Week 1: David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars Part II

by Slim Volume

I could never identify anything inside me that ever pulled me towards David Bowie or Ziggy Stardust. Instead, the idea of them has been an amorphous assemblage, hanging hazy and quiet, distant in my mind. I’m not one of those of my generation who gets sentimental about Labyrinth [editor’s note: the author was more captivated by Shelley Duvall in Fairytale Theatre], but at the same time, I don’t recoil in disgust at the thought of Bowie prancing in nude-colored tights (after all, we are also the Robin Hood: Men In Tights generation). I’ve always desired from performers some sort of knowability, some sort of gesture, an identifying tic. I want to be able to smell the booze in their sweat and feel the bone-soreness of rock ‘n’ roll through and with them. I want urgency of expression, the sharing of vulnerability, the forging of human bonds. I want to feel a connection that isn’t as mediated, scripted, or policed by consumer capitalism and the culture industry.

There was something always untouchable or unfamiliar about Bowie. Unlike ET—another alien from my past—I could never imagine Ziggy or Bowie sharing in the humiliating comedy of coming out of a closet dressed as your little sister (or watching an extra-terrestrial come out of the closet dressed as toddler Drew Barrymore), let alone reach over all those layers of meaning in the human/non-human to touch fingertip-to-fingertip. The persona of Ziggy Stardust, and the persona of Bowie himself continued to be hermetically sealed, distant, and unknowable to me.

Instead, I’ve tended to be drawn to more punk representations of the “alien”. The “Alien Boy,” as the subject of the Wipers song of the same name, is the personification of society’s abjection; a marginal figure, doomed to a life of frustration in a condition of unknowability. It was easy for me to imagine punks, queers, rock ‘n’ rollers, and weirdos who may not share much in common recognizing the beating heart of “Alien Boy,” and forge affective ties as aliens together and with Greg Sage himself. There was something too alienating about Ziggy’s alien-ness however, something too pure—not necessarily normative, but tucked up and away from the messy funk of human existence. Greg Sage and the Wipers refuse this purity, and the alienness of “Alien Boy” is palpable, yet the frustration expressed by Alien Boy seems only to be productive of bloody knuckles punching a brick wall over and over. Can a reconsideration of Bowie, and Ziggy Stardust reveal hidden subversions?   

Ziggy Stardust as a “leper messiah” prophesizing the end of the world and the salvation of humankind by mysterious starmen can be read many ways, but what I find useful here is the story’s “world-upside-down” aspect. Mikhail Bakhtin’s work identified the carnival and carnivalesque literature as a site in which social hierarchies of everyday life are turned on their heads (i.e.  peasants become kings, etc) and an amalgamation of the sacred and profane is enacted in a topsy-turvy world of hybridity, excess, parody, and vulgarity. (Bakhtin 1968) In Bowie’s case, Ziggy is inverting the authoritative power of the state or the church, assuming for himself—the outcast rock ‘n’ roller—the mantle of ideological purity, combining it with the ultimate symbolic profanity of the masses, the leper, with the goal of liberating mankind from its own destruction. However, because carnivalesque performances make visible that “established truth and authority are relative,” (Bakhtin 1968) Ziggy’s disciples are able to see through his pretensions of power. As he assumes the mantle of the new bearer of truth and “all the news”, he transforms into a new authority figure, separated from his disciples (or fans) by the membrane of celebrity, even as he becomes the “poster ‘boy’ for the margin” (Rintoul 2004).

Whatever subversion may be found in Ziggy Stardust seems to exist especially within his disruption of normative gender performance. In many ways, Ziggy’s performances of ambiguous gender and sexuality exemplified society’s desire to confront anxieties and renegotiate norms around shifting constructions of gender and sexuality in the context of his time. Along this line, Richard Grossinger suggests that Ziggy’s alienness coincides with a contemporaneous fixation on aliens and flying saucers as “savior[s] from traditional male-female roles” through their “androgynous, transsexual reflection of the individual who perceives/imagines [them],” a reflection of their unmet needs which “transgress Earth’s genetic and social boundaries in ways that Earthlings cannot,” but desire to. (Grossinger 1974: 56)  However, Suzanne Rintoul points out that, in the similar way Ziggy’s celebrity status alienates him from his fans, his alien-ness is also representative of an ultimate foreignness and difference. (Rintoul 2004: 5)

Rock ‘n’ roll has always pivoted on the aesthetics of the carnivalesque, especially in terms of the grotesque body (individual and collective) as a challenge to dominant hierarchies as “multiple, bulging, over- or under-sized, protuberant and incomplete,” (Stallybrass and White 1986: 9), a part of a teeming mass of an always becoming, hybrid humanity. Of course, power is located in the grotesque body’s dialectical opposite, the classical body: “The grotesque body is emphasized as a mobile, split, multiple self, a subject of pleasure in processes of exchange; and it is never closed off from either its social or ecosystemic context. The classical body on the other hand keeps its distance,” and “[is] far more than an aesthetic standard or model. It structure[s], from the inside as it were, the characteristically ‘high’ discourses of philosophy, statecraft, theology and law, as well as literature, as they emerged from the Renaissance. In the classical discursive body [is] encoded those regulated systems which [are] closed, homogenous, monumental, centered and symmetrical…Gradually these protocols of the classical body came to mark out the identity of progressive rationalism itself.” (Stallybrass and White 1986: 22)

Perhaps Ziggy’s alien body fails to represent a true digression from gendered norms because it is too invested in a well-bounded classical body. From the vantage point of rock ‘n’ roll rebellion, his glam alien aesthetic can be read as a true carnivalesque gesture—outcasts of dominant society performing the rituals of opulence normally reserved for the bourgeoisie. But Ziggy’s performance fails at a true hegemonic reversal. Hermetically sealed from his followers, in an image of a purely androgynous being; pedestal-ized, angular, and closed, Ziggy remains complicit with power and the ideologies that naturalize it. In denial of the grotesque body, he refuses to come down to earth.

The Wipers, in their own way, also remain complicit with power. This can be found within their cynicism, their expressions of futility. Franco “Bifo” Berardi has made important distinctions between cynicism and irony. The cynic and ironist both come from the skeptical position in which they “suspend belief in the moral content of truth,” and embrace the instability of meaning. However, while “the cynic is someone who wants to be on the side of power but does not believe in its righteousness,” the “ironist simply refuses the game, and re-creates the world as an effect of linguistic enunciation.” (Berardi 2012: 20) By resigning themselves to the idea that the law of the powerful is inevitable though it is  “rotten,” “oppressive,” etc., the Wipers’ cynicism forecloses multiple possibilities that the ironist, by creating “a linguistic space where law has no effectiveness,” might open up with regards to human connection beyond established hierarchies of power, “suspend[ing] the meaningfulness of the signifier and freely choos[ing] among multifarious possible interpretations.” (Berardi 2012: 21) The cynical Wipers, like Bowie, are too faithful in narratives of progress, completion, and redemption that have been carried through modernity in both “secular” and “sacred” discourse—narratives that continue to structure and naturalize hierarchies of power. Though they are unhappy with the status quo, they do little to actually threaten it. Instead they merely reaffirm power’s hold, the inevitability of its reach, and its perpetuation throughout time, despite their criticism.

Are there ways to imagine the glam alien beyond the cynicism of the Wipers and beyond Ziggy’s commitment to a narrative of closure and the inaccessible classical body? I became convinced of this at the Olympia Film Festival this year, which had a glam theme and opened with a screening of Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine. To set the tone for the evening was a glam cover band, Rocknho, who paraded through the likely glam catalogue but with a difference: instead of a goal of faithfulness to a supposed authentic representation of a particular band or specific celebrity figures, this cover band—who claimed to be from a peripheral state of the (former) Soviet Bloc—did not offer any easy references to personas, identities, or places in time. Instead, they seemed to be performing what Elizabeth Freeman has termed temporal drag, or a “counter-genealogical practice of archiving culture’s throwaway objects,” in order to “awaken a dissident future once hoped for in the past.” (Freeman 2011: xxiii) This performance “queers” a progressive narrative that has so often subverted oppositional moments and possibilities (as well as the legibility of their traces in the present).

Rocknho’s aesthetic gleans both from materials offered by the Ziggy Stardust allegory—the performative qualities of gender, the instability of power, and the power of celebrity as well as a punk rallying cry of frustration, which, for the Wipers was provoked by the agonizing force of the policing of norms that intensified in Reagan-era America. Rocknho flaunt the radical iconography of the revolutionary past while rejecting or bastardizing the mythology surrounding the imperialistic and nationalist militarism that followed. The Soviet film projected on a screen behind the band, and the quasi space-age, glammed-out, home-made costumes that riff off Stalinesque Soviet uniforms, recall cosmonaut dreams of human achievement finally unbridled by systems labor exploitation that limit the realization of human potential. At the same time, their bodies spilling out of their lamé hotpants, unruly curls of hair overflowing from under home made Red Army hats, and bending, contorting bodies writhing into the audience, subvert the modernist ideal of corporeal perfection championed by discourses of militarism and citizenship inherent to capitalist liberal-democracies, fascist and communist states alike. Rocknho take these elements and combine them with cast-offs from the scrapheap of modernist utopian symbols and myths at their disposal—an endless pantheon of tools enabling them to construct an ambiguous assemblage to enact a carnival of irony useful in the present.

By providing countless imaginative possibilities of community affiliation and being—a true autonomous consciousness of connection, Rocknho works against late capitalism’s commodification of affective ties, desire, sensuality, and somatic life.  Rocknho’s embodied irony subverts power by flaunting power’s constructiveness, fluidity, and contingency. It thumbs its nose at universal truths and moral prescriptions emanating either from the left or from existent hierarchies and hegemonic ideologies. It blurs the boundaries of both the unified, classical body and the split between the body of the performer and the body of the people. By performing temporal drag, Rocknho takes carnival back from the regulatory, domesticating clutches of the bourgeoisie and redistributes it in an explosion of glittering fractals of emancipatory potentiality.