Thursday, 5 April 2012
Wednesday, 4 April 2012
Saturday, 25 February 2012
Jetztzeit and the Messianic Skip of Gaga’s “Scheiβe”: I Don’t Speak German, but Benjamin Does
By Eddie McCaffray
The motif of “skipping” – of a phonograph’s needle or a CD player’s laser beam rudely leaping across the surface of a disk – dominates the song “Scheiβe.” Start from the beginning; play the song. “I don’t speak German but I can if you like, ow! – immediately one wonders what this declaration is apropos of. No one asked you to speak German Lady Gaga, did they? Who was even talking about German? The song just started! Right away, this song creates the feeling that we’ve begun in the middle of something, some other conversation. Something’s been skipped and now everyone is confused.
Then, Gaga’s German [begins 0:03]: incomprehensible gobbledy-gook, yet rhythmic and repetitive. Isn’t that how a CD sounds when it’s really stuck? Dzhep-dzhep-dzhep-dzhep, fhet-fhet-fhet-fhet? Next comes the churning, fuzzy, bass-synthesizer backbone [begins 0:19], and it too sounds like the beginning (or middle) of a thought. It’s resonant, suggestive, even begins to develop like music should before stalling out [example 0:23-0:27] and eventually resorting to repeating itself, to repeating its incomplete opening over and over again – the techno-organ line will do the same a little later [begins 0:41], when it appears. Then, the techno-scratching noises start up [begins 0:26]: they’re what first grabbed me, what first sounded like skipping, what pulled me into this impossible-to-consummate-feedback-loop of a song, of a creative project.
Because that’s where this is going: skipping isn’t just a weird, cool trash-aesthetic sound to build a dance banger around. As usual with Gaga (Stigmata), it’s a creative and ethical practice – even a principle, perhaps. It makes an argument, and it’s a way to do something. Not that we’re done tracing the motif in its simple appearance just yet, however. That was just a little taste of what’s to come. Maybe my essay is skipping a little bit itself.
Once we get into the lyrics proper, the skipping motif becomes explicit. “I’ll take you out tonight, say whatever you like. Scheiβe, Scheiβe be mine, Scheiβe be mine. Put on a show tonight, do whatever you like. Scheiβe, Scheiβe be mine, Scheiβe be mine.” Repetition interrupting itself. Then, the “I”s of the chorus: “I, I wish I got to dance on a single prayer, I, I wish I could be strong without somebody there,” almost as though Gaga is getting stuck on herself, on the self, on her own I. The last phrase then stutter-repeats into a reprise: “Oh, oh, oh, o-oh, without the Scheiβe yea,” Gaga’s voice becoming its own reflexive, diminishing echo. Next, the fragmentary return-and-modification of Gaga’s opening German declaration [begins 1:37]. Eventually, the stuttered “I”s and the fragment of “I don’t speak German but I wish I could . . .” blur together, distort, and literally skip [begins 2:46]. They’re even subsumed into the beat of the song itself. The whole sonic assemblage is reduced, or elevated, to a whirling blend of either not-quite or just-barely intelligible sentence (or musical) fragments, changing their order, recombining, and so on.
So what does this mean? What is the ethical or aesthetic meaning of all this skipping? The main message of the song is that Gaga wishes she could escape all the constraints and prerequisites of her actions: she wants to be strong – potent – without all the bullshit that invariably tags along. The conditions of her actions, or their results. The song itself is explicitly about this problem in terms of feminism or women’s rights; Gaga wants to be herself and do her thing without all this limiting, patriarchal malarkey. And skipping is, in fact, intimately related to this emancipatory struggle: when a fragment of music skips, it rejects its dependence on the principle and progression of the larger song.
Skipping is the rejecting of the intrinsic limitation that you can only sing or play the middle part of the song after the beginning part – or, for that matter, that one sound has to develop into a different-yet-related sound. Skipping puts the middle first, the beginning last, and it never ever gets to the end. Maybe it just plays one tiny part of itself, perhaps the tiny little part it likes best, a million times in a row; it feels no obligation to develop a musical or lyrical idea into its own implications, or to build such an idea out of what has already played, already appeared. The action of the skipping song rejects equally the concept of prerequisite and consequence. Skipping is a revolt both against diachronic development and against synchronic logic.
(It is also the revolt against a complete thought, or a finished identity. It is the musical equivalent of infinite births – of identity as an always-becoming, unfinished process. Born this way.)
Walter Benjamin articulated something similar to the concept of the emancipatory, disruptive skip in regards to (the music of) history:
Historicism contents itself with establishing a casual nexus of various moments of history. But no state of affairs is, as a cause, already a historical one. It becomes this, posthumously, through eventualities which may be separated from it by millennia. The historian who starts from this, ceases to permit the consequences of eventualities to run through the fingers like the beads of a rosary. He records the constellation in which his own epoch comes into contact with that of an earlier one. He thereby establishes a concept of the present as that of the here-and-now [Jetztzeit], in which splinters of messianic time are shot through.
Historicism – the understanding of time as regimented space, filled in evenly with reality, through which human subjects march, leaving the past behind and approaching the future – is Benjamin’s opponent here. What he proposes instead is that the historian, the human being, achieve a relationship with all the scope of history at each moment rather than dutifully marching along the route dictated to him by the historicist schema. Our pasts, the past of everyone and everything, is here with each of us in this present moment, and so too are our futures. We remember, we look ahead, but in doing so, those infinite expanses of time are contained within our looking, and our looking is always in the present, always fills the present.
Thus our own epoch comes into contact with that of an earlier one; Benjamin’s history is one which steps forward out of its dictated place, breaks ranks, moves laterally, reaching across an infinite distance of time and space to apprehend what it needs, what calls to it, what it finds a connection with. It rejects the principle of development. It rejects the constraint that conditions potency: “For in [Judaism’s understanding of time], every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter.” Every moment is the moment, of potency, of salvation, of emancipation.
Gaga recognizes this. That’s why this song – a plea or a desperate play for freedom – speaks out of the broken, all-encompassing space of the skip, out of a traumatic gouge on the shining surface of sound that refracts one beam of light into a thousand beams of light:
For Robespierre, Roman antiquity was a past charged with the here-and-now, which he exploded out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution thought of itself as a latter day Rome. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a past costume. Fashion has an eye for what is up-to-date, wherever it moves in the jungle of what was. It is the tiger’s leap into that which has gone before . . . the consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is peculiar to the revolutionary classers in the moment of their action.
It’s no accident that, in the second verse of “Scheiβe,” Gaga replaces the skipping lyric (“Scheiβe, Scheiβe be mine, Scheiβe be mine”) with “Express your womankind, fight for your right.” Emancipation speaks out of the gap opened in mechanism, in determinism, by the skip. The disjunction of linear time foiled, of torn plastic and screeching metal and leaping light, is a gap through which freedom bursts, a space from out of which all things are possible. In “Scheiβe,” Gaga is struggling to get stuck in that gaping void, that zero, that zone of pure potentiality, that nothing which allows for infinite somethings.
But the void is only ever possible as an incomplete or scrambled thought. Which is to say: it’s difficult to dwell there.
Author Bio:
Eddie McCaffray is a PhD student studying medieval history at Arizona State University. In addition to history, he likes philosophy, literature, and the Russian language.
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Tuesday, 21 February 2012
THE NEW FLESH
By Devin O’Neill
I watched the “Bad Romance” video the other day, the video that got me into Gaga. I wanted to see how it aged. So much seems to have happened in pop since 2009, the first time I jacked off to that video and cried because my artistic career was over and I now belonged to an Italian woman I’d never met.
When I first saw it, it felt razor sharp, fetishistic, and impossible to replicate. It had an unassailable countercultural credibility despite being blasted on the most mainstream content channels the mediaspace has to offer.
It still feels that way. Why? How does something this ubiquitous feel this edgy?
In answering this question, I’ll provide you with a step-by-step guide to producing your own art of the same shining, disruptive caliber. Be warned: if you follow my advice, there’s no escaping fame.
“There has to be danger, we have to instill a sense of fear in the audience, and ourselves. Rock’n’roll deserves that.”
–Trent Reznor
In order to properly engage constituent human fight-or-flight mechanisms, and thus compete for adrenaline-space in the hurricane gale of the new media, you must disrupt the environment of the viewer with cultural signifiers that do not have place in his ordinary threat-environment, and the best signifiers are linked to sex and violence, the beating and raping and subjugation of the identity; power and humility. All the old buttons in the monkey-brains of your viewers must be pushed relating to desire, social dominance, fear and territoriality. This is why the visual is so important – sounds can be driving, evocative, and terrifying, but our newest dangers and desires are so technologically complex that representing and then perverting them properly requires product-placement level symbolic dialog. Razor glasses, fetish gear, body auctions and golden prosthetics – if we can press the fear of wealth, fear of sex, fear of humiliation, fear of aggression, and fear-of-the-alien buttons all at once, our work is being done properly.
This cold, material danger should be balanced with vulnerability, which is just as terrifying. Appear unstable, and allow your audience to see the human weaknesses in you that terrify them in themselves, but surround those things with a matrix of blades. Place your fleshy, teary-eyed frailties in the mechanistic jaws of the modern landscape of value exchange, like a fairytale maiden guarded by a giant firebreathing dog with the heads of Donald Trump and Karl Marx. Cry very close to the camera, and twitch a lot before being taken and bound – you are out of control. You are human.
Push these two buttons in alternating rhythm for that is the rhythm of power.
Understand the visual language that soothes your viewer’s needs. They are soft, warm creatures with leaping rabbits of desire in their chests, and it is up to you to coax those rabbits out with sweet carrots before baring your aforementioned knives. Study pornography as scripture and understand advertising as prophecy – tear the creatures from your television screen to pieces with you teeth and cybernetically reintegrate them into a lover the viewer longs for with perverse prepubescent disney-movie recognition. Swathe the gloss of those forms, reeking of desire, in the haute couture of status, the unreproducible stink of exclusivity. This occult swings on the central secret of art and entrepreneurship – the fact that the reins of creativity and collage are in everyone’s hands. You will make idols of fabric sequin and mirror from your closet, and your followers will worship these idols – because they haven’t known the central mysticism, that they can program reality, that they can make their own idols. And then later in your career, in your biggest magick-trick of all, you’ll tell them.
No explanations are necessary. You must be a self-evident non-creature, a representative of mysteries the populace already suspects exist. You do not need purpose; your style is purpose in its subversion. Dick Hebdige said the purpose of the safety pin, in terms of punk rock, is to negate its own purpose. You will wallow in the decadent drug-technologies of civilization’s nonbeing, capitalistic desire fellating itself until its cum drains, withers, dies. By reconfiguring each object in your surrounding energy field to be repurposed, and so to be purposeless in relation to the religion of purpose’s consensus is-ness, you metastasize a new paradigm of purpose that does not require memory or regret. This is impossible solipsism but each milestone of headway you make will contribute to your Fame. Since the homeostatic mode of your capitalistic prison is production, consumption, exchange, value, you will fart in a glass bottle and refuse to sell your bottled fart. But people will want to buy it anyway. You will not regret this. You will regret nothing. Regret is a function of response to systems other than your own, systems with demands. Besides, people will not buy your fart. They will buy you, and then you will kill them. Eventually, they will love you for it. Eventually, they will realize that each semiotic boundary and stylistic taboo that you sacrifice on the altar of yourself is not representative of the funeral of a discreet object – they are only flakes of skin, skin that you are shedding, as you transform into something else entirely. You are an instruction manual to become yourself.
Those are your commandments. Read carefully, live courageously, and be a monster. But not a little one. Not anymore.
Author Bio:
Devin O’Neill is a writer, performance artist, and branding practitioner. 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 http://devinoneill.blogspot.com.
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Monday, 20 February 2012
Haus of Stigmata: Laurence Ross
Gaga Stigmata is thrilled to welcome Laurence Ross as one of our official Haus of Stigmata writers. Laurence holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama, and he lives, writes, and teaches in Tuscaloosa, AL. His essays have appeared in Brevity, Mason’s Road, The Offending Adam, Bluestem, and elsewhere. He has recently completed a tragicomic novel, Also, I’m Dying, rendered in three one-act “plays” in which characters deliver performances of crisis, apathy, education, vanity, alcoholism, sexuality, husband, wife, child, and anarchy, among other things.
We’re very much looking forward to featuring additional pieces by Laurence in the upcoming year. For now, check out what he’s already written for Gaga Stigmata.
On “Marry the Night,” and its creative/destructive möbius strip
Gaga must alter herself, and the creation of a new self necessitates the destruction of the old. And so Gaga destroys, takes up the box of Cheerios and dismantles it, washes herself in the milk (whiteness) and O’s (zeros/nothingness). She pours an innumerable amount of zeros over herself because there is nothing left. She opens her mouth, full of zeros, not to sing, but to show us she has nothing(ness) to say. That the Cheerios/zeros/nothingness is all that there is to see here. Gaga has lost it – it being the everything of the self, all that there was. Gaga is now nothing. As she sings in the song, “I’m a loser.” Gaga must be stripped to a naked nothingness so that Gaga may dress herself up again.
How “Yoü and I” continues the narrative of “Paparazzi” and “Telephone”
Despite the fact that Jonas Åkerlund did not direct “Yoü and I,” the video seems like the third chapter in a continuing narrative that the Åkerlund-produced videos “Paparazzi” and “Telephone” began. There is Lady Gaga’s glamour-infused romance (the result of which is death), Lady Gaga’s release from jail (the result of which is death), and then Lady Gaga’s escape to/return to Nebraska (the result of which is death). Yes, there is a repeated (rebirthed) theme, but there is also a (funereal) procession, a narrative extension on the discourse. Gaga leaves one man for another, moves from one prison to another, transitions from one state to the next. Gaga is continually killing one version of herself so that the next may be born, which implies two paradoxical sides of Gaga: one that wishes to live and one that wishes to die. “Yoü and I” simultaneously exhibits the separation (Lady Gaga and Jo Calderone) and the synthesis (Yüyi) of these two (seemingly) opposing sides of Gaga’s self. There is the Gaga who wants to be with the lover, submissive and secluded in the Nebraska barn, and the Gaga who wants to be the spectacle, the pop star, the one with agency.
Analyzing closely “88 Pearls”
At the close of the film, as Gaga and Koh place the final pearl in the teacup, Gaga says, “Let’s do the last one together.” Gaga and Koh, together, each take hold of the pearl, each one’s thumb and finger carefully joining to pinch a side, their pair of hands forming two rings, two circles, which, when joined (jointed) at the point (joint) of the pearl, form the figure eight, form yet another figure of infinity.
On the two videos for “The Edge of Glory”
There are two music videos for Lady Gaga’s newest single, “The Edge of Glory”: the one that exists and the one that does not. This is not exactly a lamentation for a reality that could have been. More so, this is a Borgesian analysis, a deconstruction of the imagined work, an essay at assaying the untaken path in the garden of forking paths.
Britney Spears : Lady Gaga
Sometimes a telephone is a means of escape (Gaga’s text to Beyoncé) and sometimes a telephone is a jail cell (“Callin’ like a collector”). Sometimes a pussy is a cat (Gaga’s cabdriver cat suit) and sometimes a pussy is a vagina (Venus’s symbol zeroing in on the Pussy Wagon in the final shot of “Telephone”). Sometimes a sandwich is lunch and sometimes a sandwich is a bit of dance choreography and sometimes a sandwich is poison – that’s the Wonder (Bread), the Miracle (Whip) of it all. And Lady Gaga exerts this freedom, this agency, over and over again. “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” (187), Stein tells us in her poem Sacred Emily (1922), a poem that creates a world where words and phrases are repeated to diminish meaning’s stability and to emphasize meaning’s permeability. And this world is the one Lady Gaga inhabits, a world where the meaning and identity of a person/place/thing are never stagnant, always changing. If Britney’s “Hold It Against Me” possesses Yeatsian echoes of a modernist looking backward in time, Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” possesses Steinian echoes of a Modernist looking forward to the Post-Modern, the dissolving of boundaries, binaries, and steel bars.
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Sunday, 19 February 2012
GAGA: A PORTRAIT
By Steve Giasson
Author Bio:
Steve Giasson is a multidisciplinary artist (conceptual poetry, video, performance, theater, photography, translation), who intends to transgress genres and undermine romantic notions of authenticity, authority and originality. He has sixteen books to his credit and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Étude et pratique des arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
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Saturday, 14 January 2012
GAGA : MANNING
By Eddie McCaffray, Devin O’Neill, and Meghan Vicks
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.
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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