Page 158 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

152 CULTURAL STUDIES

application of’ ‘postmodern theorizing, in particular Jean Baudrillard’s version’
(p. 189). Her inability to decide whether giving head is politically correct
feminism or not ‘suggests parallels with Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra’ (p.
201).
TV interviewers and commentators frequently serve as scapegoats in the
postmodern feminist chapters. They don’t ‘get the point’ of Madonna’s
intentional irony. But the irony of their own position escapes them. The irony is
that irony is always intentional. It always works rhetorically to constitute an
intending subject (in the banal, motivational rather than the phenomenological
sense), a subject prior to its environment at any given moment. Thus what starts
out as a critique of representation and the identical subject becomes an occasion
for the representation of an identical subject! The theorists distinguish their
accounts from the standard journalistic perplexity over who the real Madonna is
because they come to the conclusion that there is no ‘real’ (i.e., originally
identical) Madonna. But they do so only at the price of implying or arguing that
the display of this loss of self is the overt and deliberate content of Madonna’s
oeuvre. Only, in other words, by reinscribing the subjective identity/
representation double on a new plane.
Madonna becomes an identical subject to precisely the extent that the critique
of representation is seen to take place within her own image, as critical play.
This play is then supposed to be the key to her success, it explains, her
popularity. The fans love a critic.Madonna’s relation to ‘the historical avant-
garde’ ‘lend[s] support to her arguments. As Michel Foucault insists’ (p. 215).
‘Madonna’s work is informed by a keen insight into the connection between
subjectivity, power, and ideology. As Foucault describes it’ (p. 220). ‘The
politics of sex and gender representations as they relate to identity has not been
lost on Madonna.’ ‘[M]ulti-Madonna’ knows ‘the sly deployments of a strategic
postmodern feminism’ ‘only too well’ (p. 142).
No wonder Schwichtenberg betrays a sensitivity to Meaghan Morris’s critique
of ‘Banality in cultural studies’. For Morris this banality occurs in texts where
‘against the hegemonic force of the dominant classes, “the people” in fact
represent the most creative energies and functions of critical reading. In the end
they are not simply the cultural student’s object of study… The people [in this
case the subcultural fans who made Madonna a star by ‘getting’ her masquerade]
are the textually delegated, allegorical emblem of the critic’s own activity’
(Morris, 1988:17). Schwichtenberg uses the power of numerology to banish
Morris, conjuring up the magic number 3 in a dismissal which is never
elaborated on. Morris ‘is in fact, self-involved—a self-consciousness three times
removed from popular culture which traps Morris in a purely academic
introspection’ (p. 4).
The effects of this will to identify the star with the postmodern theorist are
sometimes unintentionally funny, but usually just boring. The theorists simply
extend and then retrieve themselves through their privileged object. Stars
become critics, critics become stars (e.g. Seigsworth: ‘It is at times an awkward