Madonna as Icon : Leftist Rebel or Poster Girl for Capitalism

With a Little Althusser, Baudrillard and Postmodernism Thrown in for Good Measure

Because of her affront to so-called decency, Madonna has been attacked from the political right with a fervor almost medieval in its zealousness. Postmodernism claims irony as one of its defining aspects and, in truth, nothing could be more ironic than conservative Americans getting their hackles raised by Madonna. 

Although Madonna may be the very model of a modern leftist in terms of social liberalism, in fact she is the very apotheosis of conservative economic thought. It is not going too far, to be completely honest, to say that Madonna and her career can be considered personifications of Louis Althusser's conception of the machinery of capitalist ideology.

As with most things postmodern, Althusserian ideology represents a relationship that is "real" only in a subjective sense. For Althusser, ideology "represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence." The very idea of classic Marxist false consciousness is stripped of existence by Althusser; falseness on the one hand presupposes truth and reality on the other. 

What could be more postmodern than to suggest that even our own consciousness is open to interpretation? Althusser goes on to introduce his theory of contradiction and overdetermination, more succinctly explained by John Fiske who wrote that ideology is "constantly in process, constantly reproducing itself." Substitute the word Madonna for ideology and that sentence still makes perfect sense.

Madonna's career has been one of continuous reproduction of herself. Madonna is on the conservative, capitalist side of the argument that Marx is making a point against when he writes, "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society." This is exactly what Althusser is talking about when he theorizes that the capitalist ideology must constantly reinvent and reproduce itself just to survive, must less prosper.