Catastrophe of Success: Marshall McLuhan, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari

Abstract

The title of the rumination is derived from American playwright Tennessee Williams’ A Catastrophe ofSuccess. The appropriation of this essay’s title reflects the struggle of hip-hop artists to achieve true (sometimes global) celebrity status while apparently remaining uncomfortable with that status. Though often appearing in the media as entitled and shameless about wealth and status, commercially successful rappers and artists in general frequently grapple with the disjuncture between the artist as a gifted individual and the celebrity as an industrially produced commodity. This is particularly clear in the Kanye West track “Pinocchio Story,” which from its title down engages with the tension between representation and underlying reality, specifically as regards the experiential and informational economy of modern celebrity. This disjunctive combination suggests what I argue here is West’s larger struggle personally and extended to hip-hop in general as an artistic theme: the gap between an artist’s experience of individual subjectivity, agency, and creativity, and the way that control of one’s art and even very personhood can be usurped by media and technology. ¹