Page 157 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 151

doubling. This, if anything, is what ‘postmodernists’ like Derrida and Deleuze
have taken such pains to show. If ‘one’ begins, as they do (though in quite
antagonistic ways) with the idea that difference is an immanent force prior, to
identity, then the various representational doublings (identity—A=A, opposition,
negation) are revealed as a particular structure by which this immanent force is
bounded or controlled. Channelling the flow of differentiation into two moments
is functional to the retrospective establishment of a prior identity. This priority
can move forwards or backwards. That is, it doesn’t matter whether it ‘turns out’
that the copy was real or vice-versa. As long as the doubled relation is
established one side will always re-establish its relative priority.
Pribram’s interpretation of Truth or Dare provides a good example. The
movie is divided in the usual, clichéd manner: colour film for the ‘public’ stage
show, grainy black and white for the intimate, private ‘real’ Madonna. Pribram
points out, in laborious detail, the moments when this opposition is reversed:
colour for ‘private’, black and white for ‘public’. For her they show how
‘Madonna’ ‘collapses’ and ‘blurs’ this particular structural opposition through
which the fiction of the private self is maintained. Yet the ‘postmodern
theorizing’ she appeals to stresses that these reversals are always already part of
the signifying economy. For Derrida (even for Baudrillard) the film would be far
more remarkable if it didn’t reverse itself this way, because such supplementary
reversals are necessary to the maintenance of the primary term’s ‘myth’ of
sovereignty ‘in the first place’.
This is the root of a paradox which produces its own set of absurdities.
Theorist and star become a kind of comedy duo, each mirroring and
misunderstanding the other. Madonna’s perpetual assertions of an entirely
formulaic star identity—one that is itself, that recedes, that is or isn’t here but is
somewhere at any rate—become evidence of a deliberate deconstructive agenda.
(Kaplan finds Madonna’s announcement in Vanity Fair that ‘you will never
know the real me. Ever’ to be an ‘arresting’ counter?/example of the way she
‘deliberately plays with surfaces, masks, the masquerade’ (p. 149)). Irony, a
manoeuvre often deployed defensively in an ad hoc manner by someone who
doesn’t really ‘know what they’re talking about’, which allows an avenue of
escape (‘I was only joking’), becomes the record of a continuing, coherent
critical strategy.
Madonna tells Arsenio Hall that she likes being spanked and giving head. She
tells Carrie Fisher that she doesn’t, and that she was ‘just playing with Arsenio’.
For Pribram, Fisher’s reaction—This is a very important piece of news’—is
evidence of her naivety. ‘It apparently doesn’t occur to Fisher that she might be
tailoring her answers to suit her immediate audience’ (p. 200–01). But it doesn’t
occur to Pribram that this is anything but a playful strategy designed to reveal
‘the definitive absence of any possible barometer for the definitive truth.’ It is
part of a ‘game’ of ‘seduction’ she is not only playing but demonstrating,
representing. For her this is an aspect of the phenomenon which shows how
Madonna, in Truth or Dare and its publicity, ‘can be viewed as a contemporary