Page 155 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 149

Emphasis on a myriad set of linkages connecting the content of the MP’s
videos to the divergent interests of subcultural communities is more or less
determined by the adaptation of subcultural theory to identity politics. But the
problem with this model is that it simply does not map on to ‘typical’ fan
experience or motivation. The fantasy that Madonna is a star to the extent that
she represents a large set of pressing local concerns, like some popular cultural
Congresswoman, functions to divert all attention from the specificities of the
cultural form she exemplifes— stardom itself. As a cultural form stardom is
produced as stars and fans are constituted in, experience and interpret a
particular range of recorded and broadcast mediums. It is common knowledge
that a star’s fascination is to a large extent an effect of their integration in and
reception through these processes.
At least since Boorstin the tautological aspect of star attraction has been
recognized. Their fascination lies as much in the fact that they are themselves as
stars, the ones who are massively replicated, as in the trivial stylistic differences
which might have led to their being replicated in the first place. Semiotic
analyses of stars, those that explain a particular star’s popularity in terms of the
images and discourses they represent, are now commonplace. But if star analysis
was exhausted by this then there would be no readily recognizable generic form
—stardom—into which each new star is inserted. Each star would emerge sui
generis in response to the already existent expressive needs of a given social
group. However incisive these accounts might be they miss the process which
then takes over, is far more important and much less understood: How stardom
becomes a sign in itself in its relation to the mediums which convey it. If the
studies were to locate themselves in the actualities of atomized, private fan
practices and fantasies, some interesting observations might emerge. But an
emphasis on Madonna as exceptional, unprecedented (as if, for all the bravado
about popular culture, this were the only reason she would be worth studying)
leads away from consideration of the dynamics of form to a preoccupation with
the minutiae of content.
Stardom and fandom are produced in arrangements and experiences of time
with their own distinct properties and effects. Stars are received in repeated,
replicated and extended passages of recorded time, for example. These
receptions produce their own meanings which are constantly changing as
mediums (video, CD) and contexts change. None of these specificities are
explored. Instead Madonna’s significance is found as the content of her songs
and videos elaborate yet more versions of the universal and entirely static
paradox of reality and representation (as the cover, showing Maddona in a
Vogue pose enframing her own face—self-presentation-as-act—suggests). The
analogies are from literature, drama, or the static visual arts. Madonna uses
‘Brechtian estrangement effects’, she is ‘like Genet’ (p. 96, 221). For Schulze,
Barton White and Brown she is ‘a striking contemporary instance of what Peter
Stallybrass and Allon White (1986) call the “low-Other”’, a category the latter
generated in studies of carnivalesque in eighteenth-century Britain. The various