Gaga is a Narcissistic Masochist and You Should Be One Too

By Spencer Jackson

The following is the sixth piece in our series on Lady Gaga’s “Yoü and I.” For previous analyses, click here.

The ghostly masochistic bride means everything and her brawny sadist groom nothing. The guests, well, they might be disappointed. In juxtaposing the earthy, country ballad “Yoü and I” with the violent, mythological landscape of its video, Gaga masterfully detourns from within the patriarchal longing of the quintessentially American starlet. Rather than simply undermining or opposing the fantasy of redemption in the arms of a male savior, Gaga maps out the tantalizing and emancipatory possibilities of being the objectified female subject.

The male savior appears in Gaga’s vision as the sadist lab technician who converts the liminal, mythological figures of the mermaid and the phoenix into the ghostly, bride-object of every Cinderella tale. Although positioned as the subject, this hunky characterless shell of a man remains captive as a kind of personal assistant to the objects he penetrates, cares for, and tortures. The ghostly aura of the bride that emerges from this lab reflects the doubleness of a human self bound to the inhuman and mythological space of the beyond. With its focus on the production of this wife-to-be, Gaga’s video redirects the desire expressed in the phrase “Yoü and I” from the expected object of the external lover to the hybrid figures of myth that reside in the interiority of the bride’s self. Subsumed in the narcissistic landscape of self-production, the love relationship in Gaga’s video becomes a wholly internal process that centers on the pleasure derived from returning to and replaying the violent process of one’s own formation as a subject. In affirming and enjoying the sadistic constitution of her latest persona, Gaga develops a strategy for accessing the monstrous, plural, and mystical others that lie within every seemingly normalized subject. “Yoü and I,” in other words, has a message for its country starlet: accept your perversion and make your love narcissistic.

By representing the mythological figures of the mermaid and the phoenix as sources for the construction of the objectified bride, Gaga suggests that at the extreme limit of the self-contained, narcissistic self lies an opening to the absolute outside, whether that be the sea, sky, or heavens. The oddly placed umlaut in the title “Yoü and I” brings the object of the singer’s longing inward to “Yüyi,” Gaga’s now established mermaid persona. Gaga’s definition of Yüyi in a tweet earlier this summer reiterates her status as a metaphor for the formation of Gaga as a subject: “A reincarnation of my birth+artistic spirit. In incubation, awaiting a human lover to save her.” As both beautiful woman and fish, the hybrid figure of the mermaid embodies the possibility of human life coexisting with the ultimate symbol of its other, the sea. In his political history of the globe Nomos of the Earth (1950), the legal theorist Carl Schmitt celebrates the sea as the great limit of human civilization prior to the emergence of maritime powers in the sixteenth century. Standing in opposition to the ordered domain of land, the pre-modern sea was a site in which “there were no limits, no boundaries, no consecrated sites, no sacred orientations, no law, and no property” (60). Hailing from this ancient zone of lawlessness, the mermaid must be transformed into an object of science in order to become a part of the modern subject. The impossibility of the sexual encounter between the male lab technician and the mermaid’s scaled bottom half highlights the tenuousness of this transition to modernity. Although subjected to the erotic gaze of science, this hybrid object remains forever capable of a narcissistic withdrawal. Bound to the inhuman realm of the sea, the captive mermaid remains just beyond the penetrative desire of her human master.

Gaga peers into the pool of Narcissus in “Yoü and I” and becomes mesmerized with the multiple and hybrid origins of a self which is not one. The splitting of her bride into a multiplicity of hybrid figures represents a renewed critique of the Freudian concept of narcissism that stems from Ovid’s myth of the Greek hunter fixated until death on the beauty of his own image. Returning to an early stage of childhood development, the narcissist according to Freud withdraws his or her libidinal energy from the external world and transforms the self into the sole object of erotic interest. Freud draws the following now infamous consequences in the essay “On Narcissism” (1914):

We have discovered, especially clearly in people whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance, such as perverts and homosexuals, that in their later choice of love-objects they have taken as a model not their mother but their own selves. They are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object, and are exhibiting a type of object-choice which must be termed ‘narcissistic’. (87)

The heteronormative sexuality that ensues from Freud’s theory of narcissism merely extends the binary between self and other on which it is based. Gaga stages a return to the metaphorical landscape of her modern American self precisely in order to upset the subject and object opposition that gives rise to the binaries of man/woman, sadist/masochist, and self/other. In dramatizing the production of her self from ancient figures of hybridity, Gaga contributes to the effort of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida to reconceptualize the self as the site of irresolvable difference rather than reassuring familiarity. With her libido fixated on the mutilated objects of science that constitute her new ghostly self, Gaga discovers the possibility of converting the male agent of this subjectivizing process into a vehicle for her at once masochistic and narcissistic desire.

Beyond reinforcing the plural and transhuman makeup of Gaga’s latest persona, the golden phoenix in “Yoü and I” crystallizes the narcissistic withdrawal inherent in this origins narrative. After living for hundreds of years as brightly colored spectacle of the sky, this mythical bird would burn itself and its nest in order to produce an identical offspring. In response to the beheading of King Charles I during the mid seventeenth-century English Civil War, royalists printed the phoenix on the coin below to portray the ascent of Charles’ son as an inevitable consequence of the indivisible and divine sovereignty of the English dynasty. Gaga prints the same image on the back of her male lab assistant in the form a tattoo that becomes apparent only once he engages in an impossible sexual act with his captive mermaid. The marking of this lab assistant with an image of a creature he holds in bondage further underlines his role as a mere agent of the masochistic desires of those he imprisons. Without parents, Gaga’s ghostly bride emerges like the newborn phoenix from the violent consumption of the very objects that constitute her self.

There is no true “you” in “Yoü and I,” only a multiplicity of personas populating the landscape of a single self. The ghostly bride, however, occupies a privileged position within this panoply because she represents the ultimate object of longing that animates the form of the country ballad. As a human figure enshrouded in a veil of death, this bride and object of ideological longing exemplifies the monstrousness of a human subject that is never quite as familiar or human as some may like. In exposing the construction of this bride from mythical creatures of history, Gaga insists that even the most seemingly complacent of contemporary subjects are intimately connected within the depths of their subjective interiority to the strangest and most distant of creatures. Rather than piously directing her libidinal energy towards her male savior, this unruly bride transforms him into the sadist agent of her masochistic and narcissistic desire. She withdraws into the landscape of her quaint American self in order to recover the supreme pleasure of her perverse and painful origins.

Author Bio:

Spencer Jackson is a lapsed communist and doctoral student in Comparative Literature at UCLA. He works on early modern English literature as well 20th century philosophers such as Foucault, Deleuze, and Bataille. He has an essay in a recent SubStance and a forthcoming one in Studies in Romanticism.

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Oh Jo, Make Me a Cyborg

By Samantha Cohen

The following is the fifth piece in our series on Lady Gaga’s “Yoü and I.” For previous analyses, click here.

This year for my August 16 birthday, Gaga released a fantastical-violent video-world containing my favorite things: cyborgs, “nature,” mythical creatures, dolls, Jo Calderone. Also on my birthday, a friend sent me excerpts of Martin Buber’s essay I and Thou. The umlaut on “Yoü and I”’s “u” makes me almost think that Gaga intends for me to connect her video with the German essay, and I’m going to. Also, I’m going to argue that Gaga creates a world in which real love involves violence and objectification; a world in which cyborg love is the best kind.

So okay, Buber says that an individual person has no spirit – spirit exists only in the connection between two people. And the lovers in “Yoü and I” do animate each other, make spirit together, etc., but also something else is happening here. Buber laments this something else. “All response,” he says, of a You to an I, “binds the You into the It-world” (1). The beloved, in other words, never escapes becoming an object.

But in “Yoü and I,” as opposed to in I and Thou, objectification and spirit-making are part of the same process of becoming.

The world of the “Yoü and I” video challenges the idea of the natural: who can say that the fields are natural while they’re traversed by a cyborg? Who can say that anything’s natural in a world that contains mermaids and phoenixes? In becoming an object in “Yoü and I,” the beloved takes her place in the world; she takes on a set of constraints within which to create, to act in a world of other constructions.

“Yoü and I,” obviously, is about relationships. We see a lot of them. I’m going to go relationship-by-relationship below, discussing the spirit-making/objectification in each.

CYBORG GAGA

The video opens on an already-object Gaga – Cyborg Gaga. Cyborg Gaga has obviously already gone through a relating process that has both turned her into an object and given her the spirit that enabled her to disappear (in order to make art?) for two years.

Cyborg Gaga sets up early the pain and the necessity of becoming an object. The lanyard straps of her high heels are cutting her, making grotesquely bruised and bleeding ankles, yet she’s returning to Nebraska for a man who wants her “in a corner of (his) bar with (these) high heels on.” She’s returned to re-undergo the bloody process of objectification. Cyborg Gaga craves to be an object, and thus to be re-animated.

The lyrics also reveal Cyborg Gaga’s desire to be an object in that she’s returning specifically in order to be her lover’s “baby doll.” In the world of this video, we see that baby dolls are not innocent. The baby doll in the video’s intro is displayed by a ghoulish ice cream truck driver, and Cyborg Gaga’s reactions are both to nuzzle the doll to her face, as well as to wince and cower from it. I read these opposite reactions as illustrative of Gaga’s desire to both be and possess a love object, as well as her fear of the painful process of transformation.

JO CALDERONE AND NATURE GAGA

So I want to argue that Jo Calderone is not a hetero man but a queer butch or else a drag king. Mostly my rubric for this is the same know-it-when-you-see-it approach that my high school English teacher claimed applied to both good writing and pornography, but also, I’ll turn to Judith Halberstam. Halberstam makes a distinction between “Butch Realness” and “Femme Pretenders” (classifications I might change to simply “butches” and “drag kings,” as I think drag needs some degree of camp in order to qualify, and also that it’s problematic to use some kind of “natural” butch- or femme-ness to make distinctions between “real” drag and “pretend” drag, but I’ll use Halberstam’s terms). Halberstam says that we can recognize “Femme Pretenders” by “heavy eyebrows…deliberately overdone” (check), and by poses that are “deliberately, loudly theatrical and even parodic” (check, check). Jo’s beer bottle throwing, snarl, shoulder action, and anachronistic greaser style mark him, I think, as queer. Along with the spelling of his name, the typically female Jo rather than the male Joe.

The queerness of Jo and Nature Gaga’s relationship is important in this video because it demonstrates that objectification is part of all love relationships, not only heterosexual/heterosexist ones – that feminism will not lead us to a world without human-objects, nor should we want it to, for reasons I’ll get to soon. Objectification between Nature Gaga and Jo comes, though, through consensual BDSM, which is not fully enacted here, but is clearly suggested, I think,

We see Gaga’s consent in this relationship when she slaps Jo’s hand away playfully, showing her agreement to enter into a relationship of slapping/grabbing, as well as asserting her agency not to be slapped or grabbed. The violence in this relationship is ironic and playful, while also doing the necessary objectifying work.

Jo, too, is aware of his own object status. He poses and postures, greases his hair and rolls up his sleeves for Nature Gaga. (And for us. Mm.)

So here’s why, according to Donna Haraway, we shouldn’t want not to be objects: Haraway describes the cyborg condition as a shift from “white capitalist patriarchy” to “informatics of domination” within “a post-gender world” (3). Her A Cyborg Manifesto critiques the feminism of the 70s that would have goddess-women frolicking in a field, howling at the moon. The earthy nature goddesses in “Yoü and I” may be free, but ultimately they’re prancing in circles in boring nightgowns, incapable of real action in the object/cyborg-world. By opting out of objecthood, they’re opting out of personhood. They barely interact with each other, making them spiritless, Buberianly speaking. They do not sing.

Through objectification and playful domination, it seems, Jo Calderone has rescued Nature Gaga from her fate of field-prancing and brought her into the It-world, which is where she is able both to have a love relationship, and to make music. We see, near the almost-BDSM moment, Nature Gaga running fierce and determined toward the camera, away from the coven of goddesses. Also just after that moment, Gaga is playing the piano with more animation (spirit) than before, and her body movements take on a robotic (cyborgian) quality.

VIRGIN BRIDE GAGA AND HER HUNK

Let’s contrast the kind of objectification and domination between Jo and Nature Gaga with those practices between the video’s traditionally patriarchal couple: Virgin Bride Gaga and her Betrothed.

The wide-eyed and worshipful Virgin Bride Gaga is being treated as an object, but she isn’t aware of her status as such. Virgin Bride’s Betrothed unwraps her possessively, engulfingly, but Virgin Bride Gaga hasn’t consented, as Nature Gaga has, to the terms of her objectification – she’s too innocent to be capable of consent. Though the bride’s Hunk enacts the least amount of physical violence on his love object of any of the video’s lovers, he is somehow the creepiest. There is no question of future violence toward Virgin Gaga, and not seeing it only makes it more menacing. This video has already established a world in which no one is innocent. Virgin Bride demonstrates that innocence is not a thing to strive for, as innocence only means surrendering to objectification without really consenting.

Besides being childlike, Virgin Bride is ghosty and ethereal. She’s see-through. And I see her see-through wedding as a critique of the flimsy love narrative propagated by popular media – a critique of the idea of love as cute and non-violent and transcendent. The sweet, transcendent love between a virgin bride and a strapping hunk does not exist in the actual world of this video: in this video-world, in order to transcend, you have to become a ghost.

RELATIONSHIPS IN THE BARN

For me, the world of the barn is a world of metaphor, an unconscious world. Here, there are more incarnations of Gaga than I can confidently count (it’s unclear who is the same self and who is Other) and time passes nonlinearly, as in dreams. (Is the black-haired Gaga in a water chamber, for example, pre-mermaid Yuyi, or a failed attempt at mermaid making, or something else all together?) Is the male lover person creating or caring for these hybrid Gagas? The barn represents visually and non-logically what is happening in all the video’s relationships: object-creation, unspeakable violence, tenderness, love, myth-infusing, hybridity.

CLOSING THOUGHTS & CYBORG GAGA, AGAIN

Buber says, “Only silence toward the you…leaves the You free. Where Buber seems to present this leaving-the-beloved-in-silence as a non-option (or a tragic option?), in the world of “Yoü and I” the leaving, optimistically, is an option. We see the Is in this video leave their Yous free via silence here: Jo postures and puffs and looks at the sky, leaving Nature Gaga free to experiment with her music. When her lover leaves, Mermaid Yuyi flips her tail excitedly and has little moments of exultation in her new objecthood. And Cyborg Gaga has left for two years, she says, imaginably to be in a free and silent state, but is now returning for more objectifying love. Solo freedom, it seems, is the other side of object-love, but the free in this video are relation-made objects already. In this world, Spirit-imbuing objectification-love can happen, and then silent freedom, in cycles that range from a song bar to two years.

At the end of the video, we see Cyborg Gaga’s face, and it is the first face in the video that we trust, that isn’t menacing or empty in some way, and we realize that this is because we, the viewer-lovers, have created Cyborg Gaga. She is our object. By watching, we are guilty of this process of objectification-love, but also we are responsible for making Gaga possible – for entering into the relationship that makes the spirit by which she creates.

Works Cited:

1) Buber, Martin, and Ronald Gregor. Smith. I and Thou. New York, NY: Scribner, 2000. Print.

2) Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. London [u.a.: Duke Univ., 2006. Print.

3) Haraway, Donna Jeanne. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. 2009. Print.

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Part of Yüyi’s World

By Alexander Cavaluzzo

The following is the fourth piece in our series on Lady Gaga’s “Yoü and I.” For previous analyses, click here.

Yüyi the Mermaid was introduced to the public imagination when choreographer Laurieann Gibson leaked a faint notion of the concept for Lady Gaga’s music video “The Edge of Glory”: “I just know that we’ll be feeling very fishy.” The ichthyologic teaser was enough to spark speculation that Gaga would be appearing as a mermaid in her next video. Of course, even after a performance on the French talk show Le Grand Journal where she first unveiled her aquatic alter ego, Gaga remained bipedal throughout “The Edge of Glory” video. The hype surrounding Gaga’s mermaid guise laid out on an operating table and hacked by couture doctors was never brought to fruition. Nevertheless, the specter of Yüyi still lurked and continued to develop via tweets, live performances, and, finally, an appearance in the “Yoü and I” music video.

She perfectly summates Lady Gaga’s project thus far, combining the spectacle of The Fame, the demonic metaphor of The Fame Monster, and the dichotomy of living halfway between reality and fantasy of Born This Way. She’s not a sultry siren floating through the crystal clear waters of a blue lagoon; she’s a grotesque aberration, a welding of woman and fish, inelegantly lying on a slab, carting herself around stage in a wheelchair, or writhing in a filthy bathtub. Her tail is a squamous stub, a black latex taper with an overgrown, misshapen flipper, or a braid of scales concluding in a filiform fin. A squamous bra fuses her breasts together and erases her nipples. In exploring the creation, both literally and figuratively, of Yüyi, she bears more relation to P.T. Barnum’s strange Feejee mermaid than Disney’s beautiful Ariel (The Little Mermaid [1989]) or Daryl Hannah’s sexy Madison (Splash [1987]).

Barnum’s sideshow creation, touted as an authentic mermaid, was nothing more than a hoax (as sideshows often are), the creature in question being the taxidermied upper-body of a monkey sewn to the tail of a fish, dipped in papier-mâché for good measure. Meant to lure ignorant consumers and spectators into the show for their patronage, Barnum exploited mythology and disfigurement in the name of commerce. Scholar Stephen T. Asma, in his book On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, relates Barnum’s hoax to our contemporary cultural condition of ostracizing those who do not fit in with archetypical social structures, be they gender, sexuality, aesthetic representation, or biological functions. He says,

In Barnum-style hucksterism, we have completely fabricated monsters, such as the Feejee Mermaid, but also real disabled or abnormal individuals who were cloaked in fabricated exotic narratives. Often those fabricated narratives had implicit (and explicit) moral and political significance (Asma, 140).

In applying this theory to Yüyi and extending it to Lady Gaga overall, her transgressive nature and embracement of “the freak” typify the moral and political significance of abnormal individuals, and, in a way, reject the strictures and labels placed upon them (Corona, 2). The utilization of the wheelchair, while initially purely functional, bonds the creature specifically with handicapped individuals and even sufferers of Sirenomelia. Naturally this is nothing new, as many performers have exploited transgressive performance tactics to comment on mainstream society. However, none of these performers have over 12 Million followers on Twitter, music videos with over 1 Billion views, and constant attention in a 24/7 news cycle. Why has someone who so vigorously performs the monstrous, who impersonates men and mermaids, become so popular?

As Asma suggests, “Monsters were intrinsically exciting but also extrinsically useful in giving audiences a sense of relief and possibly even gratitude about their own station in life” (Asma, 140). This may account for Gaga’s initial rise to fame, when she did not yet tout life-affirming messages of acceptance, but rather bled on stage at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards while singing about celebrity voyeurs. She made the celebrity an exciting spectacle, a freak at which all normal people could gawk. She still does that, although the shiny sequined shell of The Fame has cracked and given way to a new pop organism that headlines a new race instead of a new trend.

In this exploration of Yüyi as a biological extension of Gaga’s persona, it’s clear that it comes to a pinnacle through bestial intercourse. While the iconography of the mermaid is explicitly sexualized, even in Gaga’s incarnation, there is a logical dissonance with the creature as an object of desire. They may be alluring, seductive, and provocative, but mermaids in effect neutralize sexual activity, as it is impossible for coitus to occur between man and fish. This doesn’t stop Yüyi’s human lover from having sex with her, of course, adding to the confusion and blatant disregard for boundaries Lady Gaga engenders.

Gaga’s lover, portrayed by Taylor Kinney, dominates her to the point where he becomes her master. He administers oxygen to her via a mask and pours water over her in life-sustaining acts. He keeps her immobile, trapped in an aluminum tub in the middle of a barn in the landlocked state of Nebraska. Is this her savior? As Gaga tweeted, Yüyi is “a reincarnation of my birth+artistic spirit. In incubation, awaiting a human lover to save her…” Where was Yüyi incubating? Within Gaga’s creative unconscious? Within a barn in Nebraska? And how does her lover save her? There is no doubt Gaga is feeding into the cultural mythology of the mermaid figure, mirroring Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the little maiden of the sea who barters her voice in order to attain companionship and humanity. For Anderson’s character, of course, the story ends in heartbreak: she does not marry her prince and consequently dissolves into sea foam. Yüyi is a bit more Disneyfied, ultimately forming a union with her lover, her creator, her Dr. Frankenstein, both in their final embrace in the bathtub and the wedding scene, where Gaga sports teal blush, tying her to Yüyi.  

Just like Jo Calderone and the Lady herself, Yüyi draws upon precedents established in mythology, literature, music, and film. Originating in Assyrian legend circa 1000 BC, the mermaid has existed as a staple of crypto-zoological lore. The image has been continually re-appropriated by popular culture, and in her own way Yüyi pays homage to many of the depictions of mermaids that preceded her.

Her second performance of Yüyi in Sydney sparked mild controversy when Bette Midler reacted by tweeting, “Dear @ladygaga Ive [sic] been doing singing mermaid in a wheelchair since 1980-You can keep the meat dress and the firecracker tits-mermaid’s mine.” Midler was referring to her own alter ego Delores Delago (which, interestingly, means “Pain of the Lake”), a mermaid in a wheelchair act that she has performed since 1979 in several of her shows. The “fight” fizzled out as quickly as any trivial news story, and it would come as no surprise that Gaga would stage a re-performance of a cult figure. Surprisingly, though, Lady Gaga responded to the controversy a few days after the Divine Miss M’s tirade, pleading ignorance to Access Hollywood:

I didn’t know that she’d done [it], but I do now and I think it’s great…Obviously I feel connected to women in theater and women from the past … Maybe we’re just cut from the same cloth. I couldn’t hop around in that tail so I just stuck myself in a wheelchair.

That seems like a reasonable enough explanation, although considering the uniqueness of the staging, it might provoke further inquiry into whether she was truly ignorant of the character. Ultimately the research would be fruitless since authorial intent does not have supremacy over readings, and since Yüyi in practice confounds logic to begin with. She has little thematic development, she has inexplicable sex with humans, she has no clear demeanor attached to her monstrous flesh.

This is perhaps the most important aspect of Yüyi: she exists primarily as a visual representation of the female monster. Lady Gaga’s creation of the mermaid figure inextricably binds woman and monster, a relationship that has permeated the arts and philosophy for centuries. One of the most infamous demons featured in the Christian Canon is Lilith, a monstrous female associated with storms, illness, and death (Isaiah 34:14). While only mentioned tangentially in the Scriptures, Lilith is a figure prominently displayed among many cultural mythologies, dating back to ancient Sumerian tradition. While historically Eve is credited as the first woman created by God, there is evidence that suggests there was another before her (Genesis 1:27). The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a satirical medieval text, states that God created Lilith from the earth, as He did with Adam, before the creation of Eve. When Lilith refused to become subservient to Adam, as she believed them to be equals cut from the same cloth, God sent three angels to retrieve her and then created Eve from Adam’s rib. While both stories have receded into mere folklore, the exploration of the two females in Christianity prompts an interesting dialogue regarding the association between demons and the female sex.

Marie-Hélene Huet draws from Aristotelian theory to suggest, “The monster and the woman…find themselves on the same side, the side of dissimilarity” (Huet, 85). Just as, she writes, demons are engendered due to the power of a mother’s imagination during pregnancy, usurping the place of the father as progenitor, Eve is deformed when she is birthed from Adam’s body (Huet, 85). She is dissimilar from man. Eve is not, however, dubbed a “demon” as Lilith was, in spite of the fact that Lilith was not the distorted offspring of a human. This concept of the monstrous birth repeatedly factors into Lady Gaga’s self-creation, alter egos, and her femininity and feminism. Especially in “The Edge of Glory” video, while sans Yüyi, Gaga displays her embracement of perhaps mythology’s most famous female monster, Medusa, in her bearing of Versace’s emblem.

Huet continues in her discussion of the monstrous imagination by examining the etymology of the word “monster,” deciding that it stems from the Latin monstrare, meaning “to show, to display.” She claims, “This tradition confirmed the idea that monsters were signs sent by God, messages showing his will or his wrath…” (Huet, 87). Demonic imagery acts as a reminder to faithful Christians of the dangers of sin and defying God’s word. This idea stems from the story of Original Sin, in which Eve plights humanity for her disobedience to God’s strictures, cementing the connection of the woman and the demon. The theory that the word “monster,” now inextricably bound with Gaga’s narrative, comes from a verb expressing the action of presentation and exposure illustrates how she uses spectacle as a tool in uncovering the monstrous aspects of the human psyche, exposing them to literally millions of people in hopes to reveal the lie and make it true.

Yüyi exists as a metaphor, manifesting all facets of her personality, in an attempt to make “this complex + incomprehensible force to be true” through acceptance of all personas, elements and processes of being, the incomprehensible force being the cultural phenomenon of Lady Gaga, a continuing effort designed to marry reality and fantasy and exist simultaneously in both.

Works Cited

Asma, Stephen T. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Corona, Victor P. Memory, Monsters, and Lady Gaga. Journal of Popular Culture 44(2): 1-19.

Huet, Marie-Hélene. Monstrous Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1993).

The New Jerusalem Bible. Ed. Susan Jones. New York: Doubleday, 1985.

“The Story of Lilith,” JewishChristianLit.com, http://jewishchristianlit.com//Topics/Lilith/alphabet.html

Author Bio:

Alexander Cavaluzzo (@AleksandrJohn) is a Fashion-Sexual and unpaid laborer at Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine and the art blogazine Hyperallergic.com. He graduated with a BS in Art History from the Fashion Institute of Technology and is an MA candidate in the Arts Politics program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. On the occasional nights when he is drunk on Jameson, he blogs at alexandercavaluzzo.tumblr.com. His lifelong dream is to become the intelligent version of Camille Paglia.

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HER AND ME

By Devin O’Neill & Mrs. O’Neill

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

We’ll begin colloquially, since the video takes place in the country.

Having little bits of metal implanted in your face and arm fucking hurts. In fact, the entire video hurts. Even the shot of her high heels looks painful, though nothing’s involved but dirt, grass and shoes. Maybe that’s saying something about high heels. Maybe that’s saying something about a lot of things.

Women are cyborgs. People in relationships are cyborgs.

Donna Haraway basically seemed to think that anything that could be parsed as two interlocking systems could be deemed cybernetic, because the distinction between the “natural” and the “artificial” didn’t mean much to her. But we see the violation of the body’s boundaries in this video and in general, in terms of cybernetics, as painful. Robocop did not look comfortable, and neither does Gaga. What does that mean about falling in love?

These implants aren’t the only painful situations in the video. There are allusions to restraint and suffocation – a mermaid outside of the water might have trouble breathing. Those prominent gills have nothing to draw in. She’s being taken care of, but a huge proportion of the scenes in the video look very uncomfortable.

There are two notable exceptions: her wedding scene and her scene with Jo Calderone.

These are worth looking at, firstly to discover if they actually are exceptions.

I can’t think about Jo without thinking about Carl Jung. The Anima and Animus, psychic shadow-personalities created from the repressed femininity in males and the repressed masculinity in females, that act at gateways, guides to the deep areas of the subconscious. The essentialist ideas implicit here cause problems, and I wouldn’t be so on board with them except for the problematic nature of Jo himself.

He’s male, and this makes him somehow different from all of Gaga’s other creations. He received an enormous amount of attention for this. Why?

Let me put this another way: Jo throws into stark relief the fact that all of Gaga’s other images and personas, while infinitely mutable, have all been decidedly female. She isn’t as amorphous as we thought. There’s something about men.

But here, at last, she gives us a man. And she has a very special relationship with this man.

Both Jung and Aliester Crowley would argue that an individual’s marriage to herself is one of the most self-actualized accomplishments in human psychic life. And that’s what Gaga’s giving us here. The force inside you that makes you fall in love, that makes the whole world seem aglow and full of butterflies? That comes from you, and gets projected onto the love-object. You can have access to that feeling whenever you want.

Is Gaga in love with Jo Calderone?

One would sculpt a male identity based on a male ideal. A possible answer is “yes”.

So we have her and Jo loving and doving in the cornfield. But we also have a very literal wedding taking place, with a gorgeous model, this acknowledgement of the other.

This other, though, is performing surgeries and violations of pornographic proportions on the pain-nerved body of our ingénue. The aggressive imagery stands in stark contrast to the upbeat rock and roll of the track. Why all the violence?

We have, here, the narrative of human love as process. Because Gaga understands something important about love, something blindingly obvious but something that often gets left out of the media’s portrayals and our own perceptions.

Love is pain.

Her example-narrative points us not to a single moment of love, the happy moment, the moment of butterflies, but to the entirety of romantic engagement as a process viewed in four-dimensional space. Five dimensional, even, because of all the layering of metaphor. Consummation is thrust in our face at the same moment as agony, and it’s all soundtracked by a rousing stomper of an uplifting track that closes Gaga’s religious statement of an album. She says, watch me get surgery performed, watch me experience pain and suffocation, and watch me do it triumphantly. Watch me get married, too. Watch me do it all at the same time.

Love and mating are engagements in which both systems involved must open to the interaction. Parts mesh, gears grind, and things get snapped off. Love is violence and collision; I’m sure Ballard would agree. Love is the creation of the cyborg, the amalgamation; it’s the ultimate surgery on our subjectivity. This is the surgery that’s being performed in the video, and whether the interaction is between Gaga and the other or Gaga and herself is ultimately immaterial – when say that we must come to love ourselves, the violence of a bifurcation has already taken place.

The oxygen mask offered to the mermaid. The splitting of the self. The longing, and the eternal gap, and the tiny, glorious moments of consummation we get. These processes are the reward for living and loving. The processes themselves. The entire picture, and the slow disassembly, throughout our lives, of the chrysalis of ourselves, the imprisoning neurosis of our own individuality. Learn to love, and learn to die. Be ready.

Grant Morrison has declared, in lectures and in writing, the end of the individual in favor of a kind of willful schizophrenia, the development of multiple personalities to avoid the ego’s calcification and lack of options toward being. What a charming idea: two of those multiple personalities could get married.

You can marry yourself.

But you can also marry somebody else. The meshing is never easy, and you do it at peril of the disruption of your current system of self. But this pain, this surgery, is celebrated by Gaga. This song is triumphant and liberating and the video should be viewed the same way; we should marvel at this gorgeous violation of becoming, we should glory in the dirty obscenities of love as thoroughly as we celebrate its beauty. The video forces us to confront both sides of the coin at once. It’s a tesseract diagram of how to love, and we should not just examine it. We should go beyond that, and examine our own lives, loves, and pains in the same way. In five-dimensional hyperspace, the way they actually exist. They’re beautiful that way.

Photographs and video from Devin and Mrs. O'Neill's honeymoon album.

Author Bios:

Devin O’Neill is a writer, performance artist, PR practitioner, and compulsive liar. He enjoys things he shouldn’t, on purpose, and tries to get other people to enjoy them too. Some of his projects can be found at http://www.popocalypse.com/ and at http://devinoneill.blogspot.com/.

Mrs. O'Neill is a psycho.

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Bifurcation of the Simple

By Eddie McCaffray

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

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

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

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

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

Giant field of fertility metaphor

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author Bio:

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

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