Negative Capability

Last night I dreamt I was talking to Lady Gaga. She was having a having a bad wig day. As she sirened robotically, a telephone was superglued to her forehead.

I don’t mind confessing I’m not a fan of her latest. The fetishism, the pussy mobile and posions of the Telephone video are a tad perverse for my liking. So why the dream? The video is iconic with its filmic references and hyperreal posturing. Her freaky personas are supposed to revision identity. Yes, she is talented, very pretty, fame-driven, (I do really admire her zeal, and I have nothing against latex.) But I find her transgressions of the norm are stereotyped, repetitive forms of alterity, in which difference is removed by the insistence on deviation as performance. Her videos raise awareness of gender-based differences, but her differences are a sameness because no space is left for what lies beyond the act, the possibilities of image or of what exists outside the limits of consumption. A media monster, she dares to be consumed by her consumption. I’d like to see her reinvent herself within her own frame. Comparisons are inevitable with Madonna; consider the following lyrics from the song “Justify My Love”:

“Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another,”

Madonna seems comfortable with her identity. Madonna inspires us to be liberated, and empowered, whereas Gaga clones us into female Frankensteins. The video might sell a cool ten million but the song is pure bubblegum.

Lady Gaga embodies what the German philosopher Adorno described as “the fetish character of women,” Denatured by history, women function as an agency for commodity and, are in particular subject to the use and exchange value of capitalism. Adorno was critical of the way in which capitalism becomes entrenched, undermining individual critical consciousness, as people become docile and content, regardless of their economic circumstances. Culture, according to Adorno, produces false needs which are satisfied only by utility and acquisition, while the individual’s true needs for freedom, happiness and dignity become secondary. No offence, but I think Gaga epitomises the pseudo-individual, who seems unique but is actually no more than the standardised product concealed under a manipulation of taste and a pretense of individualism. Her preoccupation with self-image desexualises her. She is the spectacle, the illusion, the parody and the paraphernalia. We, the mesmerised masses, are not the measure or the subject, but the entire ideology, the object of a culture industry that divas like Gaga, Beyonce, Rihanna et al, are supposedly attempting to critique.

What’s really scary is when commodity infiltrates writing. Literary taste becomes manipulated and the homogenised monoculture infiltrates in the guise of pseudo-individuality, and pseudo-consciousness. With the explosion in electronic and broadcasting media, publishing has become increasingly trade-oriented, dictated by the production of culture. A literary exclusion pervades, pretexted by hype, by coteries, dynasties, academies, creative writing institutions. The burgeoning literatures at times fall short of innovation and self-expression. The author is becoming a pseudo-individual, who can no longer afford to subtract the social context as a new language, a new idiom, a new form, a new consumer is being programmed for consumption. So the discrepancies widen, between worth and value, as meaning becomes dispersed and our literatures are increasingly fetishised.

But I digress and conflate. You see, I too suffer from robotic delusions and cultural posioning. I left my head and my heart in the pages of a book and I’m piecing them together. It’s a book littered with language, that won’t stop talking.

Ref: see letter from Theodor Adorno to Erich Fromm 1937 on the fetish commodity of women

For critical writings, see http://gagajournal.blogspot.com/ edited by Kate Durbin and Meghan Vicks