‘On the cusp of something huge’: Anticipatory subjectivities in freelance fashion work

Abstract

This article draws on an (auto)ethnographic study of a group of freelance fashion professionals, known as ‘fashion agents’, with a particular focus on their relationship to time. It aims to elucidate the temporalities that permeate their work lives and shape their subjectivities, which I coin as anticipatory subjectivities. Such subjectivities, I posit, are emblematic of the conditions of flexibilisation, precarity and hopeful investment in the future characteristic of contemporary cultural industries and, more broadly, late capitalist knowledge economies. I propose that agents’ life-worlds are permeated by a promissory regime – i.e., living in anticipation of constantly deferred, adjourned and unsecured rewards. Such a regime produces subjectivities that are premised on a hopeful emotional investment in the future, coupled with a preparedness for, and a capacity to navigate, incalculable risks. Another feature of the ‘timescapes’ that agents have to negotiate is the simultaneity of multiple fluid, unstructured and often conflicting temporalities and tempos, which requires a particular kind of time-competence. Finally, the article also foregrounds the importance, in agents’ temporal orientations, of kairos: the right, opportune moment. Such a moment is normally perceived as being just about to happen; yet, it cannot be orchestrated or precipitated. As a result, one of agents’ key temporal experiences is that of waiting, which de-subjectivises them and inhibits their capacity to act. Together, these time-orientations – anticipation, managing multiple temporalities and a hopeful waiting for kairos – underpin and foster subjectivities and forms of affective labour that sustain the cultural industries; they are also emblematic of the temporal conditions of late capitalism.