Yukicon 2014 convention in Finland. Photo by Matias Tukiainen. 18 January 2014. Via Wikimedia Commons
What distinguishes the average contemporary costume ball or Halloween parade is the importance set on making, or devising, the costume oneself. While it is also true that many cosplayers also buy costumes or have them made, an essential aspect of many cosplay communities is in their role of self-invention.
Not only is a great value placed on self-made costumes, but as Daisuke Okabe remarks, ‘Cosplay events are a valuable venue for exchanging information and learning from each other about costume making, as well as for evaluating each other’s work’.[22]
The protocols are not confined to craft alone: cosplayers are expected to keep faithful to their character so that too much variation for self-aggrandizement is met with harsh criticism.[23]
On the other hand, the DIY approach is not only in personal craftsmanship, but the inventive resources used to emulate a figure that not only has never lived but in the case of manga, a dominant presence, a morphology that is not at all-natural.
The planes of virtual and material are therefore highly regulated and rule-bound, determined by many spaces and sites that enactments are undertaken. In other words, there is far more to cosplay than a simple binary between the dressed-up self and the 'real' self. For dressing up is a means of insertion into a variety of different social settings.
In the words of Teresa Winge,
Cosplayers interact with each other, often role-playing their chosen characters while participating in hallway conversations, karaoke parties, and online chatrooms.…Often, the settings extend beyond tangible spaces, into virtual spaces, such as Web sites, weblogs and online journals.[24]
These extend to weblogs and online journals as well as print media such as Animerica and Newtype.
Winge goes on to enumerate a variety of environments: ‘an intimate space (dress), a private space (solitary rehearsals and research), a public space (interactions with other cosplayers, both in person and virtual), and a performance space (ranging from small parties to masquerades).’[25]
It is critical to point out that the cosplay encounter of one player with another is an encounter with two other selves who have their reference elsewhere in story and myth. It is also a collision of different stories.
Hence cosplay interaction is made up of multiple discontinuities. When people meet, they meet each other as not themselves, across several narratives. Individuality, then, exists for the sake of cross-referencing and grouping.
With an emphasis on Asian cosplay, Anne Pierson-Smith elaborates on this:
Costume is seemingly used by the cosplayers in this case to communicate and perform their spectacular individual selves, whilst simultaneously signalling some form of group identity through shared costume-based identities, perhaps typical of Asian culture that exhibits both collective and individualistic values in having strong kinship ties…[26]
A group of people dressed as visual kei style musicians at the Jingūbashi (Jingu Bridge), Tokyo, a famous gathering place for cosplayers. Photo by Jacob Ehnmark. 26 March 2006. Via Wikimedia Commons
Sublimation-Desublimation
This dynamic, therefore presents an elaborate sublimation that occurs on several fronts and placed into the open, a form of sublimation-desublimation. Consider what Lacan writes in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis:
At the level of sublimation, the object is inseparable from imaginary and especially cultural elaborations. It is not just that the collectivity recognizes in them useful objects. It finds rather a space of relaxation where it may in a way delude itself on the subject of das Ding, colonize the field of das Ding with imaginary schemes.[27]
With cosplay, the delusion of to ‘colonize the field of das Ding [the thing, the object of desire] with imaginary scenes’ is made possible precisely through the excess of such schemes, that this colonization of identities and narratives is carried out through its foregrounding and its multiplication.
Conventional sublimation occurs on the level of the individual subject, whereas the sublimation active with cosplay is at its most potent when carried out in groups.
As Alenka Zupancic remarks in her analysis of Lacan’s reading of sublimation, ‘sublimation stages a parade, displaying a series of objets petit a that leave it in their power not only to evoke the Thing, but also to mask or veil it. They obfuscate the difference between themselves and the void to which they give body’.[28]
While the void can only come to presence by the mechanisms and things that veil it, it would appear that cosplay, as opposed to ‘normal’ sublimation, is a celebration of this void, and staging that celebrates it.
The obliteration of self through elaborate othering opens to infinite possibilities, displacing the anxiety to which is at the root of sublimation. Cosplay gives voice, as it were, to the process of sublimation and acknowledges that it is nothing without it. It covers the 'real' self; however, the reality of this 'reality' is itself only a myth, a myth of authenticity that is the support for authentic staging and play.
Cosplayer, who works as a photography assistant at a studio in Kuala Lumpur, at the Anime Festival Asia, which took place from Nov 30 to Dec 2 at the Suntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Centre. Photo By Adam Wan Bok Yen
Myth and Community
It has become a commonplace ascribe the nihilism of modern society as the reason for the popularity, and the need, for cosplay. The modern subject finds him or herself bereft of myths and casts about arbitrarily for myths to compensate for this.
Yet, as Jean-Luc Nancy rightly observes in his analysis of Georges Bataille, the absence of myth is already itself a myth:
What makes the myth of the absence of myth is no longer, not directly in any case, its community character. On the contrary, the mythical relation to the ‘absence of myth’ is presented as a relation, in appearance, to an individual.…What assures the function of life according to myth here is passion or exultation with which the contents of myth—here the ‘absence of myth’—can be shared.[29]
The clarification of this paradox is exceedingly useful when applied to cosplay. For it is through meeting as two separate others from separate and disconnected stories that, in this visible discontinuity, that the ‘absence of myth’ can be shared.
The absence of myth as such is, therefore the very opposite of absence. Because when myth—consensual overriding myths instead of a rich protean weave of many myths forming and reforming with great rapidity—is absent that so many false myths can circulate and multiply.
Cosplay is thus exemplary as a social practice for how the myths and narratives that inscribe it are dynamic and mobile. This is reinforced by Osmund Rahman et al. who argue that as opposed to the repetitious and immersive nature of ritual, which is enforced by unities related to a figurehead and particular stories and rules, 'in cosplay, the image and identity of an individual is never stagnant. It is not uncommon to see many cosplayers move frequently and fluidly between different characters and tribes according to their changing interests and passions'.[30]
Via Womenshealth
Thus cosplay exists across communicative groups, in synchrony with how groups form virtually over the Internet. Internet communities are a fictive state of temporary cohesion from different ethnicities, backgrounds, regions.
What they share is, in essence, sharing itself. Unlike traditional myth, in which there is the promise or suggestion of a core, an inner depth yet to be understood or a messianic 'yet-to-come', the conception of myth and identity with cosplay is across multiple surfaces. This leads us back to the beginning and the discussion and the relationship to surface, posthumanity and self-annulment.
Pure surface: the Solipsistic self
Finally, to map out the cosplay psyche, and how it differs from the traditional humanist ontology, it is worth concluding by taking an example not specific but closely connected cosplay. In 1999 the French artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno bought the copyright to a manga character for 46,000 yen (then about USD500) from a Japanese agency K-works.
Instead of buying a particularized Disney Pixar character, buying a so-called blank character from a manga repertory is not uncommon. But what remained significant in this venture, entitled No Ghost Just a Shell, was how the artists made this into a project that explored virtual and constructed, artificial identities.
The title was a purposely recognizable inversion of the 1995 anime classic by Mamoru Oshii, The Ghost in the Shell, and its subsequent off-shoots.[31] Set in futuristic Japan, these now cult movies tell when the differences between humans and cyborgs and robots are differences of degree as opposed to kind.
Ghost in the Shell (1995 film) promotional poster. Via Wikimedia Commons
Humans have merged with machines in myriad ways such that properties once reducible to humanity such as reflection, compassion, and affect have lost their specificity. For cyborgs and even robots come to share in similar reactions and beliefs, to the extent that the once essentialized properties and priorities of what was once considered human have sizably shifted in focus and relevance.
Huyghe and Parreno developed their character into a 3-D video figure, bringing her, so to speak, to life. She was purposely humanoid but not human, with purple hair, grey hair, and pointed ears. To inaugurate her 'creation', the artists produced two short films. The character, named Annlee, speaks to the screen about herself as a projection of womanhood and her market identity.
But the real twist was that the artists had a lawyer draw up a contract that gave Annlee ownership of themselves. <<Cutting out the creationist middleman, so to speak, Annlee had become the paragon of ontological solipsism, a self-referential self.>>
Huyghe and Parreno then invited artists and writers around the world to take part in the project. Annlee, the ultimate autonomous subject, paradoxically became the ultimate cipher, a conduit, receptacle, or device of artistic interventions and inventions.
As Amy Elias, in her study of this work, comments, 'Annlee thus becomes a character/sign that precedes, inhabits and succeeds story’.[32] Ironically, ‘exactly the moment Annlee is granted its “authorial” or “civic” rights to control the circulation of its image, it is silenced’.[33]
Transposing this work into the concept of cosplay is not hard: Annlee is the fictive subject that the artists effectively inhabit. Moreover, the relationship to the narrative is crucial, but it is not pathological or experiential—the phenomenological idea of embodied memory—rather, it is always something outside, beyond:
…while this project critiques contemporary human subjectivity as mediated selfhood and centralizes questions about social power, female selfhood, and posthuman identity, it also raises questions about its status as narrative. We seem prompted to ‘read’ this project as a narrative because, first, it overtly situates itself in a narrative context (the original manga referent for the project), the second because the project itself at one level is highly narrativized (as the origin story suggests).[34]
Annlee effectively becomes a commodity and reveals how even subjectivity is not immune to the forces of late capitalism.
Much like the limitations of a computer game, Annlee can describe, in Elias’ words in terms of a circuit: ‘The stroyrealm framing the project ensures that like a circuit board, energy current (the story intertext) is circumscribed in advance, and only certain pathways are open.’[35]
In a community of 'narrative possibilities, she exists out to other media and back again, such that the overall narrativity to the complex is increased'.
This also appears to be an accurate description of the cosplay psychic make-up. It exists within a range of possibilities. It can cross over various narrative fields but must always remain faithful to the narrative of which the character is both signifier and sign.
The subject is subordinated to the narrative co-ordinates denoted by the character. In short, the subject must die to inhabit another. In this, the cosplay character is like the Commedia character or the marionette.
But then there is a second kind of death, as the inside-outside relationship, analogous to the marionette and the marionettist, is foregone. One is left with a series of narratives that can be entered into, traversed, reinterpreted. Like Fortunato, one dies in fancy dress, but unlike him, one enters into a second death for the sake of other things, like operations, transactions, and narratives, to live.
References:
[1] Castle, 39-51.
[2] Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, London” Mystic Press/Bracken Books, 1987, 394.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 397
[5] Adam Geczy, The Artificial Body in Fashion and Art: Models, Mannequins and Marionettes, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.
[6] Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968
[7] Paul Castagno, The Early Commedia Dell’ Arte, 1550-1621: The Mannerist Context, New York: Peter Lang, 1994, 85.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Arnold Hauser, Mannerism, Bellkamp Press of Harvard U.P., 1965, 329.
[10] Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-century English Culture and Fiction, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986, 61.
[11] Ibid., 60.
[12] Ibid., 61-62.
[13] Alexander Pope, ‘Rape of the Lock’, Canto I, The Works of Alexander Pope, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1995, 89.
[14] Gill Perry, ‘Women in Disguise: Joshua Reynolds’, in Gill Perry and Michael Rossington eds., Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994, 37.
[15] W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’, Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957, London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1966, 167. See also Dianna Kenny, From Id to Intersubjectivity, London: Karnac, 2014, 1-2.
[16] Slavoj Zizek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, London and New York: Verso, 2012, 351-352.
[17] Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A study of the play element in culture (1938), Boston: Beacon Press, 1955, passim.
[18] Valerie Frissen, ‘Playing with bits and bytes: The savage mind in the digital age’, in Valerie Frissen, Sybille Lammes, Michiel de Lange, Jos de Mul, and Joost Raessens eds., Playful Identities, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015, 149.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid., 154.
[21] Ibid., 155-156.
[22] Daisuke Okabe, ‘Cosplay, Learning and Cultural Practice’, in Mitsuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Izumi Tsuji eds., Fandom Unbound, New Have, and London: Yale University Press, 2012, 227.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Theresa Winge, ‘Costuming the Imagination: Origins of Anime and Cosplay’, Mechademia 1, 2006, 69.
[25] Ibid., 75.
[26] Anne Pierson-Smith, ‘Fashioning the Fastastical Self: An Examination of the Cosplay Dress-Up Phenomenon in Southeast Asia’, Fashion Theory, 17.1, 2013, 85-86.
[27] Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter, London and New York: Routledge, 1992, 99.
[28] Alenka Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003, 79.
[29] Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désœuvrée, Paris: Christian Bourgois, (1986) 2004, 149.
[30] Osmund Rahman, Liu Wing-sun and Brittany Hei-man Cheung, ‘”Cosplay”: Imaginative Self and Performing Identity’, Fashion Theory, 16.3, 2012, 320.
[31] Ghost in the Shell 2: innocence (2004), Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex – Solid State Society (2006), Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie (2015).
[32] Amy Elias, ‘The Narrativity of Post-Convergent Media: No Ghost Just a Shell and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “(ghost reader C.H.)”, SubStance, 40.1, 2011, 183, emphasis in the original.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid., 184, emphasis in the original.
[35] Ibid., 199.
