Celebrity

Capitalism and the Making of Fame

Milly Williamson

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509511433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

It is a truism to suggest that celebrity pervades all areas of life today. The growth and expansion of celebrity culture in recent years has been accompanied by an explosion of studies of the social function of celebrity and investigations into the fascination of specific celebrities. And yet fundamental questions about what the system of celebrity means for our society have yet to be resolved: Is celebrity a democratization of fame or a powerful hierarchy built on exclusion? Is celebrity created through public demand or is it manufactured? Is the growth of celebrity a harmful dumbing down of culture or an expansion of the public sphere? Why has celebrity come to have such prominence in today's expanding media? Milly Williamson unpacks these questions for students and researchers alike, re-examining some of the accepted explanations for celebrity culture. The book questions assumptions about the inevitability of the growth of celebrity culture, instead explaining how environments were created in which celebrity output flourished. It provides a compelling new history of the development of celebrity (both long-term and recent) which highlights the relationship between the economic function of celebrity in various media and entertainment industries and its changing social meanings and patterns of consumption.

1
What is Celebrity? The Changing Character of Fame

Introduction

Every epoch has its own form of fame, and celebrity is a form of fame commensurate with capitalist society, both economically and culturally. The rise of celebrity corresponds to the enormous social changes wrought by the emergence of capitalism: the rise of bourgeois modernity, the commercialization of culture, the development of technology and the processes of industrialization, the growth of democracy and its curtailment. In particular, celebrity is seen to be intimately bound up with the development and extension of the mass media.

But fame has been a feature of society throughout the history of civilization. Different periods of history in different parts of the globe possess ways of being well known and publicly renowned, which are shaped by the structure of public life as it is created by the particular social, political and economic conditions that prevail. Fame is not an unchanging human condition, attached inevitably to ‘Great Men’ and the occasional ‘Great Woman’. Instead, fame is part of the historical process, and as such it helps to illuminate the balance of power in any society between different social forces and values. Perceptions of fame and its social meanings change in times of social transformation often highlighting the transition between epochs.

Famous figures from history can tell us a great deal about their period, the values of their society, the shape of power and challenges to it. Leo Braudy's (1986) epic history of fame charts the key changes in the ideas and practices of fame since ancient times. According to Braudy, we find in Alexander the Great the origins of fame, for he was the first person in Western history to have the urge to be seen as unique and to be universally known (although perhaps not the first person, for 900 years prior to the life of Alexander, the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II immortalized himself in his lifetime as the greatest pharaoh of all time). Braudy argues that Alexander presented himself as the direct descendent of the Homeric Gods – his grandiose persona corresponding with his status. His career became a guide for future generations of conquerors, and even centuries later Roman emperors emulated Alexander in their quest for absolute power, while the Roman aristocracy considered Rome to be superior by divine providence. In this atmosphere, every ‘true’ Roman strove to make himself worthy of his place in the Roman order, producing what Braudy terms ‘the Roman urge to fame’ (1986: 49).

The ostentatious and god-like fame inspired by Alexander remained the model for renown in the West for many centuries until it was challenged by the Roman emperor Augustus. Augustus did not emulate the heroes of the past, but instead developed a new form of fame which stressed civic duty and loyalty to Rome as the basis for public prominence. In this context Augustus presents himself as an imperial symbol, his importance tied to the destiny of Rome and its empire rather than to the gods. This marks one of the earliest shifts in the meanings of fame – from god-heroes to imperial-heroes, from grandiose display to an emphasis on civic duty.

Zygmunt Bauman (2005) also identifies the broad shifts in the changing patterns of fame but offers an alternative historical analysis. While for Braudy transformations in fame are related to social values, for Bauman, fame is also connected to social function and reveals the human condition in any period. Bauman contrasts the prominence of the ‘martyr’ figure in early Christian societies with the fame of the emerging ‘hero’ figure of early modern societies in the throes of nation-building. While the death of the martyr suited a world predicated on the self as a sacrifice to God and the salvation of the immortal soul, the death of the hero is a sacrifice, not to the immortality of the soul, ‘but the immortality of the nation’ (2005: 44). For Bauman, like others (Anderson, 2006; Calhoun, 2007), the nation must be understood as an ‘imagined’ community, the consolidation of which needed patriotic heroes prepared to die to ensure its success. Echoing but updating the Augustan link between public prominence and service to the state, the promotion of the early modern hero figure served the interest of nation states wanting to become stable and ‘solid’ at a time when the success of nation-building was not a foregone conclusion. The patriotism and the possibility of the death of the warrior-hero figure enacted and legitimatized these aims (Bauman 2005: 43). This period required patriotic heroes.

But for Bauman, if the hero embodied the needs of fame for a ‘solid’ modernity, then celebrity is the figure par excellence of what he terms ‘liquid modernity’. He characterizes our era as one in which community is not only ‘imagined’, as in the society of the ‘solid’ modern era, ‘but also imaginary, apparition-like; and above all loosely knit, frail, volatile, and recognized as ephemeral’ (Bauman 2005: 50). All is unstable in this characterization of the present, including, according to Bauman, the sovereignty of the nation state itself, which is no longer seen to entirely control culture and the economy and thus no longer commands the commitment of patriotic heroes. Bauman suggests that celebrities are symptoms of a new set of conditions; ‘celebrities are so comfortably at home in the liquid modern setting’ because they are ‘as episodic as life itself’, as are the ‘imaginary communities’ that wrap around ‘eminently restless celebrities who hardly ever outstay their public welcome [and] call for no commitment; still less for a lasting, let alone “permanent” commitment’ (2005: 50). For Bauman, then, celebrity comes to be an emblem of contemporary ephemera and is an expression of profound social changes.

Bauman's account perhaps overemphasizes the reduction of the role of the nation state in contemporary capitalism as a political, economic and particularly military entity, but also as a force for identification. But this is part of his diagnosis of the present as one in which huge changes to the human condition have occurred in the shift away from the ‘solid’ modern and towards the ‘liquid’ modern era. However, once must consider whether Bauman's insight about the ongoing ‘cavalcade of celebrities, each one leaping out of nowhere only to sink shortly into oblivion’ (2005: 51) is a symptom of a shift to a new epoch, or, as this book argues, a continuing and intensifying product of capitalist modernity. We must ask what the function of ephemeral celebrity is. Is it a symptom of a total cultural transformation, or an ongoing product of commercialized culture which extends back to the late eighteenth century? This book argues the latter; that it is a form of fame that emerges with the transition to capitalism and which first becomes a system in the commercial Georgian theatre in the latter half of the 1700s as a result of the growth of commercialism at the time.

Celebrity and the Cultural Decline Narrative

However, Bauman is not alone in his characterization of the present as a decisive break from the past, one that privileges the momentary and favours appearances over content. Nor is he alone in suggesting that the celebrity is a symbol of the prevailing zeitgeist. A number of commentators have suggested that contemporary celebrity is a symptom or a symbol of these cultural transformations and indeed represents cultural decline (Boorstin 1961; Debord 1984 [1967]; Gitlin 2002; Lowenthal 1961; Schickel 1985; Walker 1970). Perhaps the most frequently quoted is Daniel Boorstin who bemoans the decline of greatness that once purportedly characterized fame. For Boorstin, the ‘man of truly heroic stature’ (1961: 62), who scorned publicity, has been replaced by the image-obsessed publicity seeker. Boorstin argues that the graphic revolution in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century led to an increased valuation of style over substance. According to Boorstin, the widespread dissemination of the image through photography, film and television has meant that the circulation of the image has superseded the circulation of ideas, so that the media now rely on pseudo-events – events staged in order to be reported upon in the media – often before they occur. For Boorstin, celebrities are human ‘pseudo-events’ because, unlike heroes of the past who performed great deeds in the real world, celebrities since the early twentieth century are entirely constructed for media consumption. Boorstin claims that in the past the famous were known for their great achievements while today's celebrities are simply ‘well known for their well-knownness’ (1961: 58). They are no longer great, he claims, but mediocre mirrors of ourselves.

Boorstin has been identified, rightly in my view, as a conservative cultural elitist and a pessimist by more than one critic for harking back to an age that never was (Evans and Hesmondhalgh 2005; Ponce de Leon 2002). However, while there is a great deal of validity to this criticism, Boorstin's concept of the pseudo-event does point to an important dimension in the structure of information circulation which often relies on planned press conferences and prearranged events rather than spontaneous happenings. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that concerns about ‘cultural decline’ are not new, but instead have a long history in modernity's language of critique, setting the ‘serious’ against the ‘frivolous’ at a time when both were emerging as important elements in an emerging contradictory structure of feeling that characterized a period in great turmoil. Celebrity has from its inception produced both sides of the coin, fame as achievement (serious) and fame as personality (frivolous). And, this duality still persists today.

For even as early as the sixteenth century, as a harbinger of debates to come, the Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne expressed deep concerns about the dangers of the ‘mediocre’ in art and culture. In his work Essais (2015 [1580]), de Montaigne values the ability of both folk culture and high art to alleviate inner pain through diversion, but he considered the ‘in-betweeners’ (by which he probably meant various forms of theatrical performance) to be dangerous because of their perceived mediocrity. Interestingly, Montaigne was criticized at the time of publication for the endless digressions in his essays and for insisting on making himself their central subject matter (Sichel 1911). A century later, Montaigne's successor, Blaise Pascal advances the critique of mediocrity by suggesting that diversion itself is dangerous. In Pensées, Pascal (1983 [1670]) criticizes the entertainment afforded by the new forms of art of his day because he considers them to be a diversion from inner contemplation and elevated pursuits. Pascal considered the theatre to be the most dangerous diversion of all, because he thought it could deceive man into believing he has all of the noble qualities he sees portrayed on the stage. As we shall see below, the theatre is one of the earliest arenas for modern fame so perhaps it is not coincidental that early concerns about diversion and identification should originate there. Leo Lowenthal (1961) argues that Pascal's critique of entertainment, ‘prefigures one of the most important themes in modern discussions on popular culture: the view that it is a threat to morality, contemplation, and an integrated personality, and that it results in a surrender to the mere instrumentalities at the expense of the pursuit of higher goals’ (1961: 17). Hence the discourse on ‘cultural decline’, the concerns about the disintegration of the ‘solid’ for the ‘fragmented’, and the ‘serious’ for the ‘frivolous’, the ‘great’ for the ‘mediocre’, are themselves part of the transition to modernity rather than a new language with which to describe its perceived decline. Celebrity does not point to social transformation that has moved beyond capitalism into liquid or postmodernity; instead, celebrity is the condition of fame that emerges with the development of capitalist modernity, including its complex structure of feeling, and its consolidation with the rise of the mass media and the industrialization of the fields of art and culture.

However, this is not to suggest that because celebrity has a history as long as capitalism that we ought not to offer critiques of its meanings and functions. Instead, this book offers a critical view of celebrity as a significant factor in the industrialization of culture and the commercial character of media. It is also worth noting that there are critiques from the left which share some of the concerns set out above. The Marxist cultural critic, Guy Debord, writing just a few years after Boorstin in France, also suggested that authentic social life has been replaced by representation. In his book The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord outlines 221 theses on contemporary culture in which capitalism, or more specifically, the consumer capitalism inaugurated in the twentieth century, has colonized social life beyond the arena of production and has expanded into leisure time and all areas of civil society. For Debord, this is because we now live in a society which is dominated by consumption and by the image – the society of the spectacle. Consumer capitalism presents a spectacle of the good life that depends on the separation of the individual from the collective, and rests upon the alienation of work. Because the individual is divorced from the collective, s/he is reduced to consuming corporate ideas and images. Writing about Debord, Richard L. Kaplan puts it thus:

In these media-packaged and corporate-supplied depictions of the good life, all the social attributes actually denied to the general populace – independent power, freedom, social connection and meaningful social action – are repackaged as ‘consumer choice’, or as features of the lives of celebrities in Hollywood and Washington, DC suitable for vicarious consumption.

(Kaplan 2012: 461)

Debord was one of a number of critics who theorized late modernity or ‘postmodernity’ as characterized by the dominance of simulation on social life, the descent of the population into passive consumption of the spectacle, and the subsequent destruction of the cultural fabric of society, or the ‘real’ (Baudrillard 1983; Jameson 1991; Ritzer 2007). Figures like Debord provide a much needed critique of our increasingly corporate-dominated, commodity-saturated and mass-mediated world, particularly now, when many celebrate the consumer power of audiences and users of new technology, embrace relativism, and rewr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• 1: What is Celebrity? The Changing Character of Fame
• 2: Celebrity and the Theatre: Modernity and Commercial Culture
• 3: Celebrity and the Industrialization of Cultural Production: The Case of the Mass Press and the Cinema
• 4: Celebrity and News
• 5: Ordinary Celebrity
• 6: Social Media and Celebrity: The Internet of ‘Self’
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement