The Monstrous Art of Pop

by Davide Panagia

[This is a revised version of a piece that appeared in The Contemporary Condition (March 20, 2010)].

The issue is one of coming to terms with one’s relation to one’s culture. Nothing less is what the intensity of Lady Gaga’s feats of the spectacular make available.

Her songs and videos – and her artistic life in general – relentlessly pursue the limits of Pop, not as a representational genre but as a medium. It is in this sense that she is an inheritor of the Warhol legacy; but, I would say without reservation (though with an awareness of the unpopular claim I am about to make), she surpasses Warhol through her discovery of the medium of Pop. For where Warhol transformed art into Pop and thereby created a new representational genre, Lady Gaga has transformed Pop into an art with a set of aesthetic convictions, possibilities, and ambitions all its own.

As absurd as this might sound to those lackluster critics who will (and do) insist that Lady Gaga is all style and no substance, the simultaneous release of two major concept albums – The Fame and The Fame Monster – prove the extent to which in our contemporary condition style and substance are incompossibilities of one another. And before readers think that I am claiming that the incompossibility of style and substance means a kind of postmodern irony at the heart of Lady Gaga’s performances, please allow me to correct any misapprehensions of the sort: the claim about the irony of performativity wants to grant purpose to multivalent objects of aesthetic worth and thus betroth to them an intelligibility that makes them accessible and available to our interpretive expectations. My point, instead, is that what defines an aesthetic object is its ability to place the listener or viewer (in this case, both) in an uncertain situation where one’s capacity to give priority to either style or substance as the ground of judgment is disoriented. This, because our modes of sensorial apprehension are discomposed by the experience of the object. Aesthetic experience, in other words, occurs at the dark precursor, somewhere between sensation and reference. And the incompossibilities of sensation and reference are the tools of Lady Gaga’s art.

But I digress.

As we are incessantly reminded, Lady Gaga’s music follows a line of descent with some of the more relevant music and videos coming out of 1980s MTV pop culture, most notably the rhythmic flows of Madonna, the dance hooks of Michael Jackson, and the lyrical voicings of Cindy Lauper (though, as a note of personal insight, I would also add the profound influence of Cameo’s “Word Up” song and video). “Dance in the Dark,” from her recently released The Fame Monster, is most explicitly indebted to Madonna’s lyrical montage with its free-flow rambling in the middle of the song that revisits Vogue’s “Rita Hayworth gave good face” moment:

Marilyn

Judy

Sylvia

Tellem' how you feel girls!

Work your blonde (Jean) Benet Ramsey

We'll haunt like Liberace

Find your freedom in the music 

Find your Jesus

Find your Kubrick

You will never fall apart 

Diana, you’re still in our hearts

Never let you fall apart

Together we'll dance in the dark

But her successful partnership with the Swedish director and video artist, Jonas Åkerlund, betrays another line of descent in her aesthetic stylings found in some of the more progressive of the current Swedish synth-pop disco bands; including (I would say) Fever Ray and The Knife, but also Abba (listen to “Alejandro” and you will hear “Fernando”) and Roxette. Like her collaborations with the recently deceased Alexander McQueen (who premiered Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” in his Spring 2009 show) and the Italian installation artist Francesco Vezzoli (at the 30th anniversary celebration of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles), the videos that Åkerlund has produced and directed for Lady Gaga screen her insistence that what is crucial to our contemporary condition is our capacity for interface: that is, that our handling and beholdings of the objects of our culture speaks to our willingness to handle and behold one another. The simultaneous release of the song and video “Telephone” (on March 11, 2010) is a case in point.

Telephone’s lyrics are about a young woman at a dance club who does not want to be bothered by people calling her on her cell phone because she is too busy having a good time. “Stop callin’; Stop callin’; I don’t want to talk any more! I left my head and my heart on the dance floor,” proclaims the ritornello. Simple enough.

The song, however, announces something different than the lyrics. Upon first listening to it, I was disappointed by Gaga’s use of Auto-tune, something I didn’t think she needed given that she has an excellent voice. Auto-tune is the controversial audio processor (used by many in the music industry) that allows anyone to sing at perfect pitch by adjusting off-key performances through the use of a phase vocoder – it is the device that made Cher’s altered vocal effect in “Believe” possible and catchy. Upon second listening, however, I realized that the placing of the Auto-tune alteration in “Telephone” is not intended for pitch correction, but is an attempt to mimic through voice the sound of a ringer and to give emphasis to the artificiality of everyday life. The prominence of Auto-tune and the fact that “Telephone” lyrically and melodically swings to the beat of a busy dial-tone makes available our integration with multimedia technological culture so that the “Stop callin’” of the ritornello isn’t merely a request but is also a marker of our cultural interface: there is no naturalness to voice, especially in the digital age. 

Åkerlund’s music videos are known for their mock movie-trailer stylings. And though at times humorous, their real effect is not one of parody but of intensity. The colors, contrasts, and close-ups throughout the “Telephone” video, for instance, are exaggerated to the point of the monstrous. It’s almost as if Åkerlund is trying to show the viewer what a video can do, and not simply what it can represent. And, indeed, with “Telephone” this disconnect is especially palpable given the fact that the video has nothing to do with the lyric’s themes of being in a dance club and not wanting to answer one’s phone. 

Correction: Lady Gaga is in a club of sorts – a rough trade women’s prison in the middle of a desert – and we can surmise why she ended up there if we think of “Telephone” as a sequel to the other Gaga/Åkerlund collaboration, “Paparazzi,” wherein Lady Gaga kills a boyfriend who, in turn, had tried to kill her by throwing her off a balcony. A further disconnect: Gaga’s collaboration with Beyoncé in the song “Telephone” is turned into a “Thelma and Louise” partnership when the two ladies – in full dis/fashion regalia (including makeup whose colors recall the pastels of their automobile) – board their “Pussy Wagon” (the pick up truck that Uma Thurman had used to escape the hospital in Kill Bill, Vol. 1) and go on a highway diner killing spree. Once again, a monstrous disconnect that is perfectly in-line with the theme of The Fame Monster – the ugly side of fame where makeup is transubstantiated into black tears, or even spilled blood.

That Lady Gaga has made a concept album with both The Fame and The Fame Monster worthy of a Patrick Bateman monologue is a notable achievement; even more remarkable is that this conceptual artifice ties into some of the best instances of American popular culture, especially the pulp crime genre that Robert Warshow had written so elegantly about in the 1940s. In “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” Warshow claims that “What matters is that the experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans” (The Immediate Experience). It is universal to Americans, he goes on to explain, because Americans react to it immediately, at once sympathizing and dissociating themselves from it: the gangster, Warshow says, “is what we want to be and what we are afraid we might become.”

The persona of the gangster is transubstantiated, for Lady Gaga, into the persona of the Fame Monster (notably, a trope Michael Mann has also explored in his recent film, Public Enemies): the fashion icon/victim, the doer and the sufferer, the one who projects an image and is defeated by that same projection. And isn’t this what we all do? Do we not all project images and bear the weight of others’ projections? Facebook, the iPhone, wi-fi, and 3-G (soon to be 4-G) wireless networks are not merely the ornamental contexture of contemporary culture, they are the instruments of interface with it; they are the mediums through which events of relata emerge in our contemporary condition, they are the objects we handle and behold when we handle and behold one another.

It’s precisely this aspect of Gaga that the lackluster critics overlook with vertiginous accuracy. Most stunningly, Camille Paglia’s recent iconoclastic rant in the pages of The Sunday Times (“Lady Gaga and the Death of Sex.” September 12, 2010) mumbles such incomprehensions by accusing Gaga of being a “ruthless recycler of other people’s work,” citing the recent “Alejandro” video as an instance of Madonna-theft and then asking “at what point does homage become theft?” Despite Paglia’s clichéd vitriol, the question is the right one to ask. And, in fact, Paglia gives us the answer to her question in declaring that “Lady Gaga is the first major star of the digital age.” What might I mean by this? 

Simply put, the song (and video) “Alejandro” are Gaga’s attempt not so much at homage but at putting into view what the digital age affords. Let’s think here about some of the major events that might be associated with our digital age. Other than the monumental advent of personal computing and the Internet, one major digital age phenomenon that comes to mind is the rise of Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing. A second major event: cut and paste interface technology like that available in software programs such as Adobe Acrobat & Photoshop, Quicktime, Vuze, and Hardware. And a third: the proliferation of virtual venues for the projection and transmission of the products that emerge from our use of digital manipulation software – virtual venues like You Tube, Facebook, Pirate Bay, and so forth. Such conventions, software, and venues make the adoption, extraction, manipulation, appropriation and transmission of audio and video, song and image, immediately available elements of popular culture. The idea here is a complex, though not complicated, one: to live in the digital age means that we no longer submit to the position of passive spectatorship. That is, we are no longer merely consumers: we are also handlers. And by “handlers” I mean people who engage popular culture through transmission as much as through reception. This, it seems, is one of the key ontological shifts that comes with new media digitality. The song and video “Alejandro” places that ontological shift into full view.

To put this slightly differently, and in the hope of comforting some of Camille Paglia’s acerbic distress: What Lady Gaga is up to with “Alejandro” is neither simply homage nor theft but indexing: through such performances she indexes the handlings that our digital age makes available. One need only take a closer look and listen at “Alejandro” to note how forceful her commitment to and aesthetics of handling is. The song (as already mentioned) betrays its indebtedness to Abba. But one can’t help also hear resonances of Roxette and, in the opening hook, a stunning recall of Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants.” “Alejandro” (the song) is neither homage nor theft but a mash-up; and “Alejandro” (the video) is also neither homage nor theft but a photo-shopped assemblage. This is what the nature of Pop in the digital age is; and Lady Gaga is, in this regard, not simply a media Pop star but a New Media Pop artist. 

In his book on film, one of the first books in the study of film ever written by an American philosopher, Stanley Cavell declares (in 1971) that “it has become the immediate task of the artist to achieve in his art the muse of the art itself – to declare, from itself, the art as a whole for which it speaks” (The World Viewed, 103). For Cavell the task of the artist is to make available in his or her art the conditions of possibility (and therefore also the limits of possibility) of that art. Anything less amounts to formulaic reproduction and artistic failure. The task of the artist in the modern period, in other words, is that of making available the immediate experience of an art-form by making present the constitutive elements that make that art-form possible.

The elements that make New Media Pop art at once possible and convincing are not qualities that belong to the object, they are effects that arise from one’s interface with it; specifically, I’m talking about the sense of conviction that comes with an immediate grasp of a work. New Media Pop art is New Media Pop art because it affords an immediate grasp. Hence the importance of the shortness of the pop song, for instance, and its hook. In a two-to-three minute period the artist must convey a sense of absolute precision and certitude that will resonate or hold beyond the moment of impact, thereby creating the sensation that nothing else matters to the art-form at that moment other than that work, as if that work is the only thing that can count as Pop. Through this experience of absolute – almost theological – conviction we discover that the task of New Media Pop art – the “muse of the art itself” – is to declare immediacy for itself. Nothing less amounts to artistic (and not just commercial) failure.

Therein lies the mendaciousness of the aesthetic object: a work’s prestige, or its conjuring trick, is its conveyance of a conviction without authority or ground to validate that conviction. It’s in this sense that Lady Gaga is absolutely right to declare, in the Summer 2010 double-issue of Rolling Stone, that “Music is a lie. Art is a lie. It is a lie. You have to tell a lie that is so wonderful that your fans make it true” (Rolling Stone, July 8-22, 2010, p. 71). Art can only afford sensations; but sensations (as David Hume showed long ago) do not belong to the province of verification, or to that kind of knowledge that would give veracity to one’s judgments. The mendaciousness of which I speak, marked by the “as if” of my previous paragraph, thus returns us to the condition of incompossibility discussed in my introductory remarks. The wonderful lie made true through receptivity is another way of suggesting that the incompossible ground of aesthetic experience is sourced and sustained only through our expressions of conviction in the face of the vivaciousness of our sensations. 

This is the aesthetic ambition that Lady Gaga claims for New Media Pop art in and through her music, her videos, and her performances. The task now is to come to terms with it; that is, to conjure the terms of its possibility and to think through what the new criteria of judgment, appraisal, and (indeed) disapproval might be in the face of Gaga’s projection of this New Media Pop aesthetic. 

Through The Fame and The Fame Monster Lady Gaga has made the claim that Pop commands an immediate attention that no other medium of art can pretend to or duplicate, and it is precisely the immediacy of her stardom, and Pop’s availability through it, that marks for Lady Gaga one of the cornerstones of our contemporary condition: our interface with and handling of culture as opposed to our subjection to it. 

Author Bio: 
Davide Panagia is a political and cultural theorist who holds the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies at Trent University. He is the Co-Editor of the cultural and political theory journal, Theory & Event, and is a contributor to The Contemporary Condition.

WAT IS GAGA?

By Vanessa Place

And then, I thought, How could I possibly be better for you? Gaga is an illusion, no. That’s all I keep thinking: I just want to be better for you. Gaga is a fantasy, no. I want to say and sing the right things for you, Gaga is a pop star, hardly. and I want to make you that one melody that really saves your spirit that one day. Gaga is an ontological problem for which Gaga is the answer, though there is no question, or at least not one before us. Gaga is, because Gaga is. I love my fans more than any artist who has ever lived, and I mean that so genuinely. It’s about loving who you are. Gaga worries us like a bone because we do not know what to make of Gaga, how to read Gaga, whether to be pro- or con- the Lady G. But the question is not external, not a question of reading nor a matter of interpretation/translation/cultural approbation. The question is internal, a matter of epistemology, a question of knowing-being. I don’t want people to love me; I want them to love themselves. This epistemology is eco-logical and ecce-homo, it’s green with frenzy, queer-eyed friend of envy. I’ve looked at every man that I’ve ever dated in the eye and every woman I’ve ever been friends with and Monstrous in its petty jealousies, content to wiggle and prickle in one-eyed wonder. For the problem is cyclopic, technologic, historonic. The solution tautological. Remember that the (Romantic) fragment is a whole unto itself (Schlegel) and that there is no (Enlightenment) transcendent that is not singular (Kant). Remember that the (Continental) one is necessarily multiple (Badiou), and that multiplicity is (psycho-analytic) constituency (Lacan). Remember that the spirit Der Geist is a bone ein Knochen (Hegel). Remember how you (you) used to sing in front of a mirror (You). Who was there for you then—save Gaga? (Gaga) there will never be something that I put before my fans Remember these things along with this something. A number of Gaga essays posit the problem of what to make of Gaga, only to fall supine at the sublimity or to recoil against the vacuity, and, in letting go so gaga, failing to interrogate the precise Dei of which G is Imago. Note the “what to make” phraseology refrain, for this contains, like all questions, an answer, or at least a construction. To borrow from Lacan, in the trinity of Symbol-Image-Real, a trinity that is always to exist simultaneously and in unending interpenetration, Gaga plays clusterfuck, Image as trump. Face-up, that is, and holding. But don’t mistake being taken for getting took. The former is about satisfaction, the latter about duplicity. Duplicity being currently a false dichotomy, because what we know is what we know about me. Me meaning you, naturally. Someone said that intelligence only comes through the other, and it seems some of the stupidity around Gaga can be attributed to her lack of otherness, or rather, her failure to single out un autre upon which another singularity can scaffold some intelligence (or, vice versa, to single out a solitary subject in relation to which many others may thereby exist). Though this can be very convenient: in her September 12, 2010 Sunday Times (UK) piece on Gaga, Camille Paglia showed herself strangely capable of proving a point by missing it so profoundly that it was set in chunky bas-relief, for Paglia is an armchair Romantic (late), and wants her women, like her macadamized poetry, ready for service, that is to say, surfaced with common sense and commoner sensibility. She berates Gaga for being insufficiently sexual, unconventional, transgressive, now. She does not understand that now is an anachronism, as bourgeois as an antique then, that “sexy” in pop stars is as predictable as “pop” in cans, that transgression is yesterday’s news, that authenticity is pre-Benjamin, that the Real cannot be represented, and, more sinful still, seems to have simply forgotten that the honest trick of rhetoric is sophistic sincerity. Postmodernism is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the rejection of objective truth and global cultural narrative…postmodernism is often associated with difference, plurality, textuality, and skepticism. (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) Though Gaga is not postmodern, or post-postmodern. For Gaga is disillusioned with nothing. Not-disillusioned, that is. For Gaga is not illusioned either. For Gaga is the not of nothing; the knot of nothing, that is. To beg reductively again from Lacan: the Imaginary is our image of ourselves, the cohesive whole first fashioned by baby (heretofore experiencing its existence as fragmentary) recognizing Baby in the mirror; the Symbolic is the What It All Means (viz the big and little Os, including Father, Mother and all the to-be others); leaving the Real as that which cannot be represented or cohesively cognized, the stuff that falls outside the official or conceptual stuff of “us.” To borrow his Borromean knot, the RSI can be topologically conceived of as a set of three interlinked rings (favorite motif of the mid-90’s Celtic tattoo); sever one, and the rest will fallow. When I say that Gaga isn’t Real, that is to say the obvious, that there is no “one” who is “really” Gaga, though there is One that “is” Gaga. But something inside of me felt like I was living in a delusional world; I wanted to know what the real world was all about. Similarly, when I say Gaga is not a Symbol, I mean there is no “thing” symbolized by Gaga—unlike the icons referenced by the dumbfounding Mme. P, Gaga ¹ Raw Sexuality, Gaga ¹ Punk Priestess or The Golden Age of the Silver Screen. But there is Image, and there is Symbol. In a neat turn of the screw-you, Gaga is a tautology, ontology recapitulating epistemology. Celebrity as the very image of Celebrity, the Fame Monster as the Symbol of Monster Fame Itself. Everything Gaga says and does and is exists as the exemplar of pure Fame, of American Idolatry as American is the universal language of Fame, being the common language of abstract capital, cultural empiricism, and the interfaith of the interwebs. What we nostalgically refer to as Wall Street, Hollywood and Apple, Inc. And it doesn’t matter that none of these things are what they were, or if they ever were what they will have been thought to have been. (Empires on the decline make for lovely wakes.) What matters is that they are repositories for what we want them to be, that is to say, All-American. That is to say, Famous.  For what is fame but omniscience played as a two-way street: inasmuch as gods know all, they are known by all. And I used to pray every night that God would make me crazy. I prayed that God would teach me something, that he would instill in me a creativity and strangeness that all of those people that I loved and respected had. Faith is notoriously incongruous, incapable of full comprehension. The (famously) overt vacuity of Gaga’s lyrics, like the stone-cold fissures in her biographies (how is it that one is both petite bourgeoisie “She was the daughter of middle-class parents…” and patently privileged “Later, voice lessons with renowned New York vocal coach…”, both marginalized and mainstreamed, both poppet and puppeteer—why the same way that one can beg for the real by praying for the mad), tripled with the lack of facial/emotional performance in her videos and the hysteria of her sets-cum-costumes create a locus of singular multiplicity that cannot be read as anything other than the Image of Image, or, put another way, the Symbol of Image. (Man the Symbol of God made the Image of Man, sacrificed as Man by God as Man for Man for God.) For, as Žižek notes, “Such an empty gesture provides us with the most elementary definition of the symbolic act.” (Tarrying with the Negative) It’s so funny, though, when people say to me. “Who is the real Gaga.” Thus, the “thing” symbolized by Gaga is the Thing itself, Das Ding, the objet petit a which we all want to want. But what we don’t want is to get it or to have an it to be got. Part of the trick with the Knot is that each element ex-ists: each portion excludes the other, even as it depends on the others’ existence and exclusion for its own existence. This is why Gaga is so difficult to apprehend—the constituent parts hang together but not separately, or rather, they hang separately together. The whole of a contradiction, wherein “con” means cunt. There is something adolescent about wanting sets to come complete, when we know that things come best when they come together. I’m fuckin’ Gaga. Too, there is something dehors de la mode about decrying a lack of synthesis in a synthetic creation. Or worse, something lazy, something that’s forgotten the Thing it’s come from. Friedrich Schlegel argued for the fragment as being necessarily complete in its incompleteness, maintaining that aesthetic completeness was to be found in the animus that existed in each individual fragment, and that this kind of infinitely divisible totality was more (pace Kant) whole than that created via the formal unity born of formal utility (such as found in classical works); moreover, work which “mixes and weaves together extremely heterogeneous (heterogene) components” was the only work which formed an ethical whole (because the absolute is necessarily plural).  (Literary Notebooks 1797-1801) And where Kant would put the site of that ethical totality in the experiencing, i.e., transcendent subject, Schlegel put it in the work itself. And here comes Gaga, merging the two into the fragmented work of the transcendent subject as object sans differentiation, the Ideal “sobject.” So then I thought, Well, maybe if I show what I look like when I die, people won’t wonder. Maybe that’s what I want people to think I’ll look like when I die. What Gaga does is force a confrontation with our lack of theoretical apparatus for making sense out of our current no-nonsense. Postmodernism will not do, as it rests upon the gap for existence, and there’s no neo- for this confounding to return to. A kind of contemporary conceptualist frame works, if only because it leaves the encounter empty of direction save that provided by the one who encounters—Gaga is a concept, and as such, may be conceived any number of ways by those who choose to tarry with whatever portion of her fragmentary All. But then there is the Object, an object very much of design (a design, naturally, both equal parts designer and DIY: her “white Birkin bag covered with fan-created graffiti,” The disco bra from the ‘Just Dance’ video I made with my own two hands) and, while iterable, this site is neither fungible nor Fluxus. Gaga’s sobjectivist project is not fully Warholian because Warhol was opaque—a screen having been something for you, darling, to reflect on to—to story off of. Contrarily, Gaga is a mirror, the image of Image itself. Mirrors reflect and project: it’s the real You. I don’t know who I am if I’m not Gaga. Over and over again. This is not unlike but yet different from the phenomenon noted by Amelia Jones in her essay “The Contemporary Artist as Commodity Fetish” (in Art Becomes You! Parody, Pastiche, and the Politics of Art: Materiality in a Post-Modern Paradigm) in which the “self” of the artist is gradually effaced into the production of artist as fetish object. Jones traces this phenom through its high modernist origin (Duchamp as Rrose, e.g.) to Warhol and Cindy Sherman’s early post-modern productions of self as icon (Warhol) or iconic (Sherman) to later versions of self as fetish commodity (Matthew Barney, Nikki Lee) and as fetishized-self, either of the digital/imaginary variety (Mariko Mori, Pipilotti Rist) or of the performance/celebrity mode (Tracey Enim, Vanessa Beecroft). The real artist is replaced first by its photographic representation (Sherman, Lee), then by digital embodiment (Mori) or corporeal clones (Beecroft). The artist becoming, according to Jones, an “absent referent” for the artist. But in all of this there remains the gap that permits fetishization, the idea that the fetish object has a referent—or, to use Jones’s e.g.s, the “fact” that Barney is heterosexual, that Enim’s work presents “a package of private revelations,” or even that Mori’s digital self is a performance of “a high-tech robot cum Geisha-prostitute cum passive little Oriental girl.” And not, it is assumed to go without saying, Mori herself. Too, the artists in these performances maintain a suitably—or, with Mori and Beecroft, brutally—ironic distance from the fetish-incantation of the fetish-self. But Gaga seals the deal in all its parts: the artist is not effaced for there is no absence but presence, no presence but absence. Gaga is straight and gay and trannie and hi and lo and hot and cold and dead and alive and the point is, like the mirror disco ball which she symbolizes and which symbolizes her, a point of multiple synchronistic totalities. Silly synthesis; tricks are for kids. My real fans know who I truly am What has been forgotten or refuses to be remembered is that there is no longer any such thing as history, that we are simultaneous by virtue of our largely virtual, largely social being. I am because my facebook friends know me. Some of me is borrowed, some is new, some is very very blue. The baroque was, and is, artifice as artifice. Gaga is baroque as allegory-of-itself, allegory qua allegory. Gaga is sincerely a pop star. Paglia is stupid to want more. Where Madonna took marginal culture mainstream (Come on, vogue!), an essentially bourgeois act, Gaga marginalizes the mainstream (what does a lez prison/mass diner murder/Thelma and Louise story have to do with phoning someone at a club), an existentially ethical act. We are nothing if not fragmentary; put another way, we are everything because we are fragmentary. As pointed out quite nicely in Ella Bedard’s “’Can’t Read My Poker Face’: The Postmodern Aesthetic & Mimesis of Lady Gaga,” (Gaga Stigmata 17 August 2010) Gaga’s public personae is a performance of a public personae: her interview on Larry King mirrors a Larry King interview, she performs a Barbara Walters interview. Just as, it should be noted, her September 2010 Vanity Fair interview was a spectacular exemplar of a Vanity Fair interview, in which it was revealed that she really does care for her fans more than any thing or one, and that her fans were her and she was them, and that they were all together and separately perfect images of perfect sobjectivity. And in this, she spoke nothing but the truth of Gaga. In The Transparency of Evil, Baudrillard wrote of a transaesthetics in which there exists a surfeit of image that “replaces aesthetic pleasure” with fascination. In such a state of endless fascination, we lose the power of aesthetic judgment (pipe/not pipe), and because we no longer have the power of aesthetic judgment (good pipe/bad pipe), “we are condemned to indifference.” (what does it matter whether it is a pipe) And while he is wrong about indifference, he is right about fascination, though wrong again about the replacement, for in a coup d’oiel, fascination is aesthetic pleasure, not its substitute. (Though one might equally note how frequently aesthetic pleasure has been a substitute for fascination: ceci un blow job.) And I love fashion, but I don’t love it more than my fans. I have not seen Gaga in what would otherwise be flesh, though that doesn’t matter. I have not bought a Gaga CD, paid for a Gaga song or a downloaded Gaga video, though that doesn’t matter. Gaga the Real doesn’t matter because she is not really made of matter. She is not live to me, though there she is. Here, I mean, in my head, the site of all performativity, all totality. For there is no there, and old hats off to that. When discussing Duchamp, Dali quoted Tzara : Dada is this; Dada is that; Dada is this; Dada is that; Dada is nevertheless shit. We may profitably say: Gaga is this: Gaga is that: Gaga is this: Gaga is that: Gaga is nevertheless it. No wonder she confounds. Where Paglia is thickly wedded to old-school sexy (sex is bad and that’s good), and Baudrillard has his sentimental attachment to irony (including the irony of philosophy itself), Gaga is sentimental and asexual, iconic and unironic. Gaga cannot be ironic, for irony presupposes again the gap b(slash)w the thing and its (mal) representation, and by virtue of that gap, reconfirms the belief in the thing itself as if it could be represented truthfully. So Madonna famously struck a pose, but her real name is Madonna, and she believes, in her baby-powdered latex way, in sin (Papa don’t preach), which rests on a sense of athletic salvation (I’m keeping my baby). And Warhol encouraged real drug use and did not find it the least bit amusing when he was shot by someone who took the fame game way too seriously. (As did he.) So there they are: good and evil, the golddigger twins. (@CP: Detrietch was icon of modernism and the slo-mo sweep of WB’s Angel of History, the tired sigh of honest decadence; Madonna was icon of postmodernism and capitalism, the winking nod of the peep show gal; Gaga is the blow-up doll you love for its perfect {} mouth and fresh plastic smell—or are we still to revere the Venus of Willendorf? I.e., is art still subject to a Greenbergian thumbs up/down based upon a tingly feeling?) And Matthew Barney/Vanessa Beecroft is beautiful and was a model, and makes Art, which is necessarily finite, limited in its instantiations and thus capable of fetishistic hoarding/consumption. So there it is: glossy truth, collectable, curatable, containable as all that live in museums. Contrarily, the fully iconic Image, upon which significance and semiology has heretofore tended to stick, may be serialized or produced ad infinitium and as such a cheap-ish ($1.29 per song on i-tunes, free on youtube) commodity, can no longer be commodified except as commodity itself, and not even that. there will never be something that I put before my fans. All Gaga wants of me is my time. My attention. To plug into those two inches of socket in my face. She just wants me to look at her looking at me looking at her looking at me, endlessly. We are made for each other. As Paglia rightly notes, Gaga is a star “of the digital age” who is “almost constantly on tour,” and her biography doesn’t quite synch up, and her erotics are an erotics of death, and thus, according to CP, un-erotic, although Paglia fails to obviously conjoin the obvious disjuncts, and, again stupidly complains about The Thing itself as the Thing itself. Maybe that’s what I want people to think I’ll look like when I die. To wit, in two parts: Death is erotic. Death is the only finite thing in our infinite universe. In the www, we are all of us immortal, except for in the flesh. What is left of corporality is only its rack and rot—you can fuck everything but there’s only one that will finally fuck you in the end. Too, Wikipedia is true: all autobiography is officially autofiction, its constituent bits capable of revising or re-envisioning as need be. What is truer—historie or history? Remember the spirit is a bone, but a bone is just a cigar. To be a real-life digital star, one must present oneself in what passes (too quickly) for flesh, and prove even that’s a matter of plasticity. That is the longing: to dwell midst the waves / and have no homeland in time. (Rilke, quoted by Benjamin.) With regard to Gaga’s meat-dress, singled out by personnes as a prime (or choice) e.g. of this icky confusion b/w erotics and necrotics, there’s both this joint making/unmaking or conceptual turn of the corporeal as well as a fairly brilliant pun on the “skirt steak” (cum “meat curtain,” or, as asided by Gaga herself “meat purse”) referencing the common vault noted by all the best poets. The confusion revealed (again) as the cunt, common situ of that old sex/birth/death trinity before which we genuflect, deux par deux. I have this weird thing that if I sleep with someone they’re going to take my creativity from me through my vagina. “Man remembers the Past; Woman divines the Future; the Couple sees the Present.” (Sanit-Simonian formula, quoted by Du Camp, quoted by Benjamin) As proved by her Japanese Vogue photo-shoot, Gaga is en couple avec Gaga. It’s not trannie art, for trannie art presupposes some kernel of gender identification, the “real man” buried beneath the muff, the “woman” within. There is no within, just as there is no skin but skeins of performativity, the mirror is not real, as we know, it is just a reflection of a show. Similarly, the expression of vaginal castration anxiety plays the split right down the middle: if, as Žižek explicates in Tarrying with the Negative, man creates Woman as the abyss that he can then fill with “the mirage of soul,” such that without Woman, therefore, man has no Spirit, then Gaga flips the script forward and back, acknowledging the soulessness/bonelessness of Man, or, to put it sweetly, the too-real jouissance cached by the famously phallic female. Sontag famously said that she understood Patti Smith because she understood Nietzsche, leaving aside the quick reading of this malentendu (Smith is resolutely unironic, and has proved herself absolutely non-nihilistic, whereas Nietzche's "yes" was equal parts conscience and cruelty), we might profitably say that we can understand Badiou because we comprehend Gaga: the one as multiplicity, only the contrapuntal emptiness remaining a singularity. Like opera, Gaga is everything as everything is entertainment: the libretto cannot be critiqued as separate from the music as separate from the staging as separate from the singers as separate from the sets as separate from the language as separate from the audience as separate from the place of the performance as separate from the time of the opera. (It is perhaps important to pause and note that Gaga is impervious to deconstruction as well, for there are no discursive readings of her, or rather, the surfeit—particularly of the text—is, like opera, consciously a void or a mere surface, so that any Derridean analysis simply recapitulates the fundamental crime of not seeing the wood for the forest.) When I look into the crowd [at my shows], I feel like I’m looking into tiny little disco-ball mirrors and I’m looking into myself. And when I wake up in the morning, that’s what makes my heart tick. When I said earlier that Gaga was a mirror, I was right, but now I am wrong: Gaga is a screen. Today’s version of a screen, that is, which is the mirror that moves, the thin portable computer upon which I reflect my projects and projections and upon whom I am reflected and project, that digitally sculptured version of me that is the only real proof of my existence, and yours, because that’s all you are as well, another screen reflecting back and on my own. What I see mostly before me are screens, but I don’t seem to see them anymore. Or at least no more than they see me. Reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image. (Baudrillard, Simulations) Baudrillard was right, but now is wrong: there is no reality that is spectacular, not even the simulacrum, because there is not a nothing left over of which to imagine this is its simulation. Pace et contra Valéry: God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through. Now there is everything and everything is me. No guises but reality, no reality but the imaginary, no imaginary but the symbol, and the Symbol is of the Imaginary. Because, the truth is, I don’t exist either. Not really. My real fans know who I truly am, and they know what I represent and what I mean, and my music and my performance is what really speaks.

Author Bio: Vanessa Place is a writer, lawyer, critic, and co-director of Les Figues Press.

What's Paglia Got to Do With It?

By Jack Halberstam

Oh no! It was just as a new semester began, as the football season kicked off and right when Jersey Shore moved to Miami…right when Justin Bieber was adjusting his diaper for the VMA’s and the Jackass crew had figured out new ways to showcase male moronism in 3D…indeed just as Gaga chopped up her filet mignon to wear the next night at the VMAs, just then, someone let Camille Paglia out of her box.

Once a decade, Paglia, an acid tongued Susan Sontag wannabe, rents space in some national newspaper to tell us that we are all wrong about everything. Usually we are all wrong about a cultural icon we all love…or else we are all wrong about an entire movement of theory and philosophy, or we are simply wrong about our historical moment, the meaning of sex, the politics of gender, Madonna, Italians, John Donne, lesbians, drag queens, the economy, universities, cultural revolt…and now, we find out, **newsflash** we were all wrong about Lady Gaga. Yup, we were wrong. We all thought that Lady Gaga was actually doing something interesting, cultivating new combos of avant-garde innovation and popular recycling. We thought she sounded good, looked even better and straddled the divide between Warhol and whimsy while flashing her notoriously ambiguous meat purse. Many of us found her musically interesting, culturally thrilling and inordinately fabulous. We liked her in leather, in chains, in a wheelchair, in bed, in a sandwich, in a pussy wagon, on the phone, in jail, under meat, we liked her but then we found out that, well, we were wrong.

Lady Gaga, I learned from Camille Paglia, is just a copycat who latches onto a generation of glazed eyed internet clones and exploits its incapacity to think without an Iphone app at hand or to know anything without a twitter feed. She is a rich girl playing at being marginal, “a diva of déjà vu,” less sexy than a drag queen, less talented than Elton John, less charming than Lily Allen (is that possible??), and a “rootless” pretender who manipulates her fans, the “little monsters,” into pathetic displays of fanatical admiration. Gaga, for Paglia, represents the end of culture, the end of civilization, the end of truth, values and meaning, the end of sex, and the triumph of a kind of Baudrillardian age of the simulacra (only she wouldn’t cite Baudrillard because he is French and therefore…wrong).

In a kind of counter-Haraway move (think Haraway of “Cyborg Manifesto” rather than Haraway of “Companion Species Manifesto”), Paglia argues that we have lost touch with what is real, true and good in our mania for media manipulation, video games and cell phones. If Haraway recognized an interpenetration of humanity and technology in the digital age that was exciting and wondrous (even as it was also exploitative and dangerous), Paglia, sees, predictably, a manufactured public realm populated by media puppets and their passive and stupid fans. If Lady Gaga’s supporters have recognized in her a newish formula of femininity, phones and desire, Camille Paglia sees only same-old same-old or, in her words “the exhausted end of the sexual revolution.”

Like a bad drag queen imitation of Allan Bloom, the prophet who preached the end of culture just two decades ago in The Closing of the American Mind, Paglia worries that “the younger generation” is missing out on all the really important cultural texts that made up her own education. The Iphone generation take pleasure in cheap imitations when they could be thrilled by “real” culture, i.e. canonical English literature; they are literate in texting but hopeless at real expression and they are not even original in their forms of rebellion. Paglia has always seen it all before and she never tires of sending her readers back to school circa 1950 to bone up on their John Donne, Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson. Like a manic T.S. Eliot guarding the “great tradition” and prowling around its archive with claws out, Paglia reminds one of the schoolmarm host of the British quiz show The Weakest Link. Ann Robinson became famous for dispatching her victims on the show with the immortal words: “you are the weakest link, good bye.” And it is this tradition of learning (rote memorization of the tried and true authors memorialized by new criticism) that Paglia returns to time and time again. Why the popular media returns to Paglia time and time again is another question! But probably the answer has something to do with a kind of media masochism, a desire to be spanked for not paying attention or for succumbing to banal mind candy. But at any rate, when Paglia does come out of her box, we get to watch a completely unselfconscious right-wing libertarian blurt out high-minded nonsense while thumbing her nose at all the other academic drones who believe in crazy shit like “the construction of gender,” the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction and the mediated nature of reality.

Paglia knows better. She knows that women are women, feminists are stupid, communication networks have replaced real intimacies and Madonna was ripped off. What she doesn’t seem to know is that all cultural production consists of wild combinations of the new and the old, the borrowed and the bold, the real and the fabricated. She also doesn’t seem to know that every generation must have its icons and the tired cycle of oedipal denunciations within which older people sneer at younger people’s tastes never does change anything. She also does not seem to know that Madonna was the queen of rip offs and that her cultural borrowings were almost never acknowledged and often fell within a long tradition of white absorptions of Black cultural innovations.

Many people have noted that Lady Gaga lives in the long shadow of Madonna but noting this is not the same as totally collapsing two performers from very different historical and cultural milieux. Weird then that Paglia condemns Lady Gaga for her “poker face” when she adored Madonna’s performance in 1990 in “Justify My Love” because it confirmed that “we are nothing but masks.” Strange that Paglia charges Gaga with “obsessively trafficking in twisted sexual scenarios” while casting Madonna’s Christian upbringing as inspiring because “without taboos, there can be no transgression.” Bizarre that Paglia is so taken with Bowie’s androgyny and Warhol’s relation to the marketplace but can find not a single shred of glamour or talent in Lady Gaga’s gender-blending and articulate performances.

Ultimately, what Paglia thinks about Gaga is about as interesting as what Sarah Palin thinks about feminism or what Glenn Beck thinks of Eminem. More important is the issue of what narratives about the popular, the avant-garde, innovation and cultural appropriation make it into the mainstream media. And somehow, Paglia always seems to find an open page ready to receive her rants, her crazed generalizations (“most of Gaga’s worshippers seem to have had little or no contact with such powerful performers as Tina Turner or Janis Joplin”), her nutty projections about a generation, a culture, a movement. While Paglia is stuck in 1990, still spinning her narratives about atrophied affect, cultural decline and sexual inertia, we have actually entered new debates, developed new vocabularies and in creative interactions with new media, we have all of us become little monsters, chasing our own gaga urges and moving steadily further and further from the modernist splits between high and low, good and evil, sex and death.


Author Bio:  Judith "Jack" Halberstam is Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at USC. Halberstam teaches courses in queer studies, gender theory, art, literature and film.

Halberstam is the author of Female Masculinity, The Drag King Book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters and a new book from NYU Press titled In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives.