This post is about teleology. Recognizing the symbolic resonance of a prominent celebrity, known by the heteronym Lady Gaga, tumbling to the ground as a result of the props deemed strategically necessary to support her fame, Carles ponders the question of whether "she was ‘doomed’ 2 fall based on ‘how stupid’ her shoes were."
On the surface, it appears that Carles is satirizing those prophetic strains of Marxism that announced the inevitable demise of capitalism on account of the iron laws of the progressive immiseration of the working class and falling rate of profit. So too will the progressive "stupidity" of celebrity culture bring about its downfall, both literal and figurative. An eviscerating triviality will reach a point of insubstantiability that will leave the culture industry with nothing upon which to build -- an infinite regress becomes an abyss of replication and self-parody. Cultural "ideas" will be defective in their very inception, producing failures like the one depicted in Carles's series of photographs. In this sense, aesthetic judgment becomes unnecessary, as culture is manufactured within a set of tolerances that do not permit success as it has been understood traditionally. Cultural capital will have devalued itself, rendering its accumulation moot. The fat-cats of cool will have been laid low by the hyperinflation of associational affect. Carles blames the institutional forces behind the rise of design and fashion with in the superstructure: "Should Lady Gaga go to design / architecture / fashion school so that she can learn what makes fashion ‘beautiful’?" he asks mockingly, ridiculing the educational infrastructure for producing commodified conceptions of the beautiful subject to instrumental manipulation, quantification, and speculation.
But deeper issues lurk in Carles's analysis, with regard to the nature of knowledge itself, and what can be known and what will remain shrouded in ignorance. One can attribute Lady Gaga's fall to an ideology of excess, to a surfeit that is at once constrained, compelled from her by the very logic of the mobilized construct of her persona. The limits of autonomy are thus revealed, circumscribed by the empowering fame that, ideologically speaking, is believed to enhance it.
But it is nothing new to recognize notoriety as a prison, even as it promises a kind of subversive liberation from the rules and norms that modulate the behavior of plain folk. One can trace this sentiment back to Wilde and De Profundis: "Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain." It's no stretch to see this moment reenacted by Gaga as she stumbles -- fully aware that she is doomed to repeat the performance for as long as she can secure the popular attention and media spotlight. As Carles notes, "Lady Gaga is ‘a progressive artist’ who tries 2 take her personal brand to the next level by wearing ’stupid shit.’" And of course, there can be no finality in the perpetual climb to the next level, and the next... They are less levels than a carceral circle; only the ideology of celebrity fashions this death march into a hierarchical surmounting.
The false procession toward higher levels that are mere figments mirrors in a deeper sense the human quest for scientific knowledge, for incontestable proof of human progress toward omniscience. "Do yall know what makes Lady Gaga ’so revolutionary’?" Carles taunts, trusting readers to conclude for themselves the appropriate rejoinder, that her revolution is like all would-be socialist revolutions, trusting in the inherent progress of human societies rather than their cyclical rise and fall, and is corrupted by Utopian ideals that have curdled under the pressure of implementation and the folly and weakness of our kind. None of us, quite literally, could walk in her shoes. We cannot join this revolution, ambiguously being conducted in our name by vanguardists like Gaga. And like the French Revolution, it will lead to suffering and pain, disillusionment.
Carles wonders if this hubris on the part of our species, coupled with a puerile preoccupation with status and celebrity, is not preparing the way for a grand devolution back to primitive social relations. Thus he wonders, "Should Lady Gaga just let 1,000,000 men ‘gang bang’ her and put it on youtube / pornotube / xtube /redtube / cumtube / other popular porn video site?" In other words, is the bottom line of both the pursuit of publicity and the pursuit of knowledge eventually the pursuit of a sexuality unconditioned by sublimation, a sexuality that manifests the unchecked aggressions of the primordial species transmogrified, as if inverted in a convex mirror, into humanity's most splendiferous achievement?
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