GAGA : MANNING

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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Traductor, Traditore: (Un)translating Born This Way’s Duplicitous Message

By Samantha Cohen

It’s taken a long time for me to respond to “Born This Way.” It took a long time for me to watch the video, even. The first time I heard the song, I had to close its window before it ended. Oh Gaga, I thought. No.

Maybe it is silly, embarrassing even, to have such a prolonged emotional response to a pop song. To be actually saddened. But in the bio-deterministic world of mainstream media, Gaga had been an anti-essentialist beacon, beaming into the living rooms of, like, all U.S. families. In a world where female pop stars are packaged to be palatable, commoditized and literally defined by the gaze, Gaga’s art and fashion said fuck the gaze and fuck gazing into mirrors, even. Invent an identity. Invent another one. Become who you want to be and then become who you want to be and then become who you want to be again.

My love for Gaga had been based on her performative assertion of performance as identity and it broke suddenly and crushingly with three words: Born this way. I don’t get to love a lot of things in this world and so I hold on fiercely to the things I do. Lady Gaga was the only contemporary mainstream pop artist I was able to love and now what.

I still have complicated feelings, but I’m ready, I think, to work through them, here. It was Meghan Vicks’ article on Gaga as trickster that sparked a bit of hope toward the reignition of my Gaga love. What proceeds will be an argument that “Born This Way” marks Gaga’s self-outing as a trickster figure and that in “Born This Way,” she uses her trickster status to further the cause of gay rights. It will be, too, a personal attempt to redeem Gaga, an elaborate excuse-making for an artist I want badly to love.

***

So, trickster: Coyote, Raven, Prometheus, Loki, Eshu, Hermes, Mercurius. Et fucking al. All mythologies, all cultures, have a trickster figure, and at the site of any change in the social fabric, there s-he is. Trickster is shape-shifter, gender-transcender, a two-spirited seducer. Trickster embodies both sides of any binary opposition. Trickster is culture hero and amoral jokester. S-he is sacred and hilarious, ridiculous and godly, good and evil. Do I need to go on to convince you that Trickster is Gaga?

Okay but what I do need to convince you of, maybe, still, is that Gaga identifies herself as Trickster in the “Born This Way” video. So here: The video opens on a pink-triangle-contained Gaga with legs up where antlers might be, an animal (but still human) Gaga, a between-genders Gaga high-heeled and bearded.

This Gaga is revealed to have two heads and two faces, symbolizing Trickster’s dual nature. Gaga’s second face tells us a creation myth. A creation myth that breeds both good and evil. Wherever there’s a creation story, there Trickster is.

Plus, Trickster is able always to descend to the realm of the dead – to play around and shift things down there. At various points in the video, Gaga enters a sort of underground meat locker where a dead guy dwells. Gaga herself’s in death drag. We know it’s death drag because while the actual dead guy’s catatonic, Gaga’s dancing vigorously, chest-beating, even. She’s physically manipulating the dead guy, presumably for her own ends. Gaga’s down in the death realm for a shifting.

***

But so here’s the thing about Trickster: Trickster’s ends are always the ends of creation, of social change. Trickster is thief, outlaw, destroyer, and ultimately, creator. Trickster uses the Lorde-ian “master’s tools” to dismantle his superstructure, all while entertaining and enchanting, distracting and seducing the fuck out of him. Or H-I-M. Coyote, Loki, Anansi, and Prometheus, for example, all charmed their ways into stealing fire from the gods in order to bring the sun, moon, and stars to the people of their respective cultures.

Trickster uses the language of the dominant culture to get the job done.

“Born This Way” is essentialist, for sure – but Gaga knows that essentialism’s what gay-basher bullies are able to hear, what those in power to change the gay rights situation know how to respond to: There is no other way. You were born this way.

In his book Trickster Makes The World, Lewis Hyde argues that Tricksters are “joint-disturbers” (256) – that Trickster pinpoints the joints of any being, culture, or idea it plans to attack and, in a sense, lubes up these joints in order to move around the more solid pieces they connect, to slide them smoothly, smilingly, and reconnect them elsewhere. Trickster must fit easily into either side of the joint, must seduce both sides in order to slide them so smoothly. Gaga recognizes where the joint of the gay rights debate is, and she works that joint.

Gaga’s aware that U.S. gay rights hinge on proof (or at least belief) that homosexuality is biological. The rhetoric surrounding the U.S. gay rights debate has been, on the right side of the joint, that homosexuality is a sinful choice (God says), and, on the left side, that homosexuality is genetic, and therefore cannot be sinful, since it’s not a choice at all (Science says). “Born This Way” sides with the science of the left, functioning as an anthem self-assured enough to fill in any gaps the scientific studies might leave. Simultaneously, it challenges the right by bringing their God into its message and subtly questioning their faith in H-I-M: Gaga’s God makes no mistakes. Gaga’s God didn’t mess up in creating the gays.

***

Hyde claims that Trickster always serves as translator between two realms. The realms between which Gaga translates in “Born This Way” are actually not the realms of the right and the left; they are the realms of born-this-way gay rights activists and anti-essentialist self-performers. While pro-gay equality and anti-gay equality sides of the argument are essentially speaking the same language (no choice vs. choice), we (queers, academics) are literally speaking a different language than those who seek proof of genetic gayness. We require a translator. And Hyde reminds us of the Italian saying, “traductor, traditore,” or, translator = traitor (264).

Signifying Monkey defeats his Lion oppressor using verbal tricks and witty discourse the Lion is unable to understand. Though Monkey is speaking Lion language, Monkey twists this language. Monkey uses symbolism and the Lion can only understand what is literal. Br’er Rabbit, too, despite being rabbit-sized, uses wit, trickery, and the invention of a new symbolism in order to dismantle the enslaving social rhetoric.

It’s important that, just as Signifying Monkey speaks in Lion language, Gaga doesn’t use academic jargon or the language of queer subcultures. Her litany of identities doesn’t include butch, boi, bear, or even queer. She is speaking the language that the dominant culture understands to be theirs.

One thing Gaga’s use of the language of the dominant culture enables her to do is insert the word “transgender” into the mainstream lexicon. Transgendered life, is what she says. LGBT has sort of just become code for “gay,” while its other initials get lost. The word transgendered is still underlined in red by MS Word’s spell check where I’m typing this.

***

   

Gaga’s creation myth is pretty clearly for us, the anti-essentialist self-performing ones, the academics, the artists, the queers. Who else cares about origin stories or the “multiverse” or mucus-y glittery cell division but the same freaks who care about performance as identity? And one way to read Gaga’s creation myth is as a form of extended justification, an apology for the essentialism to come. The final line of Gaga’s creation myth: “It seems easy, you imagine, to gravitate easily and unwaveringly towards good. But…how can I protect something so perfect, without evil?” As she says this, Gaga holds a machine gun, rendering actual the metaphorical master’s tool.

And when Gaga descends from her heavenly Mother Monster throne and enters the world of the song, she’s wearing (comparatively) subtle makeup and a bikini with dainty chains. Her attire is decidedly normal, pop-video appropriate. At first glance, it’s something Britney might wear. But Gaga’s prosthetic cheekbones and strange magazine glossiness exaggerate her normalcy in a way that lets us know that Gaga hasn’t walked away from her monsters, but is adopting the uniform of the mainstream in order to work inside the system, for us.

***

But so by showing us that she identifies as Gay Rights Trickster, Gaga invites us to look beyond the platitudinous words of her almost-parodically reductive anthem, or to look deeper into them. But then what is she saying beyond the seeming-essentialism?

First, the vaginas through which Gaga’s new race are birthed are made not only of shiny pink membrane, but also of black patent and glitter and silver chains, dissolving the boundary between nature and artifice. And, then! Post creation-myth, in the first shot of the dance floor, the dancers are hunched and shadowed to be shaped like uteri and ovaries.

We might miss this had the video not primed us (at least) twice already with ovary/uterus shapes during the creation story, but since we’re primed, we totally see it. And what it suggests is that we can form ourselves into our own uterus-and-ovaries, into our own self-birthing centers. That we can curl in on ourselves and gestate, any time we need to, and be reborn.

The factory rows of Gaga heads, inchoate and waxy, suggest that there are multiple possible selves for all of us, that we simply have to call on one of our own partly-formed baby heads, to shake it awake and wash it off, in order to be new. I love this.

***

I’ve convinced myself now that Gaga has not had an essentialist conversion. But I still have tangled feelings about whether it is okay to put such a strong essentialist message out into so much of the world. I’m pretty sure most people who hear “Born This Way,” or even watch the video, will not see past the apparent biodeterminism. Isn’t it destructive to tell gay kids, or “orient-made” (I won’t go into this term’s issues here) kids that the have no choice in who they become, that they are victims of the circumstances of their births?

But then, shortly after Gaga’s Prime Rib of America speech, DADT was repealed. Months after the release of “Born This Way,” gay marriage was legalized in New York. On June 24 just after New York legalized gay marriage, Gaga tweeted “I can’t stop crying. We did it, kids.” Maybe this is not self-puffery but just…somewhat accurate. We could ask whether these huge systematic changes are worth the propagating of an essentialist message, but I think a better question is, is there another way to create change? Or do we need this trickstery use of (which is also a propagation of) the dominant language, even if that language is harmful?

I don’t find “Born This Way” inspiring or beautiful. What I wish the whole world would watch instead is the scene in Paris is Burning where two joyful-looking transwomen frolic on the beach singing, “I am what I am / I am my own creation!” But what does this accomplish, social change-wise? 65 million people have watched the “Born This Way” video on YouTube alone. Paris is Burning, I think, is relegated mostly to the academy, or to queer living rooms only.

Angela Carter wrote that “a free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.” Gaga extends this monster-ness to all of the disenfranchised, the bullied, and the pushed-out who are dancing in 5-inch heels and hair dye (or in bowties and suspenders, or in A-shirts and Dickies). And maybe part of the monster quality is that we monsters can’t speak in our own language if we want to be taken seriously by the dominant culture, if we want to create big systemic change. Monsters have to skew, to craft, to seduce. Gaga, as self-appointed Monster Representative to the dominant culture, must be Trickster. We can go on speaking our language in our queer living rooms. We can create spaces for monster discourse and monster love. But if we want equal rights, we need a Trickster representative.

Before “Born This Way” begins Gaga tells us to “Put (our) paws up.” Not our hands. Our hands are for holding our lovers, for cutting friends’ hair and watering plants. Our hands are too pure for this kind of work. No, for Trickster work, we need our paws – our Monkey paws, our monster paws.

Author Bio:

Samantha Cohen is a writer living behind the Scientology building in Los Angeles.  Her fiction can be found in PANK, Black Clock, Storyglossia, The New Orleans Review, and Mary Magazine.  She's teaching a class called Semiotics of Fashion in the Critical Studies program at CalArts this fall.

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Grammar Trouble and Lady Gaga’s Lyrical “I”

By Eddie McCaffray

Beauty is in the “I” of the beholder

Ever since Lady Gaga sang, “He’s got me like nobody […] she’s got me like nobody” in “Poker Face,” she has been playing with fluid grammatical identities. Accordingly, this essay will consider Lady Gaga’s lyrical use of the first-person singular pronoun, and, more broadly, the role of the narrator in her songs. As have many songwriters before her, including some she cites as influences, Lady Gaga often writes songs that function as the narrative or manifesto of some fictionalized narrating personality. Bruce Springsteen, one such influence, is well-known for writing character songs, wherein the speaker is specified enough to have a particular financial and/or romantic situation, personal past, or philosophical outlook; this character is then acted out by Springsteen’s song. Thus, though these narrators are only occasionally named, they do have distinct sensibilities as artistic creations separate from both the song and singer herself. Such a narrator may be fairly specific, such as in “Paparazzi,” or less so, as in “Government Hooker.” But in both songs, the “I” of the lyrics is not really intended to be understood as Lady Gaga herself, but as another persona Gaga sings through.

However, Lady Gaga plays with this trope beyond simply employing it – she steals rather than borrows. In several of her songs, the “I”, the narrator, is not simply one character, created to sing a particular song, but instead is inhabited by dual or multiple fictionalized speakers sharing that always-singular “I”. For example, as discussed previously by myself and others, “Judas” presents a narrative wherein it is difficult to tell just who is speaking to whom, or about whom. And, to heighten the anxiety caused by this narrative uncertainty, Gaga’s songs often threaten power relations in the same move. Not knowing if Jesus is betraying Judas or if Judas is betraying Jesus is worrisome not only because it makes identity uncertain (who’s who?), but also because those two identities traditionally have an established and meaningful relationship – one which includes and encourages certain assumptions about power, legitimacy, and morality; this very relationship is destabilized and made uncertain as well. The same is clearly true of the stalker/superstar relationship in “Paparazzi,” and of the client/hooker one in “Government Hooker.”

I suspect, and will argue, that this uncertainty – both in its basic perspectival-narrative aspect, and in its (gender, power) “trouble” aspect – is directly linked to Gaga’s performative project. Beauty, or power, achieved through performance, are in the “I” of the beholder, in its quality as the subject. And it is just by blurring, through art-ificial performative identity, the line between beholder and beholden (subject and object) that power, beauty, and identity are made available or attainable for an individual who had previously been objectified into passivity and exploitation.

Is “individual” really the right word for a constantly-unfolding, transient-yet-destined, process that will always be constituted by the limits of subject and object?

Is there a grammar of the new race of Mother Monster?

Three-in-one “I”?

We will start with the most explicit, to my mind, example of this perspectival-narrative uncertainty: the “Judas” song and video. As I discussed in an earlier piece for GS, “Judas” presents lyrical and narrative uncertainty about whether Jesus, Judas, or some woman (Mary Magdalene?) is singing. Consider the verse:

When he calls to me, I am ready

I’ll wash his feet with my hair if he needs

Forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain

Even after three times he betrays me.

In the first of these four lines, Gaga sings from the perspective of either an apostle or Mary Magdalene, called to or summoned by Jesus. Here, the narrator could even be Judas himself; this lyric could reference Judas in the middle of coming to give Jesus the betraying kiss, responding to Jesus’s salutation as written in the Gospel of Luke: “Judas, are you betraying the son of man with a kiss?” (Luke 22:47-48) Similarly, the next line suggests (relatively unambiguously) Mary Magdalene, who washed Jesus’ feet and dried them with her hair. The pledge of forgiveness could be Jesus speaking of Peter, who was prophesized to and did in fact deny his relationship to Jesus three times on the night of the crucifixion (as is suggested by the fourth line). It could also, perhaps, indicate Jesus’ forgiveness of the Judas kiss. These uncertainties are compounded by the chorus of the song – which suggests Jesus still loving Judas, despite his betrayal, in addition to a pining ex-lover – as well as those that appear in the other lyrics.

Thus the narrator in “Judas” must switch many times, often in the space of single line, and usually not between two possible identities but between two clusters of possible identities: from “Judas-or-Mary” in the first line to “Mary” in the second to “Jilted-Lover-or-Jesus” in the third and fourth. And the likely addressees (the likely objects) change as well! Does the singer transform from one to the other to the other to the other in order to become whatever is necessary for holding the listener’s attention? To maintain the authoritative, power-position before the verb? Has performance trumped identity – first by being the identity of the performer and then by fulfilling its role all too well? What does such a narrative voice suggest about Gaga’s whole project of fame? That the performer and audience are one? An endless chain of performers performing for performers?

Let us expand and explain this idea by studying the “Paparazzi” song and video. As Ayah Rifai suggests in her November 2010 essay for Gaga Stigmata, the pop superstar of “Paparazzi” in fact seeks the love of fans, is desperate to receive what they are desperate to give. When the stalker and stalkee, paparazza and popstar, are so closely adapted to one other, who holds the power? Who is disciplining whom? Whose discourse constitutes which object? The superstar and the paparazza need each other, and the stalker is the inversion of the superstar – not the best performer but the best fan. The desperate search to express oneself is in fact a desperate search for the attention of others. The most intimate possession, the self, interacts symbiotically – not exploitatively – with the most foreign phenomenon, the power of the Other.

“Promise I'll be kind”

Perhaps this is best exemplified simply by the desperate, romantic vocal performance Gaga gives to “Paparazzi.” Though sung from the perspective of a paparazza, the song is invariably (of course) performed by the pop star. Its desperate professions of love and devotion cannot help but bleed beyond the lines of the fictive, narrating stalker persona; Gaga’s love of fame leads to her love of photographers, of stalkers, and that shows in her vocal and live performances. In these performances of the song, Gaga often dies – the pop star martyring herself for the sake of her death-obsessed “fans”? So desperate to give them what they so desperately need that she will die – and live again? In the extreme intimacy of such a symbiosis, is the distinction between performer and audience somewhat arbitrary?

Rifai writes, “In this interpretation, the paparazzi unwittingly function as disciplinarians who cleverly keep stars in line – and perhaps even transform them into seemingly ‘docile bodies’ – because they document them from the moment they step outdoors to the moment they return home.” While I do agree with this reading, it seems to me that equally present in Gaga’s project is the idea that the performer (the object, the stalkee) does have agency. We know all the clichés about record executives manufacturing the fame and success of performers, but doesn’t this overblown cynicism more or less miss the undeniable participation of the superstar? In the paparazzi-superstar symbiosis, being watched becomes as active, as needed, as watching. The active voice of “he watches” is usurped by the passive of “she is being watched.” In highlighting the power of the viewer’s view, the power of the viewed’s performance should not be forgotten: the ability to become what(ever) others want is still an ability, an action, an agency, and undoubtedly a creative and powerful one. 

Slime Dress; Fluid Body

This trouble of perspective – this “who is objectifying whom?” and the change in power-dynamics such grammatical uncertainty causes – is further illustrated by the inversion of the human relations carried out in these narrative shifts. Because Judas, Jesus, and Mary sequentially pass through the same “I,” it is impossible to establish the power-to-act of any one exclusively. Sometimes Judas precedes the verb and occupies the subject position, acting upon Jesus (“I’ll bring him down, bring him down down”), and other times their position is reversed (“forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain”). The absence of a single power-vector, of a monarchical subject, is revealed. In such a multi-polar world, the whizzing of activity overwhelms the nodal sobjects – “nodal” because they now occupy a relative, rather than privileged, position; and “sobject” being a neologism denoting what is left after the subject/object distinction has been deconstructed. Action/verb overshadows both subject and object: being conditioned not by doers and objects, but conditioning them. The thematic subjects of these songs become their grammatical verbs: sacrifice, betrayal, and love in “Judas”; longing, obsession, performance, observation in “Paparazzi”; fucking as well as simply being (anything, everything) in “Government Hooker”; and acting (without permission or condition) in “Scheiße.”

Thus the verbal theme of “Judas” communicates a feeling of anguished backsliding ever attendant on desperate aspirations – whether the speaker is someone remembering an addictive, abusive relationship they are not yet over or Jesus clinging to his wayward disciple, it is the action of reaching above while dragging behind that lingers above all uncertainty: “Jesus is my virtue, while Judas is the demon I cling to.” Similarly the fluid identities of “Paparazzi” lead to an endless loop in which longing longingly regards longing: the paparazzi obsessively pursue the star, who obsessively pursues fame, represented in the figure of the paparazza. The photographers struggle to take pictures of the star struggling to be photographed. These songs are not about narrators but about actions: anguished backsliding and longing. And these are, after all, two rather similar actions. The painful backsliding in “Judas” complements the insatiable longing of “Paparazzi.” Just as the narrator of “Judas” is torn between what she knows is good for her and what she knows is bad for her, the narrator of “Paparazzi” can never conclusively achieve that for which she longs. Fame exists only in being hounded by photographers and stalkers; the invasive torture that has killed Gaga in so many performances is what the superstar pursues. She responds to desire, to interest, both of which are endless (and endlessly variable) appetites – she is condemned, has condemned herself, to transform forever. The singer of “Judas” desires something (Jesus, virtue) that her nature (which clings to Judas) precludes. She is caught between the initiation and completion of an action, just as the singer of “Paparazzi” is denied satisfaction: her goal, longing, is the antithesis of satisfaction!  In the end, the symbiosis of performative identity dissolves the subject and the object into verbs, making a universe where completion, satisfaction, and rest are impossible because there is only timeless action.

This trope – the paradoxical, transformative nature of performative identity – appears in the song “Government Hooker” from her recent album Born This Way. The song highlights the alternation between power and exploitation inherent in performative identity. Gaga sings “I can be anything, I’ll be your everything/Just touch me baby, (‘cause I don’t want to be sad)” – with the last line sung in a metallic male voice utterly at odds with the female pop voice that delivers the first three lines. Beyond the question of who is speaking (of who is subject and who is object), these two voices comprise a single, coherent, interwoven narrative: one of desire mutating and multiplying to satisfy itself. The distinction between the client and hooker is secondary to their mutual performance, their speaking, their reality, which is one of cooperation: the hooker becomes whatever is necessary for the client. Thtthis simple lyric also suggests that the hooker has her own agenda – after all, she gives a command to the client when she says “just touch me,” she reveals her agency, and any prostitute does have an agenda. He or she is exploited; but at the same time a prostitute demands and receives of her client just as her client does of her (money). Perhaps this suggests that it is a trick of history, of situation, and not one of fundamental reality, that certain roles or professions are weak, amoral, and victimized.

“Put your hands on me”

Two commonly-appearing verses in the song further suggest the power of the hooker and, more fundamentally, the unity of hooker-client, the problematization of the subject/object distinction: “As long as I’m your hooker!” and “Yeah, you’re my hooker!” (conspicuously not sung in a mechanical and masculine voice, but in that of the feminine narrator). These suggest, first, that the hooker functions as such contingently and temporarily: “As long as I’m your hooker” implies the corollary that all the promises and offers of the song end when the “I” is no longer “your hooker” – which is thus at least theoretically possible. Again, it is important to distinguish between the reality of prostitution in society and the ontological relationship here metaphorized as prostitution: Gaga’s performativity in this area is more a critique of Cartesian dualism and the panoptic power of the gaze that it produces than it is a statement on the social reality of prostitution.

“As long as I’m your hooker”

With this in mind, it is clear that these two verses suggest the agency of the hooker regarding the client, even going so far as to reverse the relationship, thereby removing the distinction between the prostitute and her client. Following a display of Freudian versatility – “I could be girl (unless you want to be man) / I could be sex (Unless you want to hold hands) / I could be everything, I could be anything, I could be Mom (unless you want to be Dad)” – Gaga closes the song with a triumphant, feminine, hooker-voice in chorus with the mechanical, masculine, client-voice: “I wanna fuck Government Hooker (back up and turn around) / Stop shitin’ me Government Hooker (put your hands on the ground!) . . . (Get down!)” The song transforms by its end from a tale of object-exploitation at the hands of the subject (client exploits prostitute) to a mutual celebration of their power over one another, and an enaction of their unity. Both exercise and enjoy power and submission alternately, simultaneously, and complimentarily. As the identities of the two are “reduced” to actions or verbs, their symbiosis is revealed.

This metaphysical statement of empowerment expressed as grammatical trouble takes on a similar form in the song “Yoü and I,” a rocker ballad written by Lady Gaga about her (now ex-) boyfriend Lüc Carl. Much of the verses are sung by Gaga as Gaga: “It’s been a long time since I came around . . .” But in the lead-in to the chorus, and in the chorus itself, Gaga quickly blends speaking as herself, speaking as Lüc, and speaking as Lüc speaking as Gaga. When she sings, “He said, ‘sit back down where you belong, in the corner of my bar with your high heels on / sit back down on the couch where we made love the first time and you said to me: ‘something about this place. . .’’” the chorus to follow has transformed into her quotation of Lüc’s quotation of her. With this in play, does Gaga have a stronger claim than Lüc himself to the narrator, to be the character of the character song? The title certainly fails to establish just who is “you” and who is “I,” instead making the narrative identity totally ambiguous with the simple use of supposedly-reliable pronouns. Who can claim to be the “you” or the “I,” though both terms claim specificity? Both are in irresolvable play. The song professes the love of Gaga for Lüc by professing Lüc’s love for Gaga. This revealed reciprocity leads to union – not coincidentally metaphorized by a joyous love.

“You taste like whiskey when you kiss me, oh!”

This continued, extended play goes so far as to suggest that the actor may be a feature – perhaps a secondary one – of action. Subject is not the prerequisite or creator of action, but a feature of its (grammatical) voice. This makes sense in an aesthetics where action has become the character of a character-song. If we are what we do (what we perform?), Gaga is a superstar and a stalker and a paparazza; she is Jesus, Judas, and Mary; also hooker and client; politician and activist; Lüc and Gaga. I believe that such a metaphysics is at the heart of her fame project and her entire performance art project. As Rifai and Gaga herself have suggested, her work must be understood as a whole: music, videos, performances, interviews, every costume . . . And this work – her persona that encompasses such contradictions of power and exploitation – undermines discrimination at its most basic level, by accepting the other as the other, by ascribing agency to the object as the object. It does not seek that agency by demonstrating that the object is really a subject or demanding that it become one, not by unifying all people under a single theoretical concept of “human” that remains at bottom a straight white man, but by ascribing rights, ascribing agency and creativity to the object without demanding that the object becomes something different, without qualification or any justification besides the assumption that every thing should – does – have agency, and is equal despite manifold perceptible differences. In response to the flat assertion that a hooker, as a grammatical object, could never have agency, Gaga’s metaphysics offer a flat assertion that a hooker obviously is the origin as well as the target of power; thus not that the hooker is a subject, but that an object shares the claim of the subject to agency. The object has an equal right to “I”.

Finally, the song “Scheiße” functions as a commentary on this entire principle. The song, when read as addressed to shit, (“I’ll take you out tonight, do whatever you like / Scheiße Scheiße be mine, Scheiße be mine”), becomes a pining, hopeless love song, very similar in this way to “Judas” and “Paparazzi.” Gaga is pleading to be worthy of her shit – her messy (by)product, her action, and its outcome. As in “Government Hooker,” in “Scheiße” a desperate polymorphous perversity is employed to entice and earn her own activity: “I’ll . . . do whatever you like . . .” Performance, transformation, and creativity seek desperately to seduce themselves by means of themselves.

Scheiße be mine

But Gaga also wishes that her action didn’t require this qualification – that her verbs did not require a subject. This regret contrasts interestingly with the desire to be worthy: Gaga uses the same word (“shit” or “Scheiße”) to mean her creations (foremost of which is herself) that she worships, and the limitations and qualifications that limit her ability to create, to be. What she is grappling with here is the fundamental unfreedom of existence: if you create something, you become unfree to not have created it. In terms of performative identity, you can be anything, but once you are, you are no longer free to be something else. The desire or impetus to create means that one is never without condition – desire to create is a condition that creation always requires! Gaga might sing “I wish I could be strong without the Scheiße, yea,” but strength requires at least something to bear. The perfect freedom offered by performative identity is, considered from a different perspective, perfect unfreedom: you must enact yourself, you cannot enact another. The “shit” Gaga produces – herself – limits the potentiality that she wants to be to a mere actuality; achieving one possibility extinguishes all others.

Gaga’s mediation on this paradoxical, existential freedom-unfreedom is expressed as a feminist message: “Love is objectified by what men say is right / … blonde high-heeled feminists enlisting femmes for this, express your woman kind / fight for your rights.” Gaga recognizes that the grammatical privileging of subject over object operates as a blueprint for various forms of discrimination – in this case, sexism. Being a strong female means acting without qualification (“If you’re a strong female, you don’t need permission”) – of occupying the role of assumed efficacy that has so often been gendered masculine. So she makes the taking of this space (“When I’m on a mission, I rebuke my condition / If you’re a strong female, you don’t need permission”) the condition and goal of gender liberation. It could be the goal of any emancipatory or anti-discrimination movement, combating exploitation by combating objectification at its most fundamental level.

This feminist aspect is best exemplified in the line “I don’t speak German but I can if you like.” Here Gaga attaches overcoming herself (speaking German even though she can’t speak German) to the condition of a man’s desire. As long as the traditional grammar remains the basis of power and agency, she can only overcome herself, grow, be strong, accomplish, act, through either the fiat or the imitation of masculinity. Instead of the self-expression of performance being guided by Gaga herself – by her project of becoming worthy of her shit – that expression, that creation is guided by the desires of men: by the shit of others. It may not be possible, on a fundamental, ontological level to escape the conditions inherent in existence; but Gaga does see a way for womankind to escape the conditions imposed by patriarchy. A new grammar, a new verbal perspective, to express the power of the object as well as of the subject.

Thus I argue that the narrative play of Lady Gaga’s lyrics offers both a re-imaging of the character-song form and a key to understanding not only the meaning of her songs but the nature of her entire artistic project. The grammatical troubling of this voice expresses the theme of performative identity and the radical agency to which it leads. It is at once philosophical and emancipatory, artistic and political; it is itself a paradox, a unity achieved not despite contradiction, but by means of it.

Perhaps this is a meaning of the third eye Gaga wears on her chin as Mother Monster in the video for “Born This Way”: her two eyes have been inverted and deconstructed into one. Does this eye have sobjective vision – seeing and also seeing its own seeing? Does it unify power and submission in one perceptive act? Can it see what is without losing sight of what might be?

Author Bio:

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

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