The Trajectory of the Monster: Some Musings on the Ascendance of a Myth and the Decay of the Female Celebrity

By Ella Bedard

The following piece is the ninth in our series on Lady Gaga’s video for “Born This Way.” Click here for our previous analyses of the video.

To periodize Lady Gaga’s work up to this point, I would rather consider the evolution of her music videos than her music. I say this not to dismiss Gaga’s music, but to suggest that we look elsewhere for the artistic intrigue in her work. If, like the editors of this journal, one gives credence to the view that Gaga is not simply a musician but a performance artist, then it is the juxtaposition between her seemingly formulaic music and the bizarre spectacle of the performer that warrants our critical attention. I have suggested elsewhere that Gaga’s remarkably typical pop sound is part of a greater performative statement about identity, cultural conformity, and celebrity. In this short piece, I consider how these themes are taken up in Gaga’s latest music video. In my psychoanalytic reading, “Born This Way” is a comment on the fragmented selfhood of the celebrity. The video reveals how fame creates a disparity between the Ego of “Mother Monster” and the female body upon which that myth is written. However, in order to glean this meaning from “Born This Way,” we must pay attention to the carefully constructed aesthetic of her performance, and how it has changed since the beginning of her career. For this, we turn to the videos.

If we consider the spectrum of Gaga from early videos like “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” to later epics like “Telephone,” the trajectory goes something like the following. In 2008 and early 2009, when Gaga emerged with hits like “Just Dance” and “Eh, Eh,” she was fairly typical of the pop star type. There was something vaguely grotesque about her bow-hair, but nothing all that off-putting. At the very least, we could identify her by familiar cultural symbols: she had Italian heritage, she was young, she was confident, and liked to party. She was American – irreverently so. Also at that stage, Gaga was pretty unambiguous about her sexuality and gender. Her hips and heels identify her as female; the way she rubs them against her male interlocutors indicates her heterosexuality.

“Poker Face” delivered the first signs of gender ambiguity, which emerged more strongly in subsequent videos. Lyrics like “bluffin’ with my muffin’’ had Barbara Walter’s raising her eyebrows and asking questions about Gaga’s sexual history. Around this same time, a video circulated on the Internet that supposedly exposed Gaga as a man. The video shows her mounting a motorcycle during one of her performances. Apparently we see her penis slip out of her red booty shorts. Of course, the footage is hazy and confirms nothing. In later videos like “Telephone,” Gaga makes allusion to this hype, without setting the record straight.

Also at this time, we saw the emergence of cyborg feminist and post-humanist themes in Gaga’s videos. In “Bad Romance” and “Poker Face,” Gaga’s exudes a grotesque technological sexuality: hers is the smashed-up body where feminine flesh is inseparably twisted with cold hard robotic metal. In “Telephone,” Gaga appears in a skeletal cat suit with deathly white make up: she is woman, she is feline; she is alive, and she is dead. It is not only her status as woman, but also her status as human, that have been thrown into question.

                

To my mind, what is most interesting about Gaga is how she performs herself as a contingent site of citation. This is best encapsulated in the heavily collaged video for “Telephone,” where Gaga alludes to a plurality of possible identities without settling in any one. She has cultivated an elaborate aesthetic of pastiche, citing the style and sound of Madonna, Cher, and others. She is subversive and commercial, gendered and not, original and derivative. By continuously switching roles, she complicates these dualities and reveals how her identity, like any identity, is a contingency and a performance. She succeeds in her failing to play every part; she is unique only insofar as she acknowledges that her celebrity identity is a mimetic performance that draws on the gendered performances of her predecessors.

As a self-styled Fame Monster, Gaga’s acknowledges the extent to which her identity is constituted through the recognition of her followers. The ambiguities that surround Gaga reflect the myriad of contradicting sources that inform her identity. As her career progresses and Gaga becomes better known, we become increasingly less certain about what Gaga is. This is because Gaga is only the collage of photos and Internet rumors that constitute her celebrity. She is a reflection of the pluralized and fragmented field of information through which she appears for our consumption.

Though Gaga’s aesthetic has changed significantly over time, the theme of celebrity is ever-present throughout the disparate phases of her career. In my reading of Gaga’s work, fame is synonymous with Ego, and is used to illustrate the performative and socially constructed nature of the Self. In his psychoanalytic writing, Jacques Lacan famously describes the paranoid-narcissistic structure of the “I”. He argues that the Ego is specifically not the reality-mediating faculty of the individual, but a form of alienating misidentification. The person whom “I” recognize in the mirror – the self that is reflected for me in the other – has homogeneity and wholeness that “I” find at odds with my own disjointed experience of selfhood. One always feels the gap between herself and the seemingly totalized other that stands before her. As opposed to competing with the wholeness of her reflection, the subject alienates her sense of self to it. It is this alienation of self to our spectral other that allows us to look in the mirror and proclaim “that is me!” Yet that projected and imagined self will always be a lie – an ideal – that one strives for but continuously fails to embody. In an attempt to banish the feeling of lack at the core of our being, we seek affirmation, love, and recognition from the other.

As Gaga acknowledges in the “Manifesto of Little Monster,” she exists by way of the mutually constitutive relationship between herself and her fans.

So, the real truth about Lady Gaga fans, my little monsters, lies in this sentiment: They are the kings. They are the queens. They write the history of the kingdom, and I am something of a devoted Jester. It is in the theory of perception that we have established our bond. Or, the lie, I should say, for which we kill. We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or to become rather, in the future. When you’re lonely, I’ll be lonely too. And this is The Fame.

This manifesto reads very differently from the “Manifesto of Mother Monster,” which Gaga recites at the beginning of the “Born This Way” video:

On G.O.A.T, a Government Owned Alien Territory in space, a birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place. But the birth was not finite. It was infinite. As the wombs numbered and the mitosis of the future began, it was perceived that this infamous moment in life is not temporal, it is eternal. And thus began the beginning of the new race, a race within the race of humanity, a race which bares no prejudice, no judgment but boundless freedom.

Whereas the “Manifesto of Little Monster” acknowledges Gaga fans as the source of Gaga herself, the “Manifesto of Mother Monster” inverts the relationship, positing Mother Monster as first mover. In this creation myth, Gaga is the cause of the “new race” of little monsters. While the first manifesto explicitly acknowledges Gaga as a projection of her fans, the second manifesto denies this mutually. This is because the second manifesto is a performance of the projection. She is enacting the lie that she alludes to in the first manifesto – the lie “for which we kill.” And in fact, as we see in “Born This Way,” the negative side of this myth is destroying the physical body of Gaga, the site upon which the “spiritual hologram” is projected.

The moment the ego is constituted, a false dichotomy is created between the idealized ego and the failing self. This bifurcated “I” is the lens through which one perceives herself and the world: it is the constitutive distortion that will forever inform her perception of reality. The mythology that initiates the symbolic order of “Born This Way” introduces us to two Gagas: the good and the bad. However, when visually represented, the dichotomy is perhaps more accurate described as a division between Immortal Gaga and finite gaga.

“Born This Way” dramatizes the paranoiac-narcissistic symptoms of the fractured ego. As her celebrity grows, Captial-G Gaga becomes a more powerful, more intimidating Ego-ideal, which gaga can never live up to. The idealized Gaga sits bathed in light, surrounded by religious imagery. She is the “Spiritual Hologram,” the Gaga we constitute through our adoration. The anemic gaga who appears naked and in skeletal make-up is the negative image of that Goddess. As her Celebrity grows and the mythologized Gaga becomes a more powerful and convincing mirage, the disparity likewise increases between the idealized Ego and her finite counterparts, whom we see in varying states of decay.

The gaga who dances naked reveals the aggressivity buried in the narcissistic structure of the ego. There is something menacing about the way she moves. Whereas the added boniness on the face and shoulders of the eternal Gaga contributes to her regal expression, this same makeup on the dancing gaga gives us a different impression. We see how the desire to live up to her own image has taken its toll on the physical body of the celebrity. This gaga is what threatens the beloved Ego with disintegration. Likewise, in skeletal makeup, gaga dances freely, sometimes touching herself. She rejoices in the death of the Ego – that is, in her own death, which is the death of an impossible myth. She begs us to believe that she was born this way, while the visual juxtaposition between the two Gagas serves to undercut the song’s lyrics and fill them with irony. She is both Gaga and gaga, both Mother-Monster and the excess that disrupts the phantasm of the Ego-ideal. Simultaneously one and many, she exists somewhere in between, in that indiscernible zone between herself and her fans: and this is the Fame.

Author Bio:

Ella Bedard is a student of contemporary history, culture, and criticism in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This year she will be moving to Toronto where she hopes to pursue her interests in performance, gender ambiguity, and Gaga.

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Gaga's Anaphase, Gaga's Sonogram: the Mirror, the Cell, the Vagina, the Image

By Roland Betancourt

The following piece is the fifth in our series on Lady Gaga's video for “Born This Way.” Click here for our previous analyses of the video.

Dyed my bangs black. Its my new monsterlook. Let the mitosis of the future begin. Off to meet Judas.

11:01 PM Feb 26th via Twitter for BlackBerry®

Lady Gaga’s “tweet” concerning her new bangs serves as a forerunner for the “Born This Way” film. Her statement follows a very simple formula: she has made a physical modification to her look, and that physical modification becomes the new look for her monsters. While it is her look, it structures a new “monsterlook” that will be surely mirrored by Little Monsters. The TwitPic itself is produced on her Blackberry in a mirror, as many of the (in)famous MySpace profile pictures of the early days of social networking. Gaga uses the cryptic phrase, “Let the mitosis of the future begin.” Upon viewing the “Born This Way” film, this statement retroactively becomes foreshadow and reference; but at that moment of ignorance before the video was released, this statement latches on to its utterance context for meaning. Therefore, one is led to understand a connection between her image and its reproduction. It is as if she is saying to her Little Monsters, this is my new look, go and replicate it yourselves.

After viewing “Born This Way,” one understands this statement anew, this time within the context of the video and its focus on birthing and reproduction. It is necessary to point out here the bane of every high school biology teacher who has had to teach students about the difference between mitosis and meiosis. While meiosis is the production of sexual reproduction cells, which contain half the chromosomes to produce an animal, mitosis is the exact duplication of a single cell. Mitosis is the type of reproduction that occurs for single-celled creatures – it is a form of non-sexual reproduction. Therefore, there seems to be an incongruity here. Did Gaga mistake perhaps this basic difference? No. Gaga has stated that “Born This Way” emerged as an Immaculate Conception. Was she referring to the birth of Christ? Staging herself as the Virgin Mary as I have argued here before, having been impregnated by God through the grace of the Holy Spirit? Of course not, for the Immaculate Conception refers not to the Incarnation of Christ, but to the conception of Mary herself as a vessel free of sin so as to be capable of bearing the Son of God.

What Gaga has done is create what the Ancient and Byzantine Greeks referred to as chōra, a container or dwelling place. This existed for the Byzantines as a conceptual trope for the Virgin Mary, primarily addressed in the Byzantine world as the Theotokos (the God-bearer). Chōra, rudimentarily, in Platonic philosophy, was the space in which anything could be said to exist. Therefore, it served as a useful ontological construct for the entity of the God-bearer, whose body was the “Container (Chōra) of the Uncontainable (i.e. the Son of God).” Gaga has often placed herself in this position of the Virgin Mary, either advocating her chastity to stress her creativity or wearing the McQueen Annunciation dress. What she has done now is given birth to a race that partakes in this being, a race of immaculate humans – free of prejudice – that may exist as open receptacles of ideas and images. Yet this mitosis, this reproduction of an open container, is both a violent experience and presents a dangerous receptacle.

The violence of mitosis is in fact the manner in which evil is described as being created in the “Manifesto of Mother Monster.” Just as in mitosis, where the microtubules latch onto the chromosomes and tear apart the cell from within during anaphase, Mother Monster is violently split into two.

But on that same day, as the Eternal Mother hovered in the multi-verse, another more terrifying birth took place: the birth of evil.

And, as she herself split into two, rotating in agony between two ultimate forces, the pendulum of choice began its dance.

The text, however, can be misleading. We rely on word and image during the video to develop an understanding of the nature of these births. As she slowly speaks the Manifesto, the scenery changes and we are led through what seems like an early modern image of Hell; the music crescendos, and we are presented with the image of evil a few seconds after she has told of its birth, but not yet described the split. Costume-wise this is a different Gaga: she is not the Mother Monster that we saw earlier. It is not until after we see this evil Gaga pull a machine gun from her vagina that we are told how evil was created: “And, as she herself split into two...” For a brief period, the nature of the offspring is uncertain: are there two opposing individuals, or one with a dual nature? This ambiguity is lost when reading the Manifesto as a text independent of the video, but it is nevertheless crucial; Gaga employs this conflicted process of self-generative unfolding to suggest a fundamental confusion of natures and persons. She twists in agony because there are two ultimate forces, which we are left to believe are good and evil. Thus implying that good and evil pre-exist the birth. 

It therefore follows that Gaga’s birth of evil is not the birth of the force of evil, just as Mother Monster is never described as Good, but rather it is the incarnation of evil in flesh. Good and evil become potentialities of the flesh, forms of being that dwell within the container of Gaga’s image, and upon that incarnation are echoed in matter: the costume change between good and evil Mother Monsters. The “she herself” makes clear that Mother Monster is good and evil, that she is one and the same. Like the cell that has undergone mitosis, she is the shared interval of difference between good and evil, the distance between them, that makes possible both their sameness and difference. Same DNA, but she was born this way. Like a mirror, they are the same image but one is the “right” (figuratively and literally), and the other is left (literally) or an inversion of the “right” (figuratively) image. Their difference presupposes a more primordial similarity.

Now, I would argue that since we do not know what any of the births really were (other than seeing the embryonic heads being pulled out of her womb), we cannot be certain of the otherness of the offspring – precisely since it is a mitosis. We simply know how they were born, we know they were born this way. We may pretend that those beings pulled from her womb are the new race within humanity, but this is not what the Manifesto says precisely. The Manifesto says:

...a birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place. But the birth was not finite. It was infinite. As the wombs numbered and the mitosis of the future began, it was perceived that this infamous moment in life is not temporal, it is eternal. And thus began the beginning of the new race, a race within the race of humanity...

It is the act of perception of the atemporality of birth that forms the new race; it is not any birth in itself that mothered the new race. Birth and creation exist exclusively in the act of perception. Thus, the mirror-epistemology that structures the video demonstrates the importance of perception in these births, because there is no birth outside the praxis of perception.

When giving birth to a race free of prejudice, the Mother Monster is always depicted as a mirror image. She is mirrored in childbearing, having at times one presence but two countenances:

Her vagina, her birth canal, is the fissure of this mirroring: it is the non-interval, the non-slash through which the image is constructed. This image already has two countenances, two persons, but one nature, one body. The images of butterflies – creatures idealized for their bilateral symmetry – are prevalent. There is not a Gaga separate from a mirror: both are one and the same. Her vagina is the very origin of the images, it bears witness to the folding and its replication. Like the mirror-constructed image of the TwitPic and its viral distribution on Twitter, this image of Gaga giving birth in “Born This Way” is constructed in and by the mirror. In contemporary society, there is no better reification of Lacanian psychoanalysis than the MySpace mirror image, whereby identity is literally realized by the mirror – an almost too-crude literalization of Lacan’s Mirror Stage.

However, if it is true that birth did not occur until the moment of perception, why did the embryonic heads already bear the marks of the new epistemic humanity? Preliminarily, let me answer that by pointing out that the birth had not happened, only the wombs had numbered. We do not see the new humanity until after the Manifesto, before they are merely embryonic heads: non-animate potentialities, who merely bear a resemblance to Mother Monster. Perhaps more convincingly, however, is that as the “Eternal” Mother, Gaga never ceases to be a mother, but she also never begins to be a Mother: she is properly eternally a mother without beginning or end.

It is precisely this notion of perpetual birth that is conceived in the video. She states that birth “is not temporal, it is eternal.” Birth does not occur at a definite time, but rather is eternally occurring; not enduring or occurring in time, but wholly outside of time. Thus, time is collapsed and narrative merely structures a hermeneutics, thereby enabling common mortals to comprehend the cosmological ontology she has created and properly so; cosmology and cosmogony lose all distinction and become one and the same. In other words, the creation of the universe is the understanding of the universe.

Therefore, good and evil have always and will always coexist. Evil is not some other that has emerged to corrupt humanity; rather it is inherent within it. The new race that is without prejudice is birthed through “perception,” through the perception of this atemporality. It is the perception of this splitting/birth, this dichotomy between good and evil, that allows for a race without prejudice to exist within humanity, for humanity is the synthesis of the two. Humanity is the commingling of good and evil. But what precisely is this evil?

Unlike the image of Gaga giving birth to a race without prejudice, the image of Evil is not mirrored: even when giving birth to the machine gun, Gaga has one countenance and one person – despite the clear bilateral symmetry of the image. Only the image of Zombie Boy is mirrored, but he is not Mother Monster (although his mirrored and singular images deserve more attention, beyond the scope of this paper). Moreover, the image of evil is a sonogram:

The image of evil is not a direct image, it is an image that is seen darkly through the flesh, but is not the flesh, it is not externally manifested. It is not a direct contact, but rather an image formed through the reverberation of sound. Quite simply, a sonogram is not an optical image, but rather an info-graphic – it charts the echoes of physical bodies in order to produce an image from that data. This image’s format has a clear association with birth and expectancy. It therefore suggests that the birth of evil is an indwelling of an image that lurks within, as a potentiality in each human who is to be a container for infinite birth. Evil is the singular, oblique image of the self, the image that denies its own fluidity. It is not-viralized, it is not mirrored, it is instead kept within and not exposed. Evil is being insincere in the external representation of one’s own image of the self. It is an image that is corrupt:

Her image is not properly produced, perhaps due to interference from that concealment, seen darkly through the flesh. Like the murky sonogram, the image here represents the incongruous sound waves, it demonstrates itself as an icon of sound. Of supreme importance is that it is not virtuously pixilated as the Blackberry-taken, TwitPic-distributed image of social networking. Instead, it bears the formal traces of an alien corruption, one that we are not accustomed to seeing.

Therefore, the thesis of “Born This Way” becomes quite clear here. The perpetual birth of the self exists as the perpetual duplication and distribution of one’s sincerest image. “Born This Way” inaugurates an important shift in Gaga’s work, particularly towards the focus on the ontology and phenomenology of the contemporary image in circulation, in its physical incarnation as Vicks and Durbin have pointed out. It also represents the inexcusability of closeting – one’s true image should not have to be excavated through a sonogram: found in the stalls of airport bathrooms, or under the masquerade of a bully (i.e. the foot-tapping Larry Craig, or homophobic Dave Karofsky on Glee).

The question that remains to be asked and which I have brought up previously in my response to the “Born This Way” Grammy performance regards the important shift that this entire visual and rhetorical logic evidences in contemporary identity politics from that of the 1980s and 1990s. The militant insistence on “just being yourself” is coupled with the virality of the contemporary image and its cloning logic. Gaga is not at all advocating an inherent, insular construct of the self, but rather allowing one to continuously partake in whatever virality he or she chooses. The Monsters will reproduce her bangs and form themselves in her image. The “Manifesto of Mother Monster” was produced and recited by Mother Monster, but is a Manifesto of/for her fans. She is both her image and her representation, as the “Born This Way” film clearly articulates.

Her Little Monsters have the same DNA, but they were born this way. I-dentity is relegated to the shifter, as it always has been. It is the “I” that is the most powerful construct of identity, so personal that only you yourself can utter it if you wish for it to signify you. Even I am incapable of expressing to you this sentiment unless you put yourself in the place of my I. Here the deictic, relative pronoun, this constitutes the identity that exceeds the virality of your DNA. It is the preference of nurture over nature. Since birth is an anachronic renaissance, the “I” that once provided us with the insincere myth in language of a stable, fixed, and continuous identity for our self has been displaced to the relative pronoun, that whose deictic function craves an antecedent for any possible signification – and if there is no antecedent available, it must be taken adverbially to mean “in this manner.” The I is a shifter as much as the this, but we suspend disbelief to delude ourselves that we know what we means. By forcing identity onto a more dependant shifter, Gaga has forcefully pushed us beyond any lazy shorthand for defining our I-dentity and placed all weight onto our articulation of the perpetual this that constructs our performance of everyday life.

Author bio:

Roland Betancourt  is a PhD student at Yale University in the History of Art department focusing on Byzantine art and image theory, with an outside concentration in contemporary art and popular culture. In 2009, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a double major in art history and anthropology. 

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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.