Digital Killed the Video Candidate

Davide Panagia
Trent University

In no uncertain terms, this month’s American presidential election signals Barack Obama as the first New Media President. I will quickly concede that this is an odd christening. New Media technology was around in 2008, and indeed prior to that. And we have read and heard a lot about the potentials of political mobilization thanks to the influence of social media technology (think here of Tahrir Square). But what the immediate aftermath of the 2012 Presidential elections secured for our cultural-political zeitgeist, and what contributed to our collective schadenfreude, is the conviction that the numbers were always on Obama’s side, despite what Karl Rove’s gut told him. The question that the Republicans are now asking themselves is how they could have been so wrong in their convictions?

The answer lies in the role of “big data” – something that many American voters had never heard of prior to this elections. Big data is the resource that Nate Silver had at his disposal to give such accurate predictions as he did; it is also the basis for recent developments in humanities research collectively called the “digital humanities” (see the Mapping the Republic of Letters Project here); and it is, as best as I can tell, what will make such companies as Facebook even more astronomically rich than they already are, once Wall Street realizes that what Facebook is selling is not advertising space but massive amounts of information on consumer tendencies generated from our aggregated “hits.”

Obama’s re-election campaign ran a Navy-Seal like digital operation: surgical, tactical, precise, and sophisticated beyond what James Bond’s Q can even imagine. It’s almost as if Obama took a page out of Althusser’s handbook: forgo ideology and go straight to science, so to speak.

Here is how Mike Lynch, former founder and CEO of the UK software company Autonomy, describes the scenario: “Obama’s was not an election won with a clever advertising campaign -- that is too 90’s -- and actually, that is what the Republicans did. This campaign was masterminded by data analysts who left nothing to chance. They revived the virtual campaign centre called mybarackobama.com from the ‘08 election (and thus highlighting the benefits of 'owning' your data), and encouraged supporters to volunteer their personal information, comments, post photos and videos, and donate funds. But this was only the starting point. In a multi-pronged engagement strategy, webmasters used supporters’ content to galvanize others and drive traffic to other campaign sites such as Obama’s Facebook page (33 million “likes”) and YouTube channel (240,000 subscribers and 246 million page views).”

And here is a report from ProPublica.org’s Lois Beckett about recent information released on Obama’s big data tactics.

Big data, data mining, and predictive analytics are the tools of network politics – and they are tools we all volunteer willingly, though usually not knowingly, whenever we click a link or like a post. In doing so, we make what amounts to a charitable donation in the form of micro-data points to massive organizations and global conglomerates who hold property rights to these data-hits; in exactly the way, for instance, that Facebook owns property rights to the pictures of my children when I “share” them on my Facebook page. In fact, it’s not the images they own, but the ones and zeroes that compose the data file which software converts into an image.

 All of this to say what we all already know: that we live in another age of “information overload”, to invoke the Harvard historian, Ann Blair’s helpful phrase. There is just “too much to know” and so, as in other epochs of information overload, we devise strategies and structures for handling information, for organizing it, assessing it, and rendering it valid. The Dewey decimal system was one such invention, as was the transistor radio that converted noise into sound. Writing is, of course, another such technology; as are note taking, highlighting, statistics, and practices of compiling. The number of such activities are infinite, and usually end up multiplying the volume of information rather than rendering it manageable. If I were Malthusian I would say that information has a geometric growth; and if I were Kantian, I would say that information is the best picture of the mathematical sublime.

More to the point, networked humans are information generating creatures. Every click on a keyboard or a mouse, for instance, produces new variations on ones and zeroes that, in turn, generate new information data. As I am not a coder, I have no way of knowing how much information my composing, emailing, and posting of this TCC entry has generated. Suffice it to say that the minimum measure for digital information today is the kilobyte (10³ bytes) and that most new computers currently store terabytes (10¹² bytes) in their hard drives. Such technological developments, I would suggest, marks a revolution in artificial memory storage that has dramatic consequences for our contemporary networked condition. I will only single out a couple of such consequences.

The first is that code is king. More specifically, source code is king – and code ‘sourcerers’ will inherit the earth. Our world is a world of software: a world of commands and orders relaying signals to go here and there, to execute this task and fulfill that algorithm. As the new media scholar Wendy Chun argues in her book, Programmed Visions, “Code is executable because it embodies the power of the executive, the power to enforce that has traditionally – even within neoliberal logic – been the provenance of government.” (27) This means that in the very logic of network, code is both sovereign and disciplinary master through the algorithmic production of self-regulating rules. (For those with interest in reading more on these issues and developments, I highly recommend Tiziana Terranova’s Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (PDF) and Jodi Dean’s Blog Theory (PDF).)

Two: Code is indifferent to content. Nate Silver’s algorithmic acumen, that took the accuracy of electoral prediction to alchemical heights, was initially developed as a forecasting system for Major League Baseball called PECOTA (an acronym for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm). It can just as easily still be called PECOTA, an acronym for Presidential Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm.

What this means is that traditional content-based politics – and our content-based habits of analysis – are being put under substantial pressure by our networked condition. It’s precisely the largesse of big data that makes content almost impossible to handle. Hence the switch, as the new media scholar Lev Manovich notes, from the old new media language of “documents” and “works” and “recordings” (signifying static, content-specific objects) to the big data language of “dynamic software performances,” referring to the interface with real-time dynamic outputs as in the case of video-games or mobile apps. When we do engage these virtual entities, we are not engaging static documents but interactive programs generating infinitely new instances of data. Manovich describes this shift best when he says that “in contrast to paintings, literary works, music scores, films, industrial designs, or buildings, a critic can’t simply consult a single ‘file’ containing all of work’s content.”

This is how digital killed the video candidate. Mitt Romney lost apparently against all Republican odds because Romney was the video candidate: everyone, including myself, was distraught and surprised by Obama’s lackluster performance at the first debate. He just didn’t come out looking good; he didn’t project “good content” ... and Romney did. But Obama’s big data pundits must have persuaded him that he didn’t need to look that good: that the content of his appearance didn’t matter as much as everyone thought it ought to. What did matter was the mosaic generated by big data that offers much more than any singular exit poll, or intuitive hunch, can.

And it’s not that this mosaic is devoid of content. It is filled with content. But that content is mobile, interactive, terabyte content that the video candidate’s more traditional, kilobyte content analysis finds impossible to process.

No doubt, there will be much to celebrate and bemoan in this cultural-political shift. At the very least, I think this election should put pressure on political critics to rethink the criteria of political judgment and assessment with which they (we) have leaned on for so long because one thing is certain: the networked body politic is a much different beast than our conventional understandings of the Leviathan. But then again, rethinking the famous mosaic frontispiece of that equally famous book, maybe not.

The work of human hands

Davide Panagia
   Trent University

There is little doubt that the circulation of appearances is an anxious fact about our contemporary condition. This is made even more acute by the proliferation of events and objects in and through which we interface with appearances, events and things like photography, film, cooking, video games, music, shuffling, paint, apps, reading, advertising, opinion polls, tweeting, posting, and so forth. The Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan - who would have celebrated his one hundredth birthday this year - was influential in disseminating the idea that each medium is unique in the ways in which it handles appearances in the world, whether text, or image, sound, or touch; and through such handlings, extends our own ways of handling the world.

Today, the various media themselves seem to matter less and less because they are becoming ever more fluid: we handle cell phones as easily as we might a camera, or a tablet. However, one thing does seem to stand out as perhaps the most available form of mediatic interface – namely, the screen. Whether cell phones, computers, tablets, televisions, cameras, or what have you, we are living in an unprecedented age of screen exposure, as Kevin Kelly once remarked in the pages of the New York Times Magazine: “Everywhere we look,” he said in 2008, “we see screens.” (“Becoming Screen Literate”, November 23, 2008). This may have made sense 3 years ago, but today we should re-write Kelly’s sentence to say that “everywhere we touch, we touch screens.” Rather than simply sophisticated viewers, we are becoming sophisticated handlers, ‘absorbed by the immediacy of the screen’, as the American popular culture writer, Robert Warshow, affirmed in 1954. [For more on Warshow, I highly recommend the very accessible and extremely well written collection of his essays published under the title The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002].

“BurkaNike” by Pode Bal

The irony in all this is that despite our well-documented mediatic iconophillia, we have allowed ourselves to accept the idea that anything that appeals to our senses is bad for us, that we are all unconscionable fools because we become absorbed by things that appear before us, that appearances can only tell us lies and condemn us to a life of sin. In this, we persuaded ourselves of a moral theory of the image that says that the only true things in the world are the things we can know, and everything else is ‘mere appearance’, so that all instances of the allure of appearances operate within the same moral and perceptual registers as advertising, or pornography, or both.

If this looks and sounds too polemical - but nonetheless familiar - it is because such reactions have perpetually accompanied cultures of image-proliferation, from the ancient Greeks and Jews, to the early Christians, to the Byzantine iconoclasts, to the Protestant Reformation, to Walter Lippmann, to The Matrix movie, and Wikileaks. All these instances of iconophobia are reactions imbued and embedded with aspects of the First Commandment (the one against idolatry), and they appear and reappear to warn of the damage that appearances can do - to the mind, to the soul, to the eyes, and to the body. Here is what one Biblical prophet has to say about it, in Psalm 135:

15 The idols of the nations are silver and gold,

the work of human hands.

16 They have mouths, but do not speak;

they have eyes, but do not see;

17 they have ears, but do not hear,

nor is there any breath in their mouths.

18 Those who make them become like them,

so do all who trust in them!

The message is clear: “if you don’t stop it, you’ll go blind!”, so to speak. And this lesson rings as true today as it did during its penning. Idols are artifices who appear real but are not - they seem to have all the external qualities and sensory capacities of humans, but none of those things work; appearances are the living dead, vampires, or alien apparitions. And what is worse, the risk of our interface with them is contagion or prodding – if we interface with them, we will become like them. The message of the first commandment, and of these few lines from Psalm 135, is the message of all critique that treats the luminosities of appearances as an instance of deception (this is what it means to be duped by an appearance and thus to be affected by its collusive forces).

I want to suggest another approach to what I call the advenience of the appearance (i.e., its ingression to experience) that takes as a political fact of our contemporary condition that our handling of appearances informs our handling of one another, and that this matters to our senses of politics. It matters to our senses of politics because our handling of appearances multiplies and pluralizes our pictures of political resistance. To treat appearances that advene - on a computer screen, or on the television monitor, or on our cell phones, tablets, etc. - exclusively as claim making entities available to our cognitive understandings takes the fizzle out of those intervals of friction that pose resistances to our ways of interacting with the world.

London’s Burning: Tottenham. August, 2011

A case in point is the recent riots in London and the looting/burning of the Croydon and Tottenham suburbs. Even a tertiary scan of the comments and reactions to this event suggest that they are entirely ensconced within the moral theory of the image I outline above. ‘What we are seeing’ - so we are told – ‘are a bunch of unproductive hoods who have nothing to do other than destroy private property and steal what they otherwise cannot afford to own because they don’t have jobs.’ They are the unthinking, whose time wasted has numbed their minds. They have eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear: they have become the consumer products they desire and trust. From the perspective of a moral theory of the image, the scandal of the London riots is exactly the scandal prophesied by the Reverend Thomas Malthus in 1798 in his classic study on the (then) new political economy, “An Essay on Population.” In those pages he outlined exactly how the putting in place of the Poor Laws would - in no uncertain terms - increase sloth amongst the lower classes and create the kinds of attitudes and customs (i.e., lewdness, irresponsible procreation and childrearing, etc.) that we have been told were responsible for the London riots.

Now, several things seem to me worth mentioning in response to the moral theory of the image that governs our general perceptual attitudes: the first is to reiterate a point raised by David Harvey worth making over and over again [see his “Feral Capitalism Hits the Streets”]: looting is a “feral” attitude that neoliberal capitalism created and has been more than happy to defend as a standard modus operandi - just consider, in the US context, whether the sub-prime mortgage disaster isn’t a form of feral looting?

The next point worth mentioning is a point made by the cultural and political philosopher, Jacques Rancière: what I’m calling the moral theory of the image is an instance of a certain mode of thinking that does not want you to stop, look, and see. “There is nothing to see here!” (Ten Theses on Politics, Theory & Event 5.3) is the message we learn from the knee-jerk condemnation of the rioters; that is, there is nothing worth paying attention to because we already know what is wrong with this picture. “There is nothing to see here!” also means that there is nothing political about what has happened. This is a lesson that was parlayed over and over again by the media. ‘The looters have no political agenda’; they’re just looting for the sake of looting. But as Laurie Penny notes, “The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don't know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985.” [Panic on the streets of London]. There is nothing to see here, so don’t bother looking.

In all of these quick and easy condemnations, little mention has been made of the fact that levelling and looting is a customary practice in British popular politics, at least since the time of the Levellers during the English Civil Wars. Levellers were defenders of liberty in the most literal sense of the term, who would act politically by rioting and destroying property. The attribution of their name comes from a practice they espoused of levelling hedges during riots that divided property lots. The Levellers did not have a set political agenda; they were god-fearing folk who were broadly committed to abolishing government corruption. You can find a selection of their writings here, if you want to learn more. My point, simply, is that levelling and rioting have been, since the discovery of modern liberal toleration and natural rights, a standard political practice autochthonous to British popular rule.

So, in fact, there is something political to see here: namely, that leveling or looting is a mode of resistance that – however unattractive it might be – stands as a form of political action. That Prime Minister David Cameron has elected to call for the eviction of looters and rioters from their homes as a form of punishment for their actions might also suggest that not only does looting and rioting stand as a mode of political action, but that it has juridical consequences (see here; and for a response to Cameron’s appeal, see the ‘Not in my name’ petition here).

This brings me to my final point: to disregard the [recent] London riots as unpolitical and not worthy of our attention is to miss an opportunity not only to address a serious socio-economic problem, but also a potential occasion to re-imagine our pictures of political resistance. This is not to say that we should all turn to Levelling; it is to say that the advenience of an appearance - like the images of looting, or levelling, or rioting - marks an interval in our habits of sensing; to regard an advenience is thus to allow the possibility of an effrontery, or a friction, that bothers us to the core. We are right to be bothered by the London Riots, and it is worth our political while to attend to this irritation.

I will conclude with this provocation: Recent events like the London Riots suggest that the political dilemma posed by neoliberal capitalism is not the adjudication of the priority of the right over the good, or the determination of the good as a right; the political challenge is, rather, the interruption of circulation. And to disregard the multiple portfolios of resistance available through our experiences of advenience, because such experiences persist and subside in a pre-cognitive and pre-judgmental dimension of existence, is to miss significant political opportunities for interrupting the dominion of flow in neoliberal capital. The attitudes of disregard I describe above are moral images of thought complicit and consonant with the increased capitalisation of everyday life.

Chiarismo: Or, Luminosity in Dark Times

Davide Panagia

Trent University

This past summer’s “Il Chiarismo” (pronounced “Kiarismo”) exhibit in Milan, Italy (at Palazzo Reale; June 16 – September 5, 2010) presented the work of some of the principal figures of a painterly movement that lasted all of five years, between 1930 and 1935. The “Chiaristi” were mainly associated with Milan’s Brera Academy, one of Italy’s premiere fine arts institutes and also the home of one of Milan’s most extensive and stunning picture galleries. Curated by Elena Pontiggia, the exhibit brought into full view some of the more significant Chiarismo works, and especially those of the artist Francesco De Rochhi (1902-1978). 

But it’s not De Rocchi’s paintings that I want to discuss. While on the whole compelling, his works seem to me to remain trapped in a mannered romanticism that dreams of an escape from realism – but doesn’t quite make it. 

One painting at the exhibit, however, stood out amongst the other masterworks: “The Church of Fossacaprara” (“La Chiesa di Fossacaprara, 1934). 

   This work belongs to De Rocchi’s contemporary Goliardo Padova (1909-1979), a lesser-known figure of the Chiarismo movement. In contrast to De Rocchi’s works, Padova’s Chiarismo is realism all the way down – but it is a non-representational realism that plays with the tensions between light and line that are some of the basic elements of the medium of painting. 

Meaning “clearness” in the sense of “brightness” – but also (as we shall soon note) in the sense of “clearing” – the characteristics of Chiarismo lie in painting the luminosity of light through the use of attenuated colors so as to express “a fusion of light with form and color” as De Amicis, one critic of the period, describes it. Elena Pontiggia’s essay that accompanies the exhibit’s catalog recounts how the basic technique of Chiarismo is that of mimicking fresco murals by applying paint on a moist, white-washed canvas; humidity and white paint that were (and are) the characteristics of the city of Milan itself, surrounded as it often is by a moist but intense light due to Milan’s location at the foothills of the Alps and at the beginning of the great Po River valley that is the agricultural heartland of Italy. Another characteristic of Chiarismo that Pontiggia notes: the complete disappearance of mythological subjects that were the dominant themes of much Italian painting in the early part of the twentieth century, and the taking up of portraiture, landscape, and still life motifs in their stead. 

But as the Padova painting above makes evident, there is a third characteristic to Chiarismo that has remained impervious to critics and commentators alike: namely, the committed effort to elide or dissolve the boundedness of lines through the painting of luminosity. Here space and light collide and irradiate one another. Notice how Padova has to thicken his strokes in order to show that the church has columns that support it, that it is a structure that can actually stand up. Neo-classical painting would have given much more weight to the support of architectural structures than Padova’s Chiarismo ever does. This, because emphasizing support is no longer the objective of Padova’s paintings. Luminosity has no (needs no) support, though it projects a weightiness of its own. By this I mean that the clash between light and line characteristic of Padova’s Chiarismo period defeats the demand to anchor his figures or his structures in anything that looks and feels like a traditional grounding support. I might push the point further: his depiction of luminosity ultimately reduces the painted line to a barely visible trace: it is there, it is not overcome, but it is not central or primary either. 

Notice also the contrast between the smoothness of the church’s façade, the fluidity of the street and sky, and the almost flaccid but certainly frail erection that is the bell tower. It seems clearly detached from the church and as such loses all sense of support and structure. [Having visited that church several times, I can attest to the fact that this portrayal is entirely an invention of the artist.] Within Italian cityscape imaginaries, the bell tower has a long history of prominence as both grounding a city’s source of time and as an omen used to warn away evil spirits. Here, any pretense to structural magnanimity has been completely elided. 

Padova, I should add briefly, was also a member of the Brera Academy until he was sent to an internment camp during the Fascist regime. Upon his return, after the war, he suffered a period of intense depression and though emerging from it with some wonderful works, he never revisited Chiarismo. Thankfully, however, I managed to track down some other examples of his Chiarismo period. 

“Strada Bassa” (Lower Road) is stunning and I would consider it one of the masterworks of Chiarismo. It depicts a typical landscape scene outside of Padova’s home town, Casalmaggiore, located some 150 kilometers (80 miles) south of Milan, on the shores of the Po River. The road is, in fact, one of the many winding footpaths that meander along the river.

Goliardo Padova, Strada Bassa (1934, private collection) 

   Strada Bassa puts on display a realism emphasized (in this case) by the lines that designate the path. The foliage that brushes upwards from each side of the road also give the lines of the road presence and definition. But notice how that presence is not at all authoritative or commanding, almost as if line here is complicit with the lightness of luminosity. Another noteworthy point: the road leads no where, as do the lines of the road. In fact, they disappear behind an outcrop of bush. The viewer is looking at the road from an angle away from the path, and therefore she or he is not directed by the path’s lines. In other words, light and line work together to make the painting feel as flat and as two dimensional as possible. And this feeling of two-dimensional flatness is accomplished despite the road’s apparent three dimensionality. What Padova offers us here, in no uncertain terms, is a line on a surface; but it is a line that does not trace or bind a territory. At the very most, it hints at a trace that cannot (once again) support the weight of the painting. Rather, the entirety of the painting is supported by its luminosity rather than its sculptural traces. 

I’ve certainly not said enough about these two works, or about the relationship between line and luminosity. Indeed, in light of such works, one’s imagination is sparked to consider how our contemporary egalitarian ambitions are grounded in a genealogy of line and light, of partition and appearance; and here I’m thinking especially of Rousseau’s famous “this is mine” and his acts of partition that trace a line in the dirt to designate property and hence inequality. Nor have I hinted at the contemporaneity of these paintings, despite their not being a part of our contemporary condition: the disappearance of line in the face of Chiarismo’s luminosity resonates family resemblances with our own commitments to line and light, or position and spectacle, in an age of new media corporatism. 

By stating this, I don’t mean to suggest that Padova’s Chiarismo paintings are political objects that we might turn to in order to solve our own political woes; there is nothing that I have found which would license such instrumentalizations of his aesthetic ambitions in that way. However, I do want to suggest that the aesthetic features of such works carry with them the possibility of political insight on the contemporaneity of our own valorizations of the relationship between luminosity and line. In this regard, one only has to consider the number of lines we draw every day – or, indeed, that we encounter and acknowledge every day – and their indexical role in making the world (and ourselves) intelligible to others. It’s almost as if for us, in our contemporary condition, lines are solid objects that work only and exclusively as indices of clarity and boundedness: a ‘clear line of thought’, or ‘a definite line in the sand’, and so forth. 

Rather than clarity, Padova’s Chiarismo offers irradiancy and clearing. Perhaps I might better state my point this way: the meeting of line and light in Padova’s Chiarismo works irradiates the territoriality of line, clearing the way for things, peoples, and events to appear; and it is the appearing, rather than the intelligibility, of things, peoples, and events that these paintings give weight to. Irradiancy and clearing (both terms that adequately capture the somatic sense of “Chiarismo”) are thus the modes through which appearances are sensed and through which we encounter the world in all its immediate finitude – this, without the demand or expectation of intelligibility. 

I haven’t mentioned two further things worth raising regarding these two masterworks of Chiarismo. The first is a point that the French theorist, Michel Foucault, had noted in his lectures on Manet’s paintings (1971) and that I also find available in Padova’s Chiarismo works: namely, the fact that though there are places where the viewer may stand and view these works, the tensions between luminosity and line characteristic of Chiarismo canvases makes it so that there is no one place where the viewer must stand in order to look at them. In this regard, the sense of flatness of these works places them in direct contrast to classical painting, with its normative systems of lines, perspectives, and vanishing points. In those lectures Foucault calls such works of art “picture-objects.” 

The second point worth raising is the white elephant in my discussion of Padova’s Chiarismo paintings: 1930s Milan was a time of heightened attention to line, contrast, and shading, the major formal elements that accompanied Fascism’s return to a neo-classical, sculptural form. Indeed, between Futurism and Fascist Neo-Classicism, there was little room for imagining light in terms other than bounded line – that is, light must illuminate in such a way as to draw outlines of contrast between, say, the ripples of a male statue’s muscles, or the lines of an industrious worker’s face, or the athleticism of the human form in its tense exertions.

Mosaic at Rome’s Foro Italico indoor swimming pool.

Chiarismo’s luminosity, I want to say, is a direct challenge to a Futurist hyper-fancy as well as to the Fascist commitment to the illuminated line as contrast, shading, and sculptural outline.

Goliardo Padova, The Discus Thrower (1934, private collection)

As we can see by comparing the Mussolini-commissioned mosaic of Rome’s Foro Italico (a.k.a. “Il Foro di Mussolini”, designed and created during the 1930s) and Padova’s “Discus Thrower” (also of his Chiarismo period, though one of my least favorite), for Padova any pretense to flights of fancy give way to a luminescent realism characteristic of the light and landscape of the Po River valley. Indeed, what is dramatic about Padova’s Chiarismo canvases is how fancy seems to have as little of a role to play as possible in the making of his paintings.
   I might, then, wish to call Padova’s Chiarismo a non-representational realism, however oxymoronic or even contradictory that may sound. A visit to the region on a hot summer’s day, however, will testify to the accuracy of my contradiction. The light bouncing off of the Po River’s humid haze make the lines of the landscape luminescent to the point of evanescence; that is, weightless or better yet, groundless. And this is perhaps Goliardo Padova’s short-lived achievement in the face of the contending artistic practices of Fascist Italy. Namely, his portrayal of a robust groundlessness through the realism of an irradiating luminosity that faces up to a looming, dark light.

Lady Gaga And The Monstrous Art of Pop

Davide Panagia
Trent University










The issue is one of coming to terms with one’s relation to one’s culture.

Nothing less is what the intensity of Lady GaGa’s feats of the spectacular make available. Her songs and videos – and her artistic life in general – relentlessly pursue the limits of Pop, not as a representational genre but as a medium. It is in this sense that she is an inheritor of the Warhol legacy; but, I would say without reservation (though with an awareness of the unpopular claim I am about to make), she surpasses Warhol through her discovery of the medium of Pop. For where Warhol transformed art into Pop and thereby created a new representational genre, Lady Gaga has transformed Pop into an art with a set of aesthetic convictions, possibilities, and ambitions all its own.

As absurd as this might sound to those lackluster critics who will (and do) insist that Lady GaGa is all style and no substance, the simultaneous release of two major concept albums – The Fame and The Fame Monster – prove the extent to which in our contemporary condition style and substance are incompossibilities of one another. And before readers think that I am claiming that the incompopssibility of style and substance means a kind of postmodern irony at the heart of Lady GaGa’s performances, please allow me to correct any misapprehensions of the sort: the claim about the irony of performativity wants to grant purpose to multivalent objects of aesthetic worth and thus betroth to them an intelligibility that makes them accessible and available to our understandings. My point, instead, is that what defines an aesthetic object is its ability to place the listener or viewer (in this case, both) in an uncertain situation where one’s capacity to give priority to either style or substance as the ground of judgment is disoriented. This, because our modes of sensorial apprehension are discomposed by the experience of the object. Aesthetic experience, in other words, occurs at the dark precursor, somewhere between sensation and reference. And the incompossibilities of sensation and reference are the tools of Lady GaGa’s art.


But I digress.


As we are incessantly reminded, Lady GaGa’s music follows a line of descent with and homage to some of the more relevant music and videos coming out of 1980s MTV pop culture, most notably the rhythmic flows of Madonna, the dance hooks of Michael Jackson, and the lyrical voicings of Cindy Lauper (though, as a note of personal insight, I would also add the profound influence of Cameo’s “Word Up” song and video). “Dance in the Dark,” from her recently released The Fame Monster, is most explicitly indebted to Madonna’s lyrical montage with its free-flow rambling in the middle of the song that revisits Vogue’s “Rita Hayworth gave good face” moment:


Marylin, Judy, Silvia
Tell him how you feel girls
Ramsey, Lamont, White, Liberace
Find your freedom in the music
Find your Jesus; Find your cupid
You will never fall apart
Diana you’re still in our hearts
Never let you fall apart
Together we'll dance in the dark


But her successful partnership with the Swedish director and video artist, Jonas Åkerlund, betrays another line of descent in her aesthetic stylings found in some of the more progressive of the current Swedish synth-pop disco bands; including (I would say) Fever Ray and The Knife, but also ABBA (listen to “Alejandro” and you will hear “Fernando”) and Roxette.


Like her collaborations with the recently deceased Alexander McQueen (who premiered Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance” in his Spring 2009 show) and the Italian installation artist Francesco Vezzoli (at the 30th anniversary celebration of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles), the videos that Åkerlund has produced and directed for Lady GaGa screen her insistence that what is crucial to our contemporary condition is our capacity for interface: that is, that our handling and beholdings of the objects of our culture speaks to our willingness to handle and behold one another. The simultaneous release of the song and video “Telephone” (on March 11, 2010) is a case in point.

Telephone’s lyrics are about a young woman at a dance club who does not want to be bothered by people calling her on her cell phone because she is too busy having a good time. “Stop callin’; Stop callin’; I don’t want to talk any more! I left my head and my heart on the dance floor”, proclaims the ritornello. Simple enough.


The song, however, announces something different than the lyrics. Upon first listening to it, I was disappointed by GaGa’s use of Auto-tune, something I didn’t think she needed given that she has an excellent voice. Auto-tune is the controversial audio processor (used by many in the music industry) that allows anyone to sing at perfect pitch by adjusting off-key performances through the use of a phase vocoder – it is the device that made Cher’s altered vocal effect in “Believe” possible and catchy. Upon second listening, however, I realized that the placing of the Auto-tune alteration in “Telephone” is not intended for pitch correction, but is an attempt to mimic through voice the sound of a ringer and to give emphasis to the artificiality of everyday life. The prominence of Auto-tune and the fact that “Telephone” lyrically and melodically swings to the beat of a busy dial-tone makes available our integration with multimedia technological culture so that the “Stop callin’” of the ritornello isn’t merely a request but is also a marker of our cultural interface: there is no naturalness to voice, especially in the digital age.

Åkerlund’s music videos are known for their mock movie-trailer stylings. And though at times humorous, their real effect is not one of parody but of intensity. The colors, contrasts, and close-ups throughout the “Telephone” video, for instance, are exaggerated to the point of the monstrous. It’s almost as if Åkerlund is trying to show the viewer what a video can do, and not simply what it can represent. And, indeed, with “Telephone” this disconnect is especially palpable given the fact that the video has nothing to do with the lyric’s themes of being in a dance club and not wanting to answer one’s phone. 

Correction: Lady GaGa is in a club of sorts – a rough trade women’s prison in the middle of a desert – and we can surmise why she ended up there if we think of “Telephone” as a sequel to the other GaGa/Åkerlund collaboration, “Paparazzi”, wherein Lady GaGa kills a boyfriend who, in turn, had tried to kill her by throwing her off a balcony. A further disconnect: GaGa’s collaboration with Beyoncé in the song “Telephone” is turned into a “Thelma and Louise” partnership when the two ladies – in full dis/fashion regalia (including makeup whose colors recall the pastels of their automobile) – board their “Pussy Wagon” (the pick up truck that Uma Thurman had used to escape the hospital in Kill Bill, Vol. 1) and go on a highway diner killing spree. Once again, a monstrous disconnect that is perfectly in-line with the theme of The Fame Monster – the ugly side of fame where makeup is transubstantiated into black tears, or even spilled blood. 

That Lady GaGa has made a concept album with both The Fame and The Fame Monster worthy of a Patrick Bateman monologue is a notable achievement; even more remarkable is that this conceptual artifice ties into some of the best instances of American popular culture, especially the pulp crime genre that Robert Warshow had written so elegantly about in the 1940s. In “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” Warshow claims that “What matters is that the experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans.” (The Immediate Experience) It is universal to Americans, he goes on to explain, because Americans react to it immediately, at once sympathizing and dissociating themselves from it: the gangster, Warshow says, “is what we want to be and what we are afraid we might become.” 


The persona of the gangster is morphed, for Lady GaGa, into the persona of the Fame Monster (notably, a trope Michael Mann has also explored in his most recent film, Public Enemies): the fashion icon/victim, the doer and the sufferer, the one who projects an image and is defeated by that same projection. And isn’t this what we all do? Do we not all project images and bear the weight of others’ projections? Facebook, the iPhone, wi-fi, and 3-G (soon to be 4-G) wireless networks are not merely the ornamental contexture of contemporary culture, they are the instruments of interface with it; they are the mediums through which events of relata emerge in our contemporary condition, they are the objects we handle and behold when we handle and behold one another. It’s in this sense that Lady GaGa has provided Pop with an aesthetic ambition. Through The Fame and The Fame Monster she has made the claim that Pop commands an immediate attention that no other medium of art can pretend to or duplicate, and it is precisely the immediacy of her stardom, and Pop’s availability through it, that marks for Lady GaGa one of the cornerstones of our contemporary condition: our interface with culture as opposed to our usurpation in it.

The Telephone Music Video