Madonna's World

“It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.)”

-Susan Sonntag, Against Interpretation, (my italics)

I mean, who is Madonna anyway?

The song by itself, Material Girl, preaches a neo-liberal message of women’s empowerment through material accumulation; reenforces a heterosexual matrix regardless: she is nothing but an object to be bought, and re-appropriates that symbolic to apply agency to herself as material. What is seen cannot be anything but an uncritical production wherein the “boys” and “girls” exist in an economy which is itself still functioning within a binary—the materiality as such demarcated only within and between this binary.

The secondary (or, in the age of systems of images, the primary) media which accompanies this song serves to form a much more subtle version of materiality, one which is not necessarily linked to that of a marxist notion of the material. Our protagonist, the incredibly rich producer, seeks to win this object of Madonna (who has objectified herself already), but he cannot “purchase” her, since she was simply performing radical empowerment and was herself still operating under the notions of an earlier production—more in line with the romantic period—of heterosexuality. Upon this discovery, the producer undertakes to perform that instead; eventually wooing the girl, kissing in the back of a dirty pickup truck (kissing at the end of the date as the example of heterosexuality par excellence, the ultimate conclusive act). Madonna is still an object, she is still taken through an act, she remains symbolic.

In that sense, who is the “Real” Madonna, because this song was written by two men. Which is not to say, in a facile criticism, that she herself is deprived of agency; rather, that there is no reasonable difference between Madonna as parody of Marilyn Monroe, Madonna as kissy kissy in the back of a truck, and Madonna as prior to the music video. In all instances she is organized as somehow being prior, and this apriori Madonna exists to further legitimize another instance of Madonna as being symbolic. In all instances the stability of Madonna is contingent on an imaginary object of Madonna which is cited to construct the “Real”, referenced in the symbolic.

        

Without heteronormativity, what are the demarcations of the Material which construct the materiality of Madonna; and what is the implication of this self-referenced construction within the text of “Material Girl”? Let’s examine a section from the song:

        'Cause we are living in a material world

And I am a material girl

You know that we are living in a material world

And I am a material girl

As “we” can see, while the “I” that is speaking here is obviously Madonna^[1], there is present a prediscursive “You”; perhaps a direct reference to the reader/viewer/listener, or perhaps a statement—”You” as in “not me”, as in the interpellation of the subject who is doing the viewing. In order for the media to gain legitimacy, in order for it’s thesis to be salient, it must presuppose the materiality of the very subject which it creates; and, therefore, also construct the materiality of the media-entity of Madonna by supposing that she is a part of this “we” which also includes “you”.

It would appear as if this Materiality which is taken in the song to be self-evident is itself encoded in the song, performed by the song, exists only through it. The “world” which she speaks of is already constructed, so what is “Madonna’s World”? What is the implication, where Madonna is no longer only an “I” among many “I”s which inhabit it, but when Madonna becomes the very Law which constructs this world, when Madonna is the world.

il n'y a pas de hors-univers

There is an expanding complex which begins to encompass the entire text, which reframes the entire text, which allows Madonna to be reconfigured not simply as an agent of the Material, but the only thing which can designate it. Her symbolic status is not one of a figure within the world but the world itself, she takes the role in every instantiation. Whether this is used to create a patriarchal drama, or a feminist one, there would be no world without her. Her world is nothing but a construction, yes, but it attempts to reach outside itself, to say that this world is the world; that the performative interpretation is the only legitimate one.

But again, as Sonntag does, to make the case that this violent installment of a universal is an attempt to infect reality is to fall into the Marxist trap—that is, to presuppose a material universe behind the designation of the material. What can be said, only, is that the creation of this world only serves to create an outside-text, to create an already outside Truth which reinforces the latter. What that text contains—whether is be neoliberal, heteronormative, or otherwise—is not a reasonable area of inquiry. It only demonstrates the illegitimacy of the thesis itself, and the destabilization of its established congruity to its own notions of universality.

But doesn’t the narrative of the music video contest this? That her “world” is nothing more than that, her own. It could even be said that outside the music video, in the text itself, there is no Madonna present, or rather, she is only present as an attached image (much like the one in this essay). That Madonna is only interpellated as constructing her “Material World” in the video, in contestation with the whims of some crafty and lecherous producer, in contestation with her own. That her world, the world, exists only as a side-effect of production; that there are other worlds with other Madonna’s which intersect and interlope with one and other, world’s which are not necessarily “Material”. Then again, none of those worlds escape the symbolic law of Madonna, they are all yet instances in different streams, different currents, different eddies of the same river. And let’s not forget that whether or not Madonna is “material” to the text itself, she is always in front of it; whether to act upon, or be the surface upon which Materiality is enacted. The song is apart of an album with her name, it is in a series of such albums to which she is attached.

If there were such a “dissimulated” Madonna, one which was not symbolic, it would still fail to avoid it’s own world.

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[1] The self-evidence of this statement is left as an exercise to the reader