Page 160 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

154 CULTURAL STUDIES

‘power relations’ or ‘men’s voyeuristic and dominating desires to see, to know,
and to possess’ the critical import of his work has obviously been almost entirely
lost.
Morton sees Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (‘with its patriarchal, racist and capitalist
constructions’) as an oppressive work so that Madonna’s Express Yourself song
and video can be shown to deconstruct it point by point. Strangely, given her
interpretation of Madonna’s representations as ironic exposure, Morton seems to
think that because Metropolis depicts certain things it must be arguing for their
truth. Because it represents factory drones the film ‘claims that the workers do
not have any minds’ (p. 218). By contrast the fact that the word ‘self’ in Express
Yourself is sung in a number of different keys is no coincidence. It is all part of
Madonna’s ‘mediations on the constitution of a decentred subjectivity…the word
as well as the concept gets divided and put in motion, articulating agency
through positions that remain partial and temporary’ (p. 228) (who was supposed
to be trapped in a purely academic introspection again?).
In interpretations like this the radical potential of a critique of representational
categories is contained and neutralized as representation. Nothing is what it seems,
even the critique of representation itself is already representation, already a
display originating elsewhere designed to ‘reference’ something else.
Everywhere the celebration of a collapse of depth and surface, reality and
artifice, but only as they are firmly trapped inside the receding depths of
Madonna’s intentional representations. In this context the most innocent
declarations of liberal egalitarianism become poststructuralist manifestos.
Singing ‘it makes no difference if you’re black or white, if you’re a boy or a girl’
is not ‘liberal catharsis’ but the articulation of a ‘postidentity space’ (p. 96).
Surely that is ironic!… Or am I missing something here, maybe I just don’t get
it, maybe this whole book is a playful masquerade, etc., etc.

References

Baudrillard, J. (1993) Baudrillard Live, London: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1989) Foucault Live, New York: Semiotext(e).
Gane, M. (1991) Baudrillard: Critical and Fatal Theory, London: Routledge.
Morris, M. (1988) ‘Banality in Cultural Studies’, Discourse 2 (Spring/Summer): 2–29.