Friday, January 11, 2008

Brief foray into complicated world of post-structural concertgoing proves overwhelming for Hannah Montana fans

Breaking news! Apparently some young fans and their (highly impressionable, highly idiotic) parents are upset because of some underhanded shenanigans during a recent Hannah Montana concert. E! Online explains thusly:

Giving her fans the best of both worlds is apparently too much for Miley Cyrus to handle on her own.

The singer, who performs both as herself and her Disney Channel alterego on the sold-out tour, was accused in an OK! magazine report this week of using a body double during a brief portion of her show.
...
"Then they covered her with a black sheet and she went through a secret door. Within a second, a new 'Hannah' came out of a different door wearing oversized white glasses. The whole time this was happening Miley's vocals were still playing. The new imposter had her back turned while she danced, trying to hide that fact that she was not Miley Cyrus. At this instant I became very suspicious."

Had these fans read--and UNDERSTOOD--the thesis of Derrida's "Difference" prior to attending the show, they would have grasped the central point advanced by post-structuralist critics and being performed by Ms. Cyrus in a very sophisticated and nuanced bit of deconstructionist criticism: that the concert actually consists of THREE preformers: Miley Cyrus, the "real" singer, her "TV" "alter-ego" (one of the cool things about deconstruction is that literally everything can be scare-quoted), and a third person who represents a composite character that lingers in the neverworld between fact and fiction, between Mylie and Hannah, between the authored work and its author, between creator and created.

In other words, in order to understand the genesis of Hannah Montana, we must first understand the genesis of the actor creating the "sign" of Hannah, in this case Mylie Cyrus, who is herself the outcome of a very intricate set of circumstances involving her father, noted neo-Foucaultian Billy Ray Cyrus. The complex relationship between sign and signifier here devolves into a complex series of binary oppositions between Hannah and Mylie, leading to the point where the concert has no choice but to generate a "third" performer to serve as a proxy for the outcome of the conflict between symbol and symbologist. That the concertgoers were confused and/or outraged by this only shows the depths to which they have been subjugated by the traditional Western structuralist mindset.