Tracking heroin chic: the abject body reconfigures the rational argument.

• Author: Harold, Christine L.

[T]he aesthetic of heroin chic legitimates not only a cynical disdain for human suffering, it also functions as a retro-aesthetic in which subcultural politics-however nihilistic and pathological-provide the new frontier for making profits. Transgression in this instance either reproduces uncritically or sanctions what Carol Becker has called manifestations of psychic unhealth-malaise, racism, hypocrisy, despair.

--Henry A. Giroux, in "Heroin Chic, Trendy Aesthetics, and the Politics of Pathology"

People think [heroin is] all about misery and desperation and death and all that shite, which is not to be ignored. But what they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise, we wouldn't do it. After all, we're not stupid. At least we're not that stupid.

--Renton, Trainspotting

Twenty-year-old fashion photographer Davide Sorrenti died of a heroin overdose in May of 1997. The day following his death, President Clinton took the opportunity to condemn a fashion trend that Sorrenti had helped popularize, a look that had recently permeated the pages of mainstream fashion magazines and the catwalks of haute-couture design houses. According to Clinton, this latest trend made "heroin addiction seem glamorous and sexy and cool." He warned, however, that "the glorification of heroin is not creative, it's destructive; it's not beautiful, it is ugly. And this is not about art, it's about life and death. And glorifying death is not good for any society" (qtd. in Lockwood and Ramey 3). Clinton's denunciation of socalled "heroin chic" propelled an already swelling movement against its images of thin, glassy-eyed youths seemingly strung out in dirty bathrooms or cheap, dingy motels.

The President received support from some likely sources. A coalition of drug prevention groups, for instance, organized a boycott of Calvin Klein's cK.be fragrance campaign for using heroin chic images. In a joint press release, anti-drug leaders charged that Klein had betrayed American parents' trust in "a misguided and dangerous effort to glamorize heroin addiction to appeal to adolescents" ('Boycott'). Further, they deemed the campaign "obscene" and likened it to glamorizing cancer or AIDS. But some less likely allies also joined Clinton's call to end heroin chic. Later that year, a group of British fashion designers calling themselves Designers Against Addiction signed a public condemnation of the gritty, strung-out look. Art photographer Nan Goldin (commonly considered the "mother" of heroin chic) said in interviews that she was concerned about the effect the "wasted" images might have on young people and warned that "the glamour of self-destruction wears off' (qtd. in Laurence 26). Eventually even Klein himself admitted "people were upset by heroin chic. We thought it was creative, but it was perceived as drug addicts and messy" (qtd. in Thuermer 19). Perhaps not surprisingly, Klein's acknowledgment came as he launched a new, romantic fashion line that he described as "prettier, healthier, cleaner, attractive [and] seems sexier than another dirty looking model" (19).

Cultured critic Henry A. Giroux has taken the popular condemnations of heroin chic further, arguing that the genre exploits and oppresses America's underprivileged youth by commodifying and aestheticizing their addiction. He argues that heroin chic amounts to little more than "cultural slumming as cheap titillation for its yuppie audience, whose members imagine themselves being reckless and edgy as they appropriate the behaviors, dress, discourse, and experiences of those who occupy the most tragic margins of society" (27). Similarly, art historian Carmen Vendelin suggests that although photographers who produce the dark images may attempt to resist idealism in favor of glimpses into real life, what results from their "neutral stand" on a deadly addiction is the very idealization they try to avoid (38).

As heartfelt and insightful as these sentiments against heroin chic are, the arguments above are grounded in a logocentric tradition governed by rationality and stable moral truths-a tradition that, in many ways, heroin chic problematizes. Such a tradition has tended to ignore the physical body's epistemic force that articulates itself not through traditional rational argument but through a kind of corporeal performativity. Of course, the possible dangers of drug culture and the exploitation of its images are clearly significant. However, rendering heroin chic as simply dangerous, unreasonable, and immoral reinforces an argumentation discourse in which reason reigns and the unruly, irrational body must be controlled. While the benefits of rational argumentation must not be dismissed, it is precisely a phenomenon such as heroin chic that reveals rationality's inability to account for the corporeal aspects of discourse. Hence, an analysis of heroin chic photography provides an opportunity to investigate an argumentation style that in its overt physicality might be more accurately considered a kind of anti-argument. However, recognizing the body's discursive importance does not negate argumentation per se but instead disallows narrow definitions that render it synonymous with its teleological, hierarchical conventions.

In this sense, rather than advancing a moral argument that seeks to ascertain if heroin chic makes rational sense and adheres to appropriate notions of right and wrong, this essay will investigate the transgressive force of this trend as it made its way into the cultural mainstream. In this essay, I will not judge whether heroin chic advocates a moral or immoral position-a critical project that perpetuates the body's exclusion from discourse. Rather, I will investigate how heroin chic reconfigures our very notion of argumentation itself. Indeed, I propose that heroin chic, through its temporary popularization of abject, unruly bodies, advocates an argumentation model that reintroduces physicality not as something to be denounced, but as an integral source of knowing. It does so by making the body and our conceptions of it strange. In what follows, then, I will investigate the three levels at which heroin chic advances an alternate rationality--cultural beauty norms, traditional assumptions about reason and logic, and finally, the privileged position awarded to the concept of life itself.

Junkie Bodies and the Fashion Industrial Complex

You're Just a Heroin Face--The Cure

Heroin chic is one manifestation in a long tradition of "strung out" bodies in contemporary American popular culture. The gaunt, drugged bodies of William S. Burroughs in the fifties, Keith Richards and Lou Reed in the sixties, Iggy Pop and Sid Vicious in the seventies and eighties, and most recently Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, and the characters in Trainspotting in the nineties have served as icons of an anti-establishment aesthetic that overtly challenges polite society's standards of health and beauty. The artistic merit of junkie bodies was enhanced by the critical success of art photographers such as Nan Goldin and Larry Clark (1). Both Goldin and Clark, in admittedly semi-autobiographical work, featured images of their bohemian friends in various stages of drug-induced degradation.

Although the heroin body has enjoyed varying degrees of counter-culture notoriety throughout the latter half of the century, it was only in the mid-nineties that the establishment fashion press embraced the look. Significantly, the vogue of emaciated, disheveled youths living in squalor emerged out of a space created by the interaction between the "grunge" aesthetic of the early 1990s and mainstream popular culture. As the typical grunge look-plaid flannel lumberjack shirts, layers of long underwear, tattered corduroy and denim, dirty shoes and hair-evolved from the uniform of a defiant Northwest counterculture to being heralded as the latest fashion craze in a multi-thousand dollar layout in Vogue, a door was opened in the fashion world that would remain open throughout the nineties. "White trash" couture is now as much part of the industry's repertoire as the hip-hop street fashions of urban black youth.

Rather than insisting on the exploitative aspect of heroin chic--an important aspect that nonetheless cannot be accepted as the only one--I read heroin chic as one of the many manifestations of the grunge trajectory. I argue that heroin...