David Bowie once insisted that one of his artistic and philosophical goals was ‘to be regarded as an individualist.’1 Ziggy Stardust, then, was Bowie’s self-conscious attempt to create the individualist culture of ‘the 21st century in 1971’ by synthesising three influences. The first was George Steiner’s notion of ‘post-culture.’2 A term Bowie used interchangeably with ‘postmodernism,’ Steiner’s post-cultural world was defined by the loss of the sense of life’s linearity, meaning and truth. For Steiner, post-cultural productions levelled traditional hierarchies of value and aesthetics. They conflated high and low culture and expressed a preference for immediate, sexual gratification. Post-cultural works were new kinds of hybrid arts. They emphasised ephemerality, irony and openness to interpretation. They insisted that necessity was dead. That contingency was supreme.3
After Steiner was Stanley Kubrick. Between Dr Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick became the foremost filmmaker of the ‘60s by experimenting with themes of nihilism, irony, alienation, space-age spiritual yearning, sexuality, and existential, apocalyptic terror. For Bowie Kubrick’s work ‘pulled together all the unarticulated loose ends of the past five years into a desire of unstoppable momentum.’4 Kubrick’s films, in other words, exemplified Steiner’s post-cultural mood.
The last of Bowie’s influences was Friedrich Nietzsche. As Nietzsche’s reputation recovered from its Nazi associations, Bowie read his works and adopted the philosopher’s ideas as his own. Nietzsche’s Übermensch became an ideal for David who believed his destiny was to become something ‘more than human.’5 As an artist who pre-empted Michel Foucault’s call to make our lives works of art by almost a decade, and who once wrote of his ‘distinct feeling’ in the early ‘70s ‘that “nothing was true” anymore… If we needed any truths we could construct them ourselves,’ Bowie was likely influenced by other Nietzschean arguments – that appearances are paramount, that there is perspective but no truth and becoming but no being, that identity is a fiction and the self an artistic creation.6 Nietzsche was post-cultural a century in advance. His philosophy was a perfect fit for Bowie.
Beneath the banner of Nietzsche, Kubrick, and Steiner Bowie made hybridity, contingency, desire and fluctuation his guiding principles. Between his eponymous debut record and Hunky Dory, his references expanded to include mime, Japanese kabuki theatre and German expressionism, folk and fringe New York rock music, A Clockwork Orange and 2001-styled aesthetics, apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios both nuclear7 and otherwise, William S. Burroughs’ ‘cut-up’ literary techniques, Marc Bolan’s glam stylings, space-race wonder, alienation and isolation, Buddhist philosophy, and the sense of nihilism both he and his society felt.8 Bowie experimented with these influences for years. Eventually they coalesced into a singular expression – Ziggy Stardust.
Ziggy Stardust was the great product of all Bowie’s early experiments. A perfect hybrid of post-cultural forces, Ziggy was an archetypal representation of everything new and still-to-come in the atomic-age’s liberal world. He was anarchic, individualistic desire personified.9 He was sexual openness, difference and positivity, gender fluidity and androgyny too. Ziggy was the ideology of self-transformation and self-actualisation embodied.10 The culture’s foremost symbol of the narcissistic fixations that govern our godless, nihilistic world.11 Ziggy was the messiah for a groundless land where want is free. Jesus for the post-cultural decade.
Knowing his world the way only great artists do, David Bowie made himself the nucleus of post-culture. For this reason, Bowie’s post-cultural stylings made him a perfect ego-ideal for liberal capitalism’s thriving consumer culture. Encouraging and relying on novelty and instant gratification, consumer capitalism was both a cause and consequence of post-cultural trends. After WWII, after the bomb, consumers’ desires had become primary cultural forces. Want now unified all differences and liquified all identities. Desire erased or sublated contradictions, dismantled taboos and turned absolutes into contingencies.12 The passion for consumption destroyed all boundaries to increased variety, accumulation and satisfaction. The forces exploited, invited, mandated and enabled by consumer capitalism helped usher in the post-cultural world, a world whose values only heightened its power. By the 1970s, the culture industry was beholden to our post-cultural desires. Being the embodiment of these forces, Ziggy Stardust became a perfect symbol for the liberal, consumer capitalism of his time.
Bowie’s performance as Ziggy Stardust made him an archetype of consumerist post-culture. It brought him stardom and great acclaim. But his powerful identification with the logic of consumer capitalism also had a traumatic side. Relentless change and innovation are central to post-culture and consumerism. Repurposing Bowie’s own words, ‘[a]nything that contributes to stagnation is evil’ under capitalism.13 To survive in consumer culture, you must change ceaselessly. You must relentlessly sacrifice the old for the new. Perversely, self-destruction is a form of self-promotion in the world of post-culture.
Bowie’s decision to kill Ziggy and to change endlessly and rapidly was not only a matter of art, then. To survive Bowie had to militate against stasis. He had to do to himself what capitalism demands of society – destroy himself to live.
References
Bowie, D., & Rock, M. (2002) Moonage Daydream: The Life and Times of Ziggy Stardust. Guildford, Genesis.
Buckley, D. (1999) Strange Fascination: David Bowie – The Definitive Story. London, Virgin Books.
Buckley, D. (2015) David Bowie: The Music and the Changes. London, Omnibus Press.
Critchley, S. (2016) On Bowie. London, Serpent’s Tail.
Doggett, P. (2011) The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s. London, The Bodley Head.
Foucault, M. (1997) Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New York, The New Press.
Morley, P. (2016) The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference. London, Simon & Schuster.
O’Leary, C. (2015) Rebel Rebel. Winchester, United Kingdom, Zer0 Books.
Pegg, N. (2002) The Complete David Bowie. Richmond, Surrey, Reynolds & Hearn.
Sandford, C. (1997) Bowie: Loving the Alien. London, Warner.
Steiner, G. (1971) In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.
Zanetta, T. & Edwards, H. (1986) Stardust: The Life and Times of David Bowie. London, Michael Joseph.
Footnotes
See The Complete David Bowie, Nicolas Pegg. See also Simon Frith’s comment that Bowie was ‘youth culture not as collective hedonism but as individual grace’ on p.172 of Strange Fascination.
See In Bluebeard’s Castle.
Moonage Daydream, p.12, and https://www.theguardian.com/music/2003/jan/12/davidbowie.music
See https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/david-bowie-ground-control-to-davy-jones-77059/. Note as well that The Man Who Sold the World’s track ‘The Supermen’ and Hunky Dory’s ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ either directly reference or allude to the concept.
See Ethics, p.271, and Moonage Daydream, p.12. Peter York believes that Bowie introduced ‘the idea of conscious stylisation—oneself as a Work of Art—to a wider audience than ever before’ while Simon Frith noted Bowie’s ‘example of self-creation.’ He also made similar comments about truth in a 2003 interview: ‘it’s almost as if we’re thinking post-philosophically now. There’s nothing to rely on anymore. No knowledge, only interpretation of those facts... Knowledge seems to have been left behind and there’s a sense that we are adrift at sea. There’s nothing more to hold on to.’ See The Man Who Sold the World, p.170, Strange Fascination, p.172, and On Bowie, p.132.
This interest in nuclear apocalypse was seen in his depiction of Hunger City on Diamond Dogs, and in the world of Aladdin Sane’s ‘Drive in Saturday.’ Bowie also alluded to his nuclear war anxieties in interviews on at least two occasions. See David Bowie: The Music & The Changes, p.45, On Bowie, p.68, ‘A Philosophical Conversation with David Bowie’, and https://www.thedailybeast.com/david-bowie-on-911-and-god?ref=scroll.
Bowie once described his state in the 1970s as ‘depressed and nihilistic.’ See Bowie: Loving the Alien, p.263. See also Stardust, p.203, Rebel Rebel p.227, The Man Who Sold the World, p.169, Moonage Daydream, p.12, Strange Fascination, p.174, https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/vince-taylor-the-real-ziggy-stardust/ and https://www.npr.org/2016/01/11/462653510/david-bowie-on-the-ziggy-stardust-years-we-were-creating-the-21st-century-in-197
As Christopher Sandford writes: ‘In his Ziggy incarnation, Bowie had represented the chaotic, liberating, free-form aspects of rock.’ See Bowie: Loving the Alien, p.156.
As Bowie himself said: ‘If I’ve been at all responsible for people finding more characters in themselves than they originally thought they had then I’m pleased because that’s something I feel very strongly about.’ Simon Critchley also detects this aspect of Bowie’s work: ‘As fragile and inauthentic as our identities are, Bowie let us (and still lets us) believe that we can reinvent ourselves. In fact, we can reinvent ourselves because our identities are so fragile and inauthentic. Just as Bowie seemingly reinvented himself without limits, he allowed us to believe that our own capacity for changes was limitless... when I listen to Bowie’s songs I hear an extraordinary hope for transformation.’ See The Age of Bowie, p.284, and On Bowie, pp.49 & 171.
Rebel Rebel, p.341.
On Bowie, p.134.
https://www.theuncool.com/journalism/david-bowie-playboy-magazine/