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Abstract
Lady Gaga’s celebrity DNA revolves around the notion of monstrosity, an extensively researched concept in postmodern cultural studies. The analysis that is offered in this paper is largely informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of monstrosity, as well as by their approach to the study of sign-systems that was deployed in A Thousand Plateaus. By drawing on biographical and archival visual data, with a focus on the relatively underexplored live show, an elucidation is afforded of what is really monstrous about Lady Gaga. The main argument put forward is that monstrosity as sign seeks to appropriate the horizon of unlimited semiosis as radical alterity and openness to signifying possibilities. In this context it is held that Gaga effectively delimits her unique semioscape; however, any claims to monstrosity are undercut by the inherent limits of a representationalist approach in sufficiently engulfing this concept. Gaga is monstrous for her community insofar as she demands of her fans to project their semiosic horizon onto her as a simulacrum of infinite semiosis. However, this simulacrum may only be evinced in a feigned manner as a (dis)simulacrum. The analysis of imagery from seminal live shows during 2011–2012 shows that Gaga’s presumed monstrosity is more akin to hyperdifferentiation as simultaneous employment of heterogeneous and potentially dissonant inter pares cultural representations. The article concludes with a problematisation of audience effects in the light of Gaga’s adoption of a schematic and post-representationalist strategy in the event of her strategy’s emulation by competitive artists.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of Celebrity Studies for their edifying comments.
Notes
3. According to Deleuze, a line of flight marks a singular, non-replicable trajectory of becoming that is more akin to a non-arborescent structure and smooth space, rather than a hierarchical structure and striated space. It may be assimilated by a hierarchical structure and become territorialised in a cartographic space with determinate coordinates, but as an after-effect of emergence from the Many that is not yet One. ‘Deleuze and Guattari characterise assemblages in terms of three kinds of lines that inform their interactions with the world. There is the “molar line” that forms a binary, arborescent system of segments, the ”molecular line” that is more fluid although still segmentary, and the line of flight that ruptures the other two lines (D&G Citation1987: 205)’ (Parr Citation2005, p. 147). Gaga’s singular becoming as a line-of-flight marks a constant sliding through striated (state) space and, hence, as ‘monstrous’ for a hierarchical (phallic) order (whence stems her parodying of any attempt by a state mechanism of assimilating her in her song Government Hooker).
4. Here Zizek is referring to enjoyment as jouissance; that is, as the ecstatic feeling of pleasure in pain. See Lacan’s essay God and woman’s jouissance (the word woman is crossed out, thus pointing to the effacement of its function as determinate signifier) and Clero (Citation2002, pp. 42–43).
5. According to D&G, a strange (or fractal) attractor (a term borrowed from cybernetics) ‘must be visualised as a mixed set of points – “dense points”, infinitely dense points. Each point corresponds to a potential global state of equilibrium’ (Massumi Citation1996, p. 64). Gaga’s semioscape, by virtue of its openness to stylistic variation (fashion, choreography, music genres, etc.) and to its explicit endorsement of radical alterity, is potentially inclusive of an infinity of dense points around which her fans may homeostatically stabilise. She does not attract her fandom because she polarises responses (which would accommodate her image under a binarist rubric), but because she is a complete ‘Stranger’ to any identificatory logic. Her infinitely open semioscape functions as a strange attractor for her fandom.
6. The rejection of the universality of the Oedipus complex constitutes the vantage point in this polemic that culminates in an overcoming of structural topographies, which were prominent in both Freud‘s and Lacan’s writings, in favour of systems of transformation and a-signifying diagrammatology (cf. Watson Citation2009, p. 168 and Genosko Citation2002).
7. References to Gaga’s live shows feature date (e.g. 2011) and time point (e.g. 0 hours:0 minutes:58 seconds).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
George Rossolatos
George Rossolatos (University of Kassel, Germany) is an academic researcher and marketing practitioner, with experience in advertising (JWT), marketing research (Research International/Millward Brown) and brand management (Colgate-Palmolive, Nestle, Weetabix, Cosmote). He holds a BA (Hons) in Philosophy from the University of Essex, UK, an MSc in Marketing from Manchester Business School, UK, an MBA from Strathclyde Business School, UK, and a PhD in Marketing Semiotics from the University of Kassel, Germany. He is also the editor of the International Journal of Marketing Semiotics (http://ijmarketingsemiotics.com/). Major publications include Interactive Advertising: Dynamic Communication in the Information Era (2002), Brand Equity Planning with Structuralist Rhetorical Semiotics (2012, 2014), Applying Structuralist Semiotics to Brand Image Research (2012), //rhetor.dixit//: Understanding ad texts’ rhetorical structure for differential figurative advantage (2013), plus numerous articles in trade and academic journals. His research interests rest with cultural studies and with effecting inter-disciplinary cross-fertilisations between marketing, rhetoric, and semiotics, also informed by disciplines such as phenomenology, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and communication theory.