Page 152 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

MadonnaÐMother of Mirrors
John Castles

Cathy Schwichtenberg (ed.), The Madonna Connection:
Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities and Cultural
Theory (Allen & Unwin and Westview Press, 1993)

In her essay ‘Material girl: the effacements of postmodern culture’, Susan Bordo
makes the point that the celebration of difference in ‘academic postmodernism’
is in many ways complicit with a popular discourse which actually functions to
preempt recognition of significant socio-cultural distinctions. Her discussion
centres on talk-shows like Donahue and the familiar, recurring patterns they
display. Any participant’s attempt to advance ‘some critically charged
generalization’ is drowned out in the automatic reassertion of a censoring
individualism: What I do or you do is ‘not something sociological’ and to suggest
that it is amounts to a personal affront. Here, or—the reverse side of the same
coin—where guests display some superficially bizarre activity or appearance in
conjunction with the assertion that they are perfectly ‘normal’ and the demand
that they be treated ‘just like anyone else’, difference is neutralized as spectacle
and then distributed evenly so that it is at once significant and insignificant.
‘Everything is the same in an unvalenced difference’ (p.275) because difference
is possessed absolutely and equally by whoever is speaking. Difference can only
ever be aligned with the ‘positive’ as lived or embodied critique of some
‘prejudice’ or celebrated because it originates and is entirely contained inside the
volition of the subject concerned, or, ideally, by a sort of magic that only this
logic can accomplish, it can be both at once—social critique and entirely personal
choice. It must always be expressed at the level of the particular individual so
that sameness—read ‘hypocritical moralism’ or (in the academic version)
‘totalization’—can be positioned outside or beyond the individual concerned in
any particular case. This is individualism’s false modesty—it rhetorically secures
for itself a place which may be particular, but by virtue of this is absolute.
Perhaps it is appropriate then that Bordo’s frustration with all this emerges
plaintively from the midst of a collection which exemplifies her point. For the
most part The Madonna Connection is bad cultural studies in a host of familiar
ways, not least because it divides and rules its self-actualized social critic guest
star like a Donahue show. Rather than criticizing it chapter by chapter I have
taken three terms from the book’s subtitle (‘Representational politics, subcultural
identities and cultural theory’) to show how I think some of its prevailing themes
reflect problems in the theorization of stardom and fandom and in contemporary
cultural studies more generally.