Bifurcation of the Simple

By Eddie McCaffray

The following piece is the second analysis in our series on Lady Gaga’s video for “Yoü and I”. For the first piece, click here.

Lady Gaga’s newest video, “Yoü and I”, released two days ahead of schedule on August 16th, includes the usual heavy dollop of striking images and dichotomies. There’s the bloody-heeled, black-clad, cyborg Gaga lurching gracefully down a sun-baked Nebraska highway; there is the mad-scientist lover and the Frankenstein Gaga-mermaid he creates; there is the virginal dream-state Gaga performing “Yoü and I” in a cornfield for the Jo Calderone Gaga.

Clearly, present here are sets of oppositions: Cyborg Gaga is both glamorous and very literally artificial, fake, robotic, made in the big city of show business and high technology – what is she doing in rural farm country, in the heartland? There’s also Jo Calderone, the hard-bitten greaser, and Nightie Gaga, the picture of an innocent farm-girl. Not only do these two oppose one another as simple man and woman, or rebellious hellion and doe-eyed virgin, but they also, as a couple, stand in sharp contrast to the freakish and raunchy pairing of Mermaid Gaga and her mad-scientist creator (who is, in his turn, marked as the opposite to his fishy pop creation by the wings tattooed on his back).

What does it all mean? Of course, oppositional pairings are nothing new to Gaga’s work. In my essay about the “Judas” song and video, I discussed several such pairings: Judas and Jesus themselves, as well as Gaga’s equation of betrayal and forgiveness in an interview. That piece suggested that these opposites might in fact be one and the same: Gaga’s vices are her strengths, her fears are her aspirations. In my essay “Grammar Trouble and Lady Gaga’s Lyrical ‘I’”, I considered the way in which Gaga’s character songs blur the distinctions between various individuals, with major ramifications for power, agency, and identity.

In the “Yoü and I” video, as in these previous works, Gaga is interested in a very special kind of opposition, or duality: namely, she is interested in binaries which only appear to oppose one another; but when we peer at them more closely, or understand them in a new, more profound light, we come to see that they are in fact indistinguishable from one another – they are unities. Cyborg Gaga is, after all, returning to her home – “it’s been a long time since I came around/been a long time but I’m back in town.” She may have changed in drastic, even horrifying ways, but can it be denied that she is still a creature of the place in which she was born? Of course, Jo Calderone is easy to explain in this light: he is Lady Gaga in the most literal sense. And as an artistic creation, acted out by her, he fits in perfectly well as the dream of Nightie Gaga – who, after all, must be dreaming of some hunk, or why is she scampering around in her underwear at night in the middle of a giant field of fertility metaphor?

Giant field of fertility metaphor

In a similar sense, the winged-scientist lover and Mermaid Gaga also belong together, require one another. The monstrous passion of the scientist requires its project, as his monstrous lover’s passion requires the object of its lust. He clearly craves his opposite, a fish woman to his birdman, and their coupling is obviously both joyful and desperate on the part of both parties. Though perhaps Mermaid Gaga didn’t know that she needed the transformation her tormentor-turned-creator-turned lover has inflicted upon her, she seems to realize it by the end of the video. And the pain and violence of her creation is not incidental – it parallels the bloody, raw heels of Cyborg Gaga as she marches home down the highway. Journeys of self-discovery, as well as of homecoming, are difficult and even painful. (Odysseus, the original home-comer, is given his name by his grandfather who takes it from the word odium; he is later only recognized by the scars on his body – physical manifestations of the odium heaped upon his being. His pain, therefore, is synonymous with his identity.)

Thus the “Yoü and I” video is perhaps Gaga’s most overt statement on identity thus far. The crux of this video is that, despite the oppositions between Nightie Gaga and Calderone Gaga, between Mermaid Gaga and Nightie Gaga, between Cyborg Gaga and Nebraska Homestead, and between the two different romantic pairs, all these different Gagas belong together: even more, they are one.

This is how the identity which Gaga posits, and which she explores not only in individual songs and performances, but also in her day-to-day performance art project, is able to be at once performative and essential. The title of her second album, Born this Way, certainly caused a hubbub among many observers who considered themselves informed. How could Gaga champion empowered self-creation, to say nothing of LGBT rights, and yet choose a name that positively screamed the essentialist understanding of identity: from birth and by birth we are determined? Such observers could take a lesson from Gaga in the (re)unification of supposed-binaries: does having a destiny truly preclude self-creation, or transformation? Isn’t it conceivable that one’s destiny might be to make a certain choice, and if so, hasn’t the opposition between fate and freedom become obsolete or arbitrary?  

Hegel, in the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit, writes,

Further, the living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself. This Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity, and is for this very reason the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition, and then again the negation of this indifferent diversity and of its antithesis [the immediate simplicity]. Only this self-restoring sameness, or this reflection in otherness within itself – not an original or immediate unity as such – is the True. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presuppose its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out it its end, is it actual. (10)

I argue that what Hegel means in this passage and what Gaga is attempting to say about identity have much in common. Hegel’s argument is that the really real, the “actual”, the human subject, must include both itself and the perception of itself. There is always a distance inherent in identity, a sense in which a person knows who and where they are, and also that they could be something else someplace else. Thus, in a way, identity is an empty space, a gulf across which the self is perceived by something at once itself and alien. Compare this idea to one of Gaga’s tweets in the days before the video was released: “We bare an Unbearable Human Inability: to just ‘be.’” She grasps what Hegel means when he writes that “this substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity” – humans are nothing more than the perception of something missing, of a void wherein that perception will always struggle and transform in an attempt to be fulfilled. Hence the arduous distance Cyborg Gaga must traverse, which leaves her ankles caked with blood, before she can return to a home as alien as it must be familiar. Hence the painful, rapine, monstrous transformation Mermaid Gaga undergoes before the throes of pleasure, before the coming-home of orgasmic ecstasy; hence the desire of Nightie Gaga for her dream object, which is after all only an inversion of herself. That tweet also includes “love is a result” – the result of this striving, a homecoming across the gulf of the self, which is perhaps not so different from the gulf between two selves.

Author Bio:

Eddie McCaffray is a PhD student studying medieval history at Arizona State University.

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