Intersecting David Bowie

But Why the Circuit of Culture?

We had three intentions in mind when employing the circuit of culture model (du Gay et al. 1997) to ‘intersect’ the cultural significance of David Bowie. First, we felt that by traversing the five points on the circuit – representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation – all the ways in which David Bowie enters and circulates within contemporary culture would open out to us in richly vexing and dynamically connecting articulations. We felt that by unravelling David Bowie in this way would allow us to critically understand media culture more broadly. By running David Bowie through the circuit of culture we would not only get to understand his stardom and celebrity but how cultural forms are established, maintained, circulated and circumnavigated. Exploring Bowie in this way would allow us to historicize and contemporize media culture in equally exciting and provocative ways. 

Second, we wanted to, both demonstrate the usefulness, and some of the limitations, of the circuit of culture model in fostering cultural understanding. The intention was to extend its application beyond products, goods and services. In essence, we wanted to embody the circuit of culture.

Third, we wanted to recognize the significance and legacy of Stuart Hall’s later cultural studies work, particularly the way new forms of cultural empowerment flooded his writing and reignited his understanding of, and belief in, active agency and ideological resistance.

The circuit of culture is an analytical device that allows one to explore a cultural artefact, form, or phenomena across five intersecting nodes or points: (1) production, (2) consumption, (3) representation, (4) identity and (5) regulation. The argument runs that only by assessing a cultural form or formation in and across these nodes will one get to comprehend all the articulations that render a cultural text meaningful. No one node or point is more important than the other and they all intersect and cross-connect in a myriad of both competing and complimentary ways, creating the spaces for negotiation, opposition and transformation. Unlike Marxist models of power, then, where the forces of production shaped all material, social and economic realities in their wake, the circuit of culture equals out the power capillaries that operate within its scintillating structures. Taking the relationship between production and consumption, for example, the latter is ‘increasingly seen as an activity with its own practices, tempo, significance and determination’ (Mackay 1997, 4), best encapsulated through the way consumers can appropriate or transcode the material of ‘mass culture’ to their own ends, through a range of everyday creative and symbolic practices including hair and body modification, scratching and sampling (records), and fan fiction. Such appropriation often shows itself as protest and resistance against the dominant ideology embedded in the cultural form from which it came. With David Bowie, of course, resistance was very often embedded in the material from which his star images were made.

But Why David Bowie?

David Bowie is one of the most influential artists for the last 40 years and yet in terms of academic scholarship he has, until recently, garnered minimal attention. He has an incredibly dedicated fan base, had global main-stream success, is influential in numerous cultural and artistic arenas, and straddles the popular with the avant-garde and experimental nexus. His cultural currency is presently at an all-time high, his death creating a revisitation to, and a canonization of, his oeuvre, and an outpouring of grief and remembrance that seem to cut across or through different generations and international landscapes. His most recent albums and theatre work have had him defined as being at his artistic peak (Gill 2013); while, the globally touring ‘David Bowie Is …’ exhibition, that started at the V&A in London in 2013, has broken attendance records across the world. More profoundly of course is the fact that David Bowie crosses borders and ‘articulations’, whether this be the resigning of gender and sexuality, the confrontation with regulatory masculinity and sexual mores, or the way he was an active consumer in the production of his own star image fictions. We might speak of David Bowie as simultaneously being part of culture but also embodying a distinct culture that employs specific meanings and practices. His own sonic and visual assemblages have allowed cultural fissures to be created and polysemic tapestries to emerge and converge. As a type of science fiction he is an alien messiah and alienated outsider. He is, then, the living embodiment of the waveforms of the circuit of culture.

Intersecting David Bowie

We have organized the articles in this special edition to take us through a particular pattern of the circuit of culture: we begin with representation and identity and follow it with production and consumption. The last articulation we address is regulation. What we have found is the articles speaking to one another, not deliberately so, like some machine aesthetic, but through the rich strings of the circuit itself.

Kath Woodward’s article opens the edition, not only because Kath was one of the foundational architects of the circuit of culture but also because she so beautifully sets it up as an analytical tool which she then brilliantly hones on David Bowie. Recognizing the importance of image, visibility and visualization to the way Bowie moved through different representational streams, Woodward demonstrates how representation remains very much a central way of organizing meaning in the world. Toby Miller and Jorge Saavedra Utman start their essay with the exact opposite conceit suggesting that David Bowie doesn’t matter very much at all. They suggest that in the Latin America context he is of minimal importance by contrast with other prominent English-language pop-music exports such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Smiths and The Cure. Bowie thus becomes an absence of representation in this particular geo-political area. They identify several reasons for this lack of representation, including conservative gender norms, and a continent dominated by dictatorships when Bowie was becoming a putative world icon.

If Toby Miller and Jorge Saavedra Utman find a lack of representation through their macro approach to music fandom and consumption, Sean Redmond takes us into the home of sensorial storytelling, memory and feeling to explore how identity is wrapped up in event moments that shape and are shaped by cultural phenomena. Through an auto-ethnographic framework and drawing on sensory aesthetics and embodied experience, Redmond addresses alienated identity through storying his identification with David Bowie. Lisa Perott further develops the question of identity through exploring the process of performativity in which Bowie plays a pivotal role in reanimating the gestural traits of several other performers, and by so-doing opening up the boundaries that one feels like one can exist in. Complementing this analysis, Perot interviews a number of New Zealand Bowie-inspired performers who provide further insights about their own performativity in relation to identity, belonging and desire.

Denis Flannery’s essay takes the perspective of production to propose that a significant aspect of the production of ‘David Bowie’ was, and remains, the deft employment of aesthetics of absence or the power of empty spaces. Choosing two texts from which Bowie is himself absent – Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers (1888) and Todd Haynes’s film Velvet Goldmine (1998), Flannery’s contention is that for the circuit to function analytically, absence itself must be motivating and deftly addressed. Absence allows fantasy to be called forth into existence, while defining its shapes. Through these exemplars, Flannery suggests, are found uncanny aesthetics, sensuous and formal templates for deeper explorations of Bowie and his legacies.

Leah Kardos interprets the node of production through the lens of musicology, employing an intricate understanding of song writing techniques within David Bowie’s catalogue of work, locating definitive patterns in his creative voice. Kardos’ approach uncovers a unique music language comprising vocal articulations, idiosyncratic approaches to melody and harmony, mode and tonality, familiar and foreign sonic landscapes and nostalgic references that together act to encode meanings beyond the lyric and any immediate pop/rock style representation. This reflective essay highlights the sonic elements of a Bowie song and defines production as being intrinsic to the music’s meaning and consequent artistic influence.

From the perspective of consumption, David Marshall contends that ‘productive consumption’ is a specifically useful term for understanding the movement of cultural commodities and their proliferation of value beyond consumption itself. Marshall argues that fundamental to this conjunction is acknowledging that cultural forms are dependent on the co-creation of value by the artist and the artist’s audience. As such, there is something generated in the circuit of cultural that creatively comes to transform the product for the audience and generates new structures of value. Marshall’s essay identifies the production of value inherent in the consumption process of Bowie through the ways that Tribute Bands retool David Bowie and his music for a lived experience as well as through his variously interpreted performative personae.

Andy Bennett also reflects on consumption and signals David Bowie as a pre-eminent modern artist who was able to shrewdly navigate the ebb and flow of the contemporary pop-music industry. The rise of Glam Rock was notable as an important antidote to the then disillusionment found in British youth of the 1960s, and Bowie sat as a figure-head. More than this, Bennett argues that Bowie’s legacy to systems and practices of consumption affords audiences a skilful and tantalizingly fashioned DIY iconicity that works across time.

In their essay, Peri Bradley and James Page search the depths of cultural regulation for the exactitude of the significance of David Bowie’s complex gender identity. Bradley and Page contend that Bowie signified a radical fracture in gender binaries, whereby meaning became fluid and elided long established boundaries and restrictions. The thesis that Bradley and Page present us with is that regulation is conceptually indispensable in comprehending how one’s individual identity and performance are constantly under bombardment by the agents of capitalism and consumption, demanding relentless change so as to consume, but in the ‘correct’ way. For Peri Bradley and James Page, Bowie’s art and image act to guide understanding of how the system of cultural regulation operates in containing and ultimately assimilating all transgression so as to reassert social order and stability – but offers a position where resistance yet lies.

Toija Cinque draws the arc of the circuit of culture home, employing the multi-faceted storying the self approach to firstly understand the idiosyncrasies wrapped around regulation and individual experience. Cinque starts her essay by drawing the reader intimately close to trace ways we bear the critical need for identity formation and continuance. Reaching upward and outward, Cinque continues pulling the aetiological thread drawn by Bradley and Page, and holds that regulation is a crucial articulation of a number of formal and informal processes that have over time lead to contingent and variable pleasurable intersections with David Bowie’s art forms for (on a micro level) listening/viewing bodies, and (at the macro level) international communities of accordant ‘others’.

David Bowie is a circuit of culture: his star and celebrity self occupies and is occupied by each node and by dynamic, multi-modal articulations and intersections. As one moves through this special edition, one sees these articulations better shape an understanding of his cultural, economic and social significance. David Bowie is dead. Long live David Bowie.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.