This
Tuesday Lady Gaga and myself shall be appearing at Birkbeck in support of
the UCU strike in the run up to the 26th of March. My theoretical project and,
indeed, my defence of pure theory as such in contraposition to those calling
for near unreflective action has reached a critical zero-point. Either we act
now, or we do not act at all.
But what of my good friend Lady Gaga’s
theoretical contributions? Certainly, there is a certain performance of theory
in her costumes, videos and even (some of) her music. Nina Power has already
noted that the infamous “meat”
costume could be seen in reference, indeed, a performance of, Carol J.
Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory,
a book that notes the consistent linking in the oppressive imaginary of the
patriarchy of the female body and meat, of animality and the feminine. Equally,
her moral support for the cause of gay rights in The States has been well
documented – in an underrated piece Dan Hancox traced the spidery
pathways between her work, Wikileaks, Bradley Manning and the end of the “don’t
ask don’t tell”. Gaga’s work as a cultural phenomena has generated its own theory. But what of her actual
theoretical project? Let us turn to her one extant theoretical fragment,
written at college in 2004 when she began her musical production,
Assignment #4: Reckoning of Evidence by the then Stefani Germanotta.
Gaga begins by reckoning with
the social construction of the body, with particular reference to the work of Spencer Tunick, a New York artist
whose displays of mass public nudity, perhaps with a hint of bourgeois
vulgarity, caused controversy in Guilliani’s reformed city – to the point that
the artworks were only possible through mass
civil disobedience. His work, for Gaga, is the movement of “freeing objects
from their social significance and thus endowing them with endless
possibilities of form”. Thus the naked body, seen only (and thus made
controversial) from the perspective of sex, is repurposed in Tunick’s work as
pure form, and thus as moves into the sphere of art, which simultaneously, and
dialectically challenges that initial social signification oppositionally. Is
this not entirely then the very logic of the spectacular occupations of place
that have been occurring, both in student spaces, old public houses and disused
Job Centres that we see today? The reduction of spaces of the social body of
capital or the neoliberal university into places of pure use, in what Giorgio
Agamben calls the movement of profanation
– opened to the infinite possibilities of collective human creativity while
standing as a direct challenge to the structures it is placed within in an
oppositional mode, simultaneously inside and outside the system – both sharing
communication and co-operation and antagonism – much as Antonia
Birnbaum’s recent essay on
communism is early Marx shows. Tunick discovered the same himself in the
construction of his own pieces, in their need to find a way around New York, to
take a space and fill it with naked human bodies – “The choice of location
provides symbolic impact (i.e. the Brooklyn Bridge, the Dakota, the Stock
Exchange), and as the models become more numerous, the compositions become
progressively more abstract” – clothed, and made more permanent, this could
appear as an economic blockade.
Tunick’s work brings us to a
paradox: the ultimate source of barbarism is culture itself, one’s direct
identification with a particular culture which renders one intolerant towards
other cultures. The basic opposition is thus related to the opposite between
collective and individual: culture is by definition collective and particular,
parochial, exclusive of other cultures, while – next paradox – it is the
individual who is universal, the site of universality, insofar as s/he
extricates itself from and elevates itself above its particular culture. Since,
however, every individual has to be somehow “particularized,” it has to dwell
in a particular life-world, the only way to resolve this deadlock is to split
the individual into universal and particular, public and private (where
“private” covers both the “safe haven” of family and the non-state public
sphere of civil society (economy)). In liberalism, culture survives, but as
privatized: as way of life, a set of beliefs and practices, not the public
network of norms and rules. Culture is thus literally transubstantiated: the
same sets of beliefs and practices change from the binding power of a
collective into an expression of personal and private idiosyncrasies. The task,
then, of today’s revolutionary is precisely this bodily-economic
blockade.
This is perhaps why then we
find, like nudity in public places, the occupied space frequently objected to
through in terms of abjection – squatters are dirty, they don’t wash, they
don’t have jobs, they aren’t respectable – and so on. For police, protesters
are dirty swampies,
animals, profane. The repurposing and reduction of these spaces and their
subtraction from capital is formally offensive to its systematic logic. The
system react with characteristic venom. The same is true of the UCU strike
itself – the press will be at pains to describe its actants as bedraggled,
ugly, Trotskyite perverts, ivory tower intellectuals and so on to stress the
traditional association of political opposition with ugliness – the same will
be true, we predict without checking, of the right-wing reaction to Saturday.
We have already seen Labour and Conservative politicians dip into their stores
of insult, ‘retards’
among the most well know, to describe anti-cuts protesters disrupting
council meetings. Gaga perhaps anticipates this in the closing section of the
essay on the monstrous. Considering Montaigne essay on ‘deformity’ she notes
that like public nudity, what is ‘deformed’ is only an effect of social
constructions of the body, just as nudity is only sexual, and therefore mass
nudity only problematic for the New York police due to this social formation.
Emphatically Gaga notes ‘we call contrary to nature what we call contrary to
custom’, ‘we only accept the regular and it is this which blinds us from seeing
the prodigy of what we have never seen before’. The greatest lie of capitalism
is perhaps its naturalisation – the idea that it is simply the law of nature
that it is this way. The cuts cannot be helped, just as capitalism cannot be
helped. Deborah Orr, at the high of the student protests displays
this logic with stunning clarity. “Fiscal discipline really is necessary”,
Orr opines “The truth is that they [so-called “adults” failing to protest] are
too wise to waste their energy on something so silly. Protesting against the
cuts is like protesting against water’s stubborn habit of flowing downwards”.
My God! The bleak hand of capitalist realism! Protesting cuts is equivalent to
being against the direction of the fundamental laws of the cosmos! But this is
not nature, but simply custom, a custom that the ruling class have generated as
an ideology that manufactures exploitation and alienation. To denaturalise
capital, to subtract while remaining within to push outward, to reform spaces
to pure use opposed to the commodity form, to not accept as regular what is
simply custom – this is the essence of our protest. This strike can be seen as a dull
churning of reaction against the telos of nature, or placed in a global context
of revolution, something ‘we have never seen before’ – just as Lady Gaga
appearing in solidarity with workers, or as I have explained elsewhere, the
utterly unpredicted revolutions shaking the Middle East.
Slavoj Žižek is a senior
researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University
of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate School.
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