By Eddie McCaffray, Devin O’Neill, and Meghan Vicks
May 25 or 26, 2010, 02:14:21 PM
Bradley Manning: listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltratrating possibly the largest data spillage in american history ...
Introduction
Lady Gaga’s music was used both as a mask and as a canvas when Bradley Manning downloaded classified national defense information: he lip-synced “Telephone” as the files were burned onto erased CD-RWs that originally contained Gaga’s album The Fame Monster. In effect, the “largest data spillage in american history” figures as a kind of digital palimpsest, comprised first of Gaga’s music erased, and then re-inscribed with the classified data. The leaked information carries with it the analog specter of Lady Gaga, and, in particular, an echo of “Telephone” – the latter features Bradley Manning as Gaga’s lip-syncing ventriloquist’s dummy who has come into its own consciousness, while the former positions Lady Gaga as the erased vessel upon which deadly and shameful state secrets are inscribed.
It’s a beautiful detail, but it is also incidental. This throw-away connection between Manning and Gaga probably deserves no more attention than that allotted in a footnote. Yet there’s something uncannily appropriate about this piece of trivia that places Lady Gaga hand in hand with Bradley Manning and his alleged crimes, appropriate not just in the context of Manning, Wikileaks, wartime acts, politics & aesthetics, and the public’s right to know (or the government’s right to keep secrets), but also in the context of Lady Gaga’s project – her anti-bullying campaign (DADT), identity aesthetics/politics, play with spectacle, manipulation through images, advocacy for equal rights, power grabs via pop, and rewriting of the past.
Image : Truth
Both Manning and Gaga demonstrate how uncomfortable we are with the image’s relationship to truth, albeit in dramatically different ways. Gaga embraces the spectacle as truth, heralds performance and construction of identity as one’s “born this way” birthright, rewrites her past as she wished it had been and declares that rewriting as her reality. In doing so, she eliminates distinctions between the essential and performative selves, between reality and fiction – completely implodes these binaries.
Most people think this is bullshit: they still operate in a system that opposes one’s birthed identity with one’s performed identity, and so they don’t get how one can simultaneously be a performance and “born that that way,” or how one can rewrite one’s past and thereby make it truer than its original lived experience.
So Gaga gets reamed for being a faker: she wasn’t born that way, they sneer; why can’t she just dress like a normal, real person? The irony is that Gaga’s performative birthed identity, and her insistence on the power of the image, are worshipped in the operations of the state. What people chastise in the pop figure (why can’t she just get real, cut the crap) are essential to the construction of the country’s identity. And what country performs freedom, human rights, and respect-for-life more aggressively than the United States? The country’s grandiose, ostentatious, chest-beating performance is the perfect analogy for that of Lady Gaga. But the point of Gaga’s project is to call attention to the performance as such, and to celebrate and uphold the performance as just as real as anything else not performed – and it is precisely here the comparison ends. If you try to make the country get real, to cut through its bullshit and show us how it really is, to show the nature of its performance, then suddenly you’re a traitor and a terrorist.
You’re Bradley Manning.
This distinction reveals something interesting about how performance and image function. Art and entertainment can thematize their use (and abuse) of representation. In fact, calling attention to itself as representation is a fundamental trait of art. But truth, especially of a political or ideological nature, and especially when called to exercise real power, must reject, deny, forget, and hide its nature as a constructed representation. Both art and politics require artifice, but where one requires that artifice to be recognized and discussed (art), the other requires that the artificial process be stricken from the record (politics). And when the distinction between politics and art is damaged or lost, the results are explosive.
The results are Bradley Manning.
The public has been given the palatable, performative version of the U.S. occupation of Iraq; they’ve been given the spectacle, and a rewritten, more-beautiful version of events as the U.S. government wished it had been. Sound familiar? But in this instance, the tables are turned: people take the side of the spectacle. Because neither the public nor the government want the real story about Iraq; they want safer images. No one wants to see that Apache Helicopter shooting Iraqi men and, later, children. But Bradley Manning wants you to see it cause he’s obsessed with the truth before it’s been rewritten: “i want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed de/cisions as a public.”
But nobody wants the truth, Bradley Manning. We all think we worship the truth, and we proclaim we love honesty and authenticity; meanwhile, the Enlightenment pushes us to illuminate any and all truths, Modernity witnesses those truths turn out to be monsters, and Postmodernity (sometimes) laments the nonexistence of truth. Even so, through this all, we adore the truth, but here’s the hypocrisy – I bet not one of us has the guts to really tell the truth about ourselves. Didn’t the Underground Man say this? It’s impossible to write a truthful autobiography, he hissed. And even if you manage to do so, it will look too ugly and vile and decrepit and … well … in short, it will be too repulsive that you’ll end up smudging, you’ll prefer a more “literary and beautiful” version of events – a performance, if you will – to the truth that probably resembles more an Apache helicopter gunning down men than a redeeming story about freedom and democracy. The truth? “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards.” “Nice.”
They destroy Manning for revealing the truth, but they sneer at Gaga for not being real, for celebrating the performance (lies) as truth. Do you understand why this is? Why do they loathe Lady Gaga (but she’s FAKE!) for what they require of the State (tell us sweet lies)?
Again, this is about the power of the image, and its relationship to the truth. Both Manning and Gaga demonstrate how complicated and urgent this issue is. And the apparently-happenstance nature of their conjuncture reveals that their positions on image/truth are two sides of the same coin.
“Telephone”
What is “Telephone” about? The lyrics are about someone fleeing the shackles, the hook-up, of a ubiquitous piece of modern communications technology. The video is about an uncontrollable, destructive principle (murder, public health risk, feminism), first captured and contained by society, but soon enough breaking free and rampaging across unsuspecting, defenseless, virgin Americana.
This is the song Bradley Manning listened to as he leaked information from SIPRNet (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network) – essentially the US Department of Defense’s classified military version of the Internet. Manning worked long hours in a dark room crammed with computers, files, and cables. He was very much at the beck and call of modern global communications, awash in e-mails and combat videos, sifting through reefs of documents, tripping over terminals, entangled in cables and cords. Much of the information horrified him and continuously forced him back to the moral dilemma he eventually solved with his leak. The frantic half-plea, half-declaration of “Telephone” – stop calling, stop calling – could hardly have been more appropriate.
At the same time, Manning fulfilled the other paradigm of the song (rather, of the video). He released carefully-controlled material on an unsuspecting (world) public. In the same way that Lady Gaga and Beyoncé tore across the countryside, Manning’s documents and videos raced around the world. They ignited controversy, caused embarrassment, and even – in the minds of his condemners at least – left the United States vulnerable to real attack: terrorism and sabotage of just the type depicted in the “Telephone” video.
Thus, Manning reveals the connection between these two “Telephone” paradigms. The (referential?) mania, the frantic, desperate madness inflicted on Manning by the constant bombardment of media found its natural response in his paroxysms of moral guilt and, eventually, confession. In an extreme version of what we all face in a telecommunication, audio-visual, hi-def-drenched world, Manning lashed out against the apparatus that endlessly subjected him to its profusion of chattering digital effluvia, and he did so in the only way that seemed natural: he turned its process back on itself. Manning took over the subject position – he stopped tuning in and started broadcasting. His reclamation of the seat behind the screen, instead of in front of it, was the greatest rebellion possible, which demonstrates just how powerfully image and truth are regarded in modern civilization. Manning’s punishment for this transgression will fit the weight given it by the civilization against which it was directed.
Trauma
In the worldwide economy of memory, perception, trauma, and communication, Bradley Manning is perhaps as sick, as dysfunctional, as schizophrenic as the big movers. If governments represent means that have supplanted the ends they were intended to attain (tyranny in pursuit of freedom, war in pursuit of peace, the strength of the state in pursuit of the common good), classifying first and asking questions second, keeping secrets habitually, reflexively, compulsively, what is Manning but the compulsive, obsessive insistence of trauma upon its own place in experience?
Perhaps this will be clearer if we take Lady Gaga’s “Marry the Night” video as a blueprint. Gaga is the country, or the world of people – the entity struggling to both know and live despite all indications that the two may be mutually exclusive. The story we get from our government, our military, and our media-entertainment complex – that’s the stable narrative of our experience, our memory. That story is the one that appeals to our desire to remember things “exactly as they happened” while forgetting the unpleasant parts; it claims to show us everything we need, leaving out the parts we can’t or don’t want to know and asserting that they aren’t really necessary to the truth anyway. We forget that we forgot. It’s the packaged deal in which the editing and plastic-wrap are both denied (it’s the true story) and a selling point (it’s deliberate, explained, legal, professional, entertaining, reassuring).
In contrast, Manning is the trauma, the shattered and disorderly train of remembering it with all those ugly parts included. He threatens, breaks, nauseates, compulsively vomits up what our covert media-apparatus of a government makes dangerous or unprofitable to remember. Manning and Wikileaks don’t offer a workable alternative; they represent a negative image of our obsessive-repressive cultural order, all the more dangerous and unstable because they are the scar-tissue of a violent and rigorous lifetime.
This is how Manning shows us that the system is broken, the massive multiple system of perception and memory and self-knowledge of a giant human community. Not because it has secrets or skeletons, not even because it punishes (and punishes him). What reveals this breakdown is the production of Manning and his actions themselves. He cannot negotiate, he cannot compromise, he cannot agree that some secrets should be kept and others brought to light. He can only demolish compulsive, manic secrecy with compulsive, manic exposure. The system produces two madnesses and no sanity.
Play
One of the central problematizing issues in the gradient of sanity between Gaga and Manning, and one of the fascinating ideological consequences of Wikileaks, is the extreme pornography of modern political entertainment. Gaga is an entertaining entity, and one of her goals is to entertain, to play. But there’s clearly also a playful element to WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange is clearly, on some level, enjoying himself and his trickster role. And we enjoy it too.
This dynamic is metastasized when fed into the news cycle, where Manning becomes an entertaining figure, a figure for cultural consumption, and his extreme penetration and exposure of the governmental body becomes a pornographic act. We can talk about the parallels between that and Gaga’s penetration of quotidian norms with her highly disruptive sexuality, but it may be even more interesting to place the two along a spectrum of degree: Gaga plays with certain semiotic memeplexes, rearranging large blocks of visual and aural culture into forms broken and terrifying and stimulating; Manning, in his neurosis, did the same with entire governments. I’m reminded of the shift in extremity of perception I experienced when I sat down to read Ballard’s Crash for the first time while eating a particularly messy sandwich – suddenly car crashes were porn, and porn never looked the same again. The “Telephone” video points in extreme directions, but Gaga’s never actually killed anyone. As far as we know.
The element of play and entertainment becomes even more inextricable when one considers Anonymous’ role in the defense of WikiLeaks. As an amorphous entity bounded only by the ideology of unrestricted “lulz”, their involvement and necessary disengagement through the mediation of cyberland turns the entire thing into a media event for them, albeit an interactive one with material consequences. Indeed, what we’re talking about here is all media: WikiLeaks and Manning dealt, fundamentally, in information. Do we have the authority to say that the ideological and material consequences of the release of that information outstripped the violence and deforming cultural influence of “Telephone” or Born This Way or Gaga just because the consequences were more linear, the effects traceable by government, the causalities more literal?
What is information composed of? What is art composed of? The obvious answer might be meaning, but that response does indeed reveal just why Gaga and Manning have both upended information and art. By scrambling the way meaning is supposed to operate, both have introduced new values into its economy: new principles of distribution, new combinations, new authorities. In Gaga’s sphere, that of art or entertainment, this scrambling, this play, can introduce confusion, irritation, even anger. It can also introduce all the new ideas that art, at its best, is concerned with: new ways of conceptualizing the economics of meaning and form, new ways of understanding or imagining beauty, or individuality, or whatever their opposites are. In Manning’s sphere, his revolutionary playful economics of meaning, his short-circuiting of the way information is gathered and distributed, has many of the same effects: it caused confusion, irritation, anger in the American people, in the American government and military, and in other governments as well. But it is also provoking, perhaps weakly, a re-evaluation of the rules of the form, of the genre – not of art per se, but of government, of war-fighting, of state secrets, of diplomacy.
We are taught that one of these two forms of play is acceptable, and one is not. One gets people killed, the other is a basic part of being a producing-consuming “free” subject. One is disruptive and dishonorable, the other is expressive and harmless – maybe even beneficial! Why the hell not! Just as long as we play in the sandbox we’re allowed in, and stay out of the other. The idea that any idea is acceptable for discussion is predicated on the distinction that the same is not true of any action. In this way freedom of expression functions as a release valve for all those pesky urges to actually do something. Concerned about the way things are going? Write your congressman! Or call!
But performative identity doesn’t work that way: there, the concept only exists in the action (and vice versa). Maybe the Manning/Gaga comparison indicates that we should stop treating art as the place to play around, get messy, distract yourself, it doesn’t matter anyway. Maybe it’s time for a little art in government.
Identity Politics
In many ways, Bradley Manning begins where Lady Gaga ends: she presents the safe, consumable, legitimate (even acknowledged and celebrated) version (proponent, iteration) of an ideology that Manning takes to an extreme. Perhaps Manning pushes so far that he loops around, ends up embodying something that is antithetical to Gaga? Gaga has, so far, performed compliance with, participation in, even something like confidence in and enthusiasm for the political process of American democracy. She’s met with politicians, given political speeches, celebrated the repeal of DADT. At the same time, there’s a real theme of viral anarchism and resolutely non- or anti-political activity in her work. The diner-murder scene, of course, but in a broader sense any project that conceptualizes the individual as Gaga’s does is bound to have grave ramifications for the idea of democracy: Gaga ridicules and de-centers Anglo-American liberal democracy’s individual when she emphasises its fake, trash-pop aspect, or she radicalizes the individual into a dangerously-fertile, unstable principle above any laws or norms. Radical art and continual transformation probably don’t mix very well with rational negotiation and the institutionalized representation of interests.
Taking the former half of Gaga’s circular project of aesthetic identity, Manning disregarded his own safety, his career, his future, and his reputation in carrying out such a dangerous and grave breach of confidentiality right in the belly of the beast. A state built on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has nothing to entice with and nothing to threaten when dealing with a little monster that understands itself as the glittery refuse of a global-political media complex. Taking the latter half, Manning identified himself with his act in an enlightening, even aesthetic way: he had to release the information, the videos, and damn the consequences because he was born this way – there ain’t no other way. His own principles, drives, beliefs, and experiences trumped what the established democratic system had decided should be done. Thus it’s hard – impossible – to correlate either “side” or aspect of Gaga/Manning identity politics with the territory staked out by modern democracy, because neither fits neatly into a straight pro- or anti-ideology. They’re both unresolvable, generative-chaotic principles that are inherently democratic, or at least modern liberal, in some ways, and anti- in other.
Thus, on the one hand, Manning’s actions are radically democratic: the people of the United States, of the world, have to know what their governments are really doing if any of those governments can really claim to be democratic. At the same time, Manning put his own perception and experience above that of the whole “system” – he took matters into his own hands in a unilateral, uncompromising, illegal, even secret way. This bi-curiosity vis-a-vis democracy and the Enlightenment project follows Gaga’s lead: the primary way that she empowers, praises, and defines that most sacrosanct modern concept – the individual – is to render it as meaningless/meaningfull as beautiful trash: worthless, limitless, monstrous, artificial, destined all at once. Is politics really possible with such people, who regard themselves as aesthetic projects, as little monsters? What are the concrete differences between understanding yourself as an aesthetic project and understanding yourself as a moral or ethical one?
Manning shows, quite literally and sacrificially, the weakness in Gaga’s project’s ability to be truly emancipatory. Accepting yourself as the detritus of fate, of gigantic inhuman systems, of birthright (or lack thereof) may lead us all along Bradley’s incarceratory trajectory. But perhaps the point isn’t to mobilize ourselves as a massive, well-trained, fanatical army in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness modeled conceptually on property. Perhaps a truly emancipatory project accepts the limited, contingent role of the “individual” in society, and spends more effort in transforming that individual in its relationship to its world than in mobilizing and manipulating quantifiable resources.
Other points to discuss:
● DADT; “gender confusion”
● Manning allowed one text in prison; he selects Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
● POLITICAL DRAG
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