Mediation of Lady Gaga free essay sample

This essay unpacks the life of cultural objects based on Scott Lash and Celia Lury’s argument in the book of Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things. It draws on a set of case studies of a current phenomenon in music and culture, Lady Gaga, using the framework of The Global Culture Industry. Lady Gaga has only been in the spotlight since she first appeared on the television in 2008. Since then, she has been gaining her fans from all over the world. She is seen as a brand that has a global flow of movement. The theory is tested by being compared to other writers’ view on social objects, which includes Karin-Knorr Cetina (2002), Appandurai (1986), Deleuze (1994), World Industry of Information Culture industry was the term that first mentioned by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightment (1947), which has been the main reference to the critical theories. However, in the glorious era of ‘dot. We will write a custom essay sample on Mediation of Lady Gaga or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page com’ and social network such as blogs, twitter and facebook, the relevance of the theory is questioned by contemporary theorists. One of the critiques is elaborated in Lash and Lury’s Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things. The book is driven by the concern of the implementation of Adorno and Horkheimers’ Cultural Industries in the global media age. The main argument of the book is culture has taken on another different logic with the transition from culture industry, ‘that globalization has given culture industry a fundamentally different mode of operation’ (Lash Lury, 2007: 3). The view of the objects is rather metaphysical than dialectic. Since the emergence of information industry and the global communication system, culture has been seen in different perspectives. The second half of 1990’s was marked with the 2 boost of globalization of the information economy and the rise of cyberspace. The academic studies were followed by business and management analysis with the emphasis on non tangible assets. In this ‘regime of signification’, signalling ‘not simply a shift to a new mode of producing and circulating signs (cultural commoditization), but an alteration in the very relation between culture and economy’ (Wernick, 1991 in Grainge, 2008). In the nature of capitalism, brands were one of the non tangible assets that have been gaining attention from the world. As Lash and Urry pointed, culture industry is a branded circulating intellectual property (Lash Urry, Economies of Signs and Space, 1994). Moreover, the reproduction process is reassuring the sign value (Grainge, 2008). Lash and Lury argues that global culture industry of operates through brands. Anthropologically, culture is seen as ‘the signifying system through which necessarily (though among other means) a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced, and explored’ (Williams, 1981: 13). Because culture is the main object of the study, signs and text are the analyzed rather than the objective process that is emphasized in ‘political economy’ (Du Gay, 1997; Hesmondaghl, 2007). There is also ‘culturalization of economic life,’ where ‘contemporary capitalism was marked by a degree of reflexive accumulation in economic life, that included a new degree of aesthetic reflexivity in the spheres of both production and consumption, as capitalist reflexivity in the spheres of both production and consumption, as capitalist production became increasingly design-intensive and oriented toward niche consumer markets’ (Lash and Urry, 1994 in Flew, 2005). In this sense, culture has been industrialized. Hesmondaghl (2008) defines culture industries as a sector or a linked production system which involved in the production of social meaning and deal primarily with industrial production and circulation of texts. The essay will focus on linking a music brand with performing arts, fashion, publishing, and video games. 3 In spite of its multi-billion dollars success, the singular form phrase ‘culture industry’ was first identified by German scholars Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightment (1947) to show the negative side of the information manufacture. The book probes how the culture industry manipulates its consumers through mass media for ‘the interest of financial profitability of corporate oligopoly’ (Lash Lury, 2007: 3). Human beings become dependent on it and the industry legitimates the power of cultural producer or elitists (Adorno, 1997). At the time the book was written, culture was still in the realm of superstructure, where domination and resistance through ideology, symbols, and representation. Nevertheless, Lash and Lury believe that some of the process no longer exists with the situation in global culture industry era. Images and other cultural forms are thingified, not in the superstructure, but in the materiality of infrastructure, dominating ‘both the economy and experience in everyday life’. Instead of circulating as identical objects, cultural entities have the dynamics of their own and move as if it is by accident and unintended. The form of the objects is not static as an atom and determined by the intentions of their producers (top down). Biopower in Cultural Entities One of the arguments of Global Culture Industry is that the industry is animated (Lash and Lury, 2007: 21). In the logic of ‘singularities’, cultural objects ‘move and changed through transposition and translation, transformation and transmogrification’ (Lash Lury, 2007: 5). Translation is ‘an organizational process in which the product moves in a linear, sequential fashion as a short story to a book, a film, video television and so on’ (Lash Lury, 2007: 25). Authorship, creativity, regional or national culture are understood as the result of integrity of an artistic work related to others. By transposition, Lash and Lury mean the intensive features of the 4 object that enables movement, rather than any kind of aesthetic integrity. The movement of transposition is characterized by multiplicity, intensive, associate series of events, merchandise promotion, and publicity. Organized in part by the laws of trademark and passing off, transposition defined by territorial boundaries from multiple origins. It also can be seen as a zone of identity in order to sell products (Becket, 1998, in Lash and Lury, 2007:25). Meanwhile, is an activity to change into a different shape or form, especially one that is fantastic or bizarre (Menheim, 2010). The objects are viewed as ‘a product of normative or instrumental rational action (mediated by a set of internalized habits and expectations) in the first, and as an outcome of social interaction in the latter’ (Leschziner, 2005). Cultural objects are seen as monads that live in different forms by a trace with a memory complex. Unlike commodities by Adorno and Horkheimer that are seen as atoms, monads are self-energizing have their own lives. They are living in microstructures. This culture of circulation is not anymore determined by the producers as Adorno and Horkheimer stated. The value is added in this movement or self-modification throughout the range of spaces. Therefore, the indeterminacy process of production and consumption are the matter of the ‘construction of difference’. This logic of difference is where brand, one of the cultural objects (Lury, 2004), work, and circulate. The embedding of social meanings and relations in physical world constitutes a social ‘morphology’, a spacial arrangement of material objects that constitutes the landscapes, settlements, and technologies to which human actions relate. This book’s argument is in the flow of the objects’ movements, media becomes things, and things can transform into media. Argument is nuanced chapters ma pping the biographies of seven ‘cultural objects’, which are four media that becomes things, such as Toy Story and 5 Wallace and Gromit; and three things that become media: Euro ‘96, Nike, Swatch. The analysis was drawn from a number of different points of view, which are anthropology, science and technology, media theory, biography, multiplicity, and economic sociology. The theory has a number of influences, including Appadurai on how it traces the objects by following them; Deleuze in relating the objects to one another; and Karinn Knorr Catina in the logic of the space of the objects, in microstructures or networks. Brand Has Risen As mentioned before, brand plays a key role in today’s global culture industry. ‘Culture is driven by imagination’ (Tuan, 1998). Within the growing critical literature on brands, the cultural work of logos, signs and trademarks has often been read symptomatically, an aspect of the thickening hegemony of global capitalism and of the social disjunction represented in the production and promotion of goods. Brands have lives of its own that actualize themselves. It flows from brand’s memory, that is ‘brand identity’. A range of series of goods or commodity generates a brand with diversification of products. According to Lash and Lury, Brand experience can be seen as a feeling of intensity. Objects are not always something that can be seen or touch physically. Unlike most natural scientists, social scientists including Lash and Lury refer objects as something that is in the imaginary world. In the new economy, brands are living on the thin air (Leadbeater, 1999; Simmel, 1978) sees ‘economic objects’ that pure desire and immediate enjoyment. Branding has been linked to structural changes, or intensifications, in the basis of consumer culture, which is especially associated with the move from Fordism to post-Fordism in the last third of the twentieth century. As a critical label, Fordism describes a mode of production based around the factory, the rationalization of labour and the standardization of goods (Grainge, 2008). 6 Although both can be sources of power, Lash and Lury differentiate the brand and commodity. Commodities works through a mechanistic principle of identity, brands through the animated production of difference’ (Fraser et al, in Lash and Lury, 2007: 7). However, Appandurai defines commodity ‘as a situation in social life of any ‘thing’ be defined as the situation in which its exchangeability (past, present, or future) for some other thing is its socially relevant feature’ (Appadurai, 1986). The summary is shown on the table below. Variable Logic Exchange value Production role Valued by History Set of relations with others Life Quantity Determinancy Production Works through Consumption Commodity Identity Money Produced as products Exchange for quantity, use value for quality No No Dead Singular Determined Labour-intensive Reproduction of identity Generalized Fordist consumption Use value: concrete singularity, qualities of product Exchange value (as commodity): homogeneity Brand Difference Not exchanged except for capital markets Source of production Expected future profits and difference Yes Yes Alive Series of goods Indetermined Design-intensive More production difference Specialized consumption Values Sign value: qualities of experience Table 1 Commodity versus Brand Methodology This essay uses the method of Global Culture Industry by following the life of Lady Gaga 7 with a biography. Lady Gaga is seen as a thing, ‘the internal organization of the object itself’ (Lash and Lury, 2007). Although she is a living human, she is a singular, manufactured brand (Gaffney, 2010) which makes her a cultural object. She is no just a pop music singer, she other values behind her. There are several people who shape Lady Gaga, including herself who has a major influence on the brand. The objects are followed by getting as much of information in many places and time from as many points of view as possible (Lash and Lury, 2007: 20). Literature reviews from various articles and research about Lady Gaga are used to reach comprehensiveness and the richness of data; and also to show intersubjectivity. In the book, Lash and Lury uses interviews to support the biography. This essay uses the interviews that are done in the multiple sources. In this biography, writer also incorporates other theorists’ views to the objects in the biography in order to test Lash and Lury’s method on the specific situations, time, and space. This essay will look at the objects with theoretical approaches by Karin-Knorr Cetina, Appandurai, Deleuze, and Heath and Potter; and Beer and Burrows. The biography is structured in three parts: the most recent development which the object enters to a flow; the structure of the industry; the beginning of the cultural object as a thing. Biography: From Germanotta to Gaga ‘I am my music; I am my art; I am my creativity’ (Gaga in Robinson, 2010) ‘She isnt a pop act, she is a performance artist. She herself is the art. She is the sculpture’. Lauper, 2010). Lady Gaga is one of the most successful acts in popular music industry in the last decade. ‘There is no denying it. Lady Gaga is one huge global brand. In fact, the money-making machine that is Lady Gaga is predicted to earn more than $100 million in 2011’ (Daily Mail, 2011). She has 8 been gaining her fans from all over the world, whom she refers as ‘little monsters’. With combining performance, she and her image have been shifting in different kinds of movement, adding her values in the eyes of the world.