Page 159 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 153

dance. Turn this way and you stare into the camera (as [Eric] Michaels concludes
“I have bought another five minutes of fame”). Turn the other direction and you
might see Baudrillard, Frith, Jameson, Morris, Deleuze, or Barthes. These are
complicated pleasures of being interpreted and interpreter…of being a star and
starstruck’ (p. 310). And the versions of Baudrillard and Foucault produced as
they are identified with Madonna prove to be strange indeed. In this process
accounts of networks which constitute the subject become apologias for some
sort of leap into a pure, contentless, disengaged subjectivity, a breaking free from
‘oppressive power’ into ‘pure freedom’. In Pribram, for example, Baudrillard’s
concept of ‘the obscene’ comes around to having something to do with the way
Madonna ‘shocks’ some people with the ‘representation of sexuality’ while the
new postmodern generation don’t mind, about changing, culturally relative
‘social attitudes towards sexuality’, about liberation from the ‘culturally
repressed’, from ‘repressive and oppressive’ ‘socially constructed definitions of
obscenity’ (p. 200).
But this tendency reaches its nadir in Melanie Morton’s account of Madonna
as avant-garde Genet-Foucault, deconstructing Fritz Lang. To Morton Madonna
‘stages both [the] construction and deconstruction’ of the ‘repressed and brutal
maxims of liberal humanism’, she is engaged in ‘combat against the norms of
representation’ (p. 215, 217). But in her every formulation Morton reveals her
own position to be an intensified version of the liberal humanism and
representationalism she attacks. She continually uses poststructuralist
descriptions of form as pretexts for critiques of their functioning, as if they
describe some particular oppressive structure which can be abstractly
transcended: discourse reverts back into ideology. Madonna ‘examines’ things
like ‘narrative closure’, ‘representation’ and ‘identity’ and their ‘connection with
domination’, where all these things are contentless forms, self-evident evils to be
avoided.
Foucault’s description of power relations gets mixed up with a residually
Marxist conceptualization of ‘domination’ which it was explicitly designed to
counter. This produces all sorts of confusions. Sometimes Madonna’s strategies
exemplify the power relations Foucault describes (p. 226). sometimes they are
exposés designing to facilitate escape from their oppressive workings, ‘politically
subversive’ ‘displays’ ‘making conscious’ the ‘connection between sex and
power’, revealing ‘the interests of state [Foucault? The interests of state?] that
require docile bodies for a governable populace’ (p. 220).
In one paragraph Morton discusses how Express Yourself ‘undermines the
stability of domination’ while ‘dominance is not clear or stable’ (p. 229). Still
this bizarre amalgam enables her to write sentences like ‘Madonna insists that we
not be conquered by the power relations to which we are subject’ (p. 233).
Foucault attempted to describe power relations as at once inescapable and open,
as producing productive subjects in particular positions, in order to move away
from the humanism and representationalism implicit in both liberal and Marxist
formulations. When he is used to rouse an undifferentiated ‘we’ to ‘conquer’