By Meghan Vicks
The following is a companion piece to STIGMATAVISION 1: Holy Fool.
Cause it’s a hard life, with love in the world.
And I’m a hard girl, loving me is like chewing on pearls.
When Lady Gaga sings “I’m just a holy fool” in “Judas,” she succinctly articulates the status she now occupies. Meaning, the role of the “holy fool” fittingly describes Gaga’s aesthetic and, especially, how the public reacts to her. Traditionally, the holy fool embodies the most squalid and debased of men, and, at the same time, the most godlike and perfect of men; what is most glorified is present in what is most sullied. Likewise, as we’ve written ad nauseum here at GS (we believe in honoring our vomit, too), Lady Gaga is another such figure who places sacred and meaningful aspirations in the most dismissed and illegitimate of today’s cultural figures, the pop starlet.
As artists, we are eternally heartbroken.
But the “holy fool” may also perfectly describe this phenomenon of academic and creative studies on Lady Gaga, which, in the first place, seek to take Gaga seriously as a subject of academic discourse (that is, we bring what is often regarded as the trash of culture [e.g. pop music and performance] into the space of high culture [academia]), and, in the second place, aim to challenge our own epistemological foundations, to reconsider what legitimate scholarship looks and reads like, just as Lady Gaga has forced us to reconsider (once again) what legitimate art looks and sounds likes. And as Lady Gaga’s spectacle, like the Holy Fool’s, often ignites people to outrage, to throw stones at such a figure who would dare to challenge the lines between the sacred and the profane, so we here at Gaga Stigmata provoke our readers to lash out just by engaging in an academic project that studies Lady Gaga. Stones are thrown from both sides of the line: by those who think we’re reading “too much” into Lady Gaga, who think we should just enjoy her project for what it is (meaningless but fun! pop music, they say); and by those who think we’re misappropriating theory, sullying that sacred thought by applying it to Lady Gaga’s hairbow or her video for “Born This Way.” These are the ones who advise us to use our talents for something that “matters,” or who tell us how disappointed they are that all this energy is being spent on a figure like Lady Gaga. How many times have we been offered the philosopher’s straightjacket? We’re writing our way to Bedlam, sullying with glitter the Ivory Tower, or spoiling the lighthearted pop party with our persnickety analyses that unearth much more in “Just Dance” than a simple party song.
Do you know the feeling, when your heart is so hurt, that you could feel the blood dripping?
However, we maintain that people’s reactions to Lady Gaga and our readers’ reactions to Gaga Stigmata say a great deal about how challenging and meaningful a figure like Lady Gaga actually is, and tell us much about what academic study like GS does: that is, both Lady Gaga and Gaga Stigmata make us uncomfortable precisely because they dare our epistemologies to uphold themselves, they challenge what we know about culture, knowledge, art, politics, gender, academics, music, etc. They threaten our precious borders, forcing us to encounter the abject – that impossible and unthinkable ambiguity that resides on the outside, in “the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 2). Gaga and GS bring us face-to-face with “a ‘something’ that [we] do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes [us]. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, or a reality that, if [we] acknowledge it, annihilates [us]” (ibid). So we revolt (vomit), rage against their abject that so threatens our knowable world.
Of course, such reactions speak volumes about the public’s expectations of the pop star and academic discourse, but they are also, at times, a kind of sin. People self-righteously judge, call names, wish misfortune upon, condemn, censor, and lament both Gaga and GS. They throw stones, but do not pause to consider that maybe these stones are part of the point.
I don’t want the 5 dollars in your pocket, I want your soul.
A spectacle – either in pop music or in academic discourse – that forces people to react, that challenges basic assumptions, that merges the sacred and the profane. It is in this way that both Lady Gaga and Gaga Stigmata are reminiscent of the holy fool. For he resides precisely in the neverland between the sacred and the profane: he is the spectacle that performs against a Janus-faced background of official pomp of the state/church (//s academia) and ribald culture of folk laughter (//s Gaga). This notion of performance is central to both the hagiography of the holy fool, and to the popular understanding of the figure: his foolishness was often seen as his choice, as a willful acceptance of humiliation and suffering. His folly was therefore a deliberate spectacle of self-debasement, an intended kenotic performance through which his self was emptied and relinquished for the sake of the salvation of others.
The effects of this spectacle were many in form and single in intent – to variously bring the spectators closer to the divine. One desired effect was to lead the audience directly into sin, to encourage their taunts and abuses of the fool. The fool would then ask God’s forgiveness for their sins: “The ‘madman’ prays for forgiveness for his fellow ‘madmen’” (Murav 25). Another effect was to unmask and stage the degraded state of humanity, and its concurrent need for redemption. Again, the fool’s performance and spectacle comes to the forefront. A third effect was to provide a site of resistance against official culture in the figure of the fool. In all, the holy fool’s inverting and inverted figure and performance do not simply intend to demonstrate the relativity of existence, but endeavor to draw the sacred to the debased human world.
We are not just Art for Michelangelo to carve, he can’t rewrite the agro of my furied heart.
In the past few months leading up to the release of her sophomore album Born This Way, Gaga’s been repeatedly saying, “let the cultural baptism begin.” It’s time, she tells us, to clean culture of its sins, and Gaga herself is the kenotic figure through which this will happen. Like the holy fool whose spectacle reveals society’s degradation and actively affects its spectators, drawing them in and forcing them to react to the degraded culture embodied in the holy fool, ultimately rousing them to sin against him so that he can pray for their redemption, so Gaga provokes and challenges us, causes many of us to sin against her precisely so that the culture as a whole may be baptized – emptied of its sins through Gaga, who forces their release upon her figure. She invites us to stone her: rage against Gaga, so that she can cry for us. Empty your hatred upon her, so that she can pray for your redemption. The point is, the stones are necessary for the baptism to take place – the cultural baptism cannot occur if people keep hidden their various sins, prejudices, and hatreds. All these must be purged (vomit, again) in order for cultural cleansing.
I want the deepest, darkest, sickest parts of you that you are afraid to share with anyone because I love you that much.
We perform the role of the holy fool as well, finding the highest, most sacred meaning in this free bitch who makes millions singing pop music and trotting her bare ass all over creation. Our writings threaten some readers, forcing them to sin. And we shed tears. It therefore happens that stigmata of Gaga’s wounds have begun to bleed through our writings, strangle our words. Gaga Stigmata is shedding its italics, becoming literal, corporeal stigmata. We embody her – our criticism takes on her flesh and tears; we vomit her puke.
Like Kate in STIGMATAVISION 1, we break out in Gaga’s rash. It’s physiological, not just mental, this reaction/relationship to Gaga. This art/criticism makes us anxious precisely because it forces us to dress in our former wedding attire and confront those ideas/people/ideals to which we were once wedded and now can no longer be. We’ve evolved, and the blood spilling from our words and onto our wedding dresses is proof of the growing pains.
We work, so maniacally, to reconsider and revise what academic writing does and looks like, while loving so sincerely (like a spouse, maybe) the academy. We also love Lady Gaga, so much that when she bleeds on stage we feel blood soaking through our shirt, replacing the ink in our pens as we write our research. But we remember that love is like a brick, which is a lot like a stone – it can also build a house or sink a dead body.
Prejudice is a disease. And when they come for you, or refuse your worth, I will be ready for their stones. I belong to you.
So throw your stones: give us this day, our daily Scheiße. We’ll take it to the Electric University, light it up in those ivory halls. Let the academic baptism begin.
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