Haircut is a haircut is a haircut is a haircut

There are, obviously, a couple of (good) reasons to go to the hairdresser: utilitarian ones (you need a cut), aesthetic ones (you need a cut), or, sometimes, deeply psychological ones (you need a cut). Which just goes to say: a haircut is a haircut is a haircut, but sometimes it is also a so called break-up-haircut (so called by fashion-glam-women-magazines). That's the kind I got, and I actually got it twice - first, more moderate, then, more radical, and I have been wondering why ever since (and obviously this is not only about myself, since the phenomenon seems so widespread and culturally acknowledged that the fashion industry considers it to be a specific enough field to make money out of it by dedicating a magazine section to the topic).

Put very generally, getting a new haircut (as in: a different one from the one you had) more or less clearly, depending on its radicality, signals that something about you changed; thus it is a way of bringing your outer appearance in accordance with your inner feeling. The notion - or maybe need - of concordance of inner and outer appearance is not a very new idea: one of its most fierce spokesmen was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and his claim, though by no means a novelity in the 18th century, was remarkable mainly because he drastically applied it to himself.

The notion of inner and outer appearance having to concur in one way or another is then, in the 19th century, adapted, for example, into a difference of social and biological gender. (If you think the feminist sex-gender-divison of the 1970ies is something new, think again. You can find it all over the place in sexual pathology and sexual science starting from the 1850ies onwards. Though the originality of the feminist claim was - and to some extend still is - to dissociate the causal nexus between the two terms.) In the 19th century, a lot of scientific attention and effort was devoted to proving that there is a natural - and, more importantly: a normal - accordance between anatomical parts and social character (thereby digging its own grave, because if this accordance was as natural as scientists wanted to make everyone believe, then why all this brouhaha to prove something that is apparently simply 'there' anyway?).

One can find - but I am making this up as I go, so I might be wrong on this -, the idea of inner and outer appearance again in Lacan's concept of the mirror stage, this time turned into the division between the je and the moi: When the child recognizes itself in the mirror, it becomes aware of its own, separate existence. Thus, it is only when recognizing your outer appearance as your self (or yourself), you have become a subject according to Lacanian psychoanalysis. The joke being of course that you become a (as in: one) subject the instant you become a sort of split personality (je and moi) and can see yourself as an object, as an other. (Which is why Lacan's mirror stage is a very good illustriation of Rimbaud's sentence Je est un autre. And if I am not mistaken, some scientists do not accord self consciousness to primates precisely because they do not recognize their own reflection. The primates, that is, not the scientists.)

While all of this inner/outer appearance stuff somehow holds true for me (and probably a lot more deep unconscious shit I don't even have the slightest idea of), there is also, as I found out today, another dimension here: Cutting your hair is, of course, symbolically about cutting away your 'old' self, as in: 'the-in-the-relationship-from-which-you've-just-split-up-self'. But cutting your hair is also a way of turning a symbolic or emotional loss into a very concrete loss, i.e. the loss of hair. I was reminded of the very telling German idiomatic phrase 'Haare lassen', which means that when you go through a rough situation, you will (literally) 'loose hair'. So this haircut might be like an emotional chemotherapy.

And the morale of this little story is: There are different ways of dealing with a break-up. Some people go and get their hair cut. Others go and get fucking engaged to the first person they stumble across in the street.