Celebrity Society

The Struggle for Attention

Robert van Krieken

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351587228
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

On television and in films, in magazines and books, on the Internet and in the realm of politics, celebrities of all sorts seem to dominate our attention. Celebrity Society: The Struggle for Attention brings new perspectives to our understanding of how the figure of 'the celebrity' is bound up with the structure and dynamics of society, economics, and politics. It outlines how the 'celebrification of society' is not just the twentieth-century product of Hollywood and television, but a long-term historical process, beginning with Christian saints, the printing press, theatre, and art.

Drawing on the ideas of Norbert Elias, the book explains how contemporary celebrity society is the heir (or heiress) of 'court society', taking on but also transforming many of the functions of the aristocracy. As well as examining celebrity in all the familiar arenas – film, television, music, fashion, and sport – Celebrity Society also includes the analysis of celebrity in business and management, politics, humanitarianism, and philanthropy. A key feature of the book is its development of the idea that celebrity is driven by the 'economy of attention', since attention has become a form of capital – attention capital – in the Information and Internet age.

In this second edition the author has updated and significantly revised this path-breaking book to include a more detailed discussion of attention capital, the question of gender and celebrity, populism, fans, fandom, and self-formation, micro-celebrity, and personal or self-branding, the 'worker celebrity', and the impact of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Celebrity is an exciting and rapidly expanding field of social science, making this engaging book a valuable resource for students and scholars in sociology, politics, history, celebrity studies, cultural studies, the sociology of media, and cultural theory.

CHAPTER 1
The foundations

Individualism, media, and the public sphere, theatre, court society

Key Concepts/ Terms

Saint factory
Court society
Individualism
Public sphere
Graphic revolution
Theatre in society
Portraits & celebrity
Prudence vs authenticity
Court rationality
Celebrity rationality

In every human group, at the point where power, status and wealth are unevenly distributed, certain individuals will become more publicly visible than others – emperors, kings, queens, princes, aristocrats, prophets, popes, saints, martyrs, philosophers, warriors, star athletes, and heroes – and become eligible to be considered as worthy of distinctive attention. One obvious place to begin any history of celebrity is with Alexander the Great, who made sure that the populations of the enormous swaths of Europe and Asia Minor he conquered kept him at the forefront of their minds by having his image imprinted on the coinage used in those territories. But he also made a point of his ordinariness among his soldiers, keenly aware, as Leo Braudy observes, ‘of himself as an actor, a performer in public, who required art and language to preserve what he had done,’ so that Alexander ‘remains the earliest example of that paradoxical fame in which the spiritual authority of the hero is yet a model for a support of ordinary human nature’.¹ Alexander was also competing for attention from day one: on the day of his birth, BC 365, a young man named Herostratus burnt down the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, because he wanted to be as famous as the newborn Alexander. ‘Paradoxical fame’ indeed: that would be an excellent starting definition of celebrity.

From Ancient Greece and Rome onwards, there have been various turning points, watersheds and revolutions in the historical development of celebrity. It is tempting to identify any one of these as the point of celebrity’s ‘origin’ or ‘invention’, but it is important to resist this temptation and develop a genuinely historical sense of the long-term processes that underpin the changing nature of celebrity in differing historical contexts. Over time the ambivalent conception of celebrity in Christianity, the changing value placed on individualism, changing modes of communication, the development of the public sphere and then the mass media, technological change, democratization, increasing social differentiation and social density, have all played a role in the transformation of celebrity from its form at the time of Alexander the Great and Herostratus to how we experience it today in the form of Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump. Braudy refers to the ‘landscape of renown’ changing along with society itself,² but one could also speak of the every-changing ‘landscape of celebrity’, and in many respects the history of celebrity runs alongside that of whatever we choose to conceive of as ‘modernity’.

A lot depends on how one visualizes social change over time: horizontally, as a straight line, or vertically, as a constant accumulation of layers on top of each other. If one conceives history as a horizontal line, then each stage leaves the earlier stages behind, and those earlier stages play no role in the later ones. However, if one sees history geologically, as a vertical accumulation of layers, the past never disappears, it lies ‘beneath’ the present in one way or another, and during the societal equivalent of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or clashes of tectonic plates, breaks back to the surface to re-assert its continuing presence in contemporary social life. The two most important elements of the bedrock on which the long-term development of celebrity society is based are, first, the pursuit of glory, fame and celebrity in the human world by powerful and influential individuals in Ancient Greece and Rome. Second, the reaction against the vanity of secular celebrity by the Christian church, an approach which, paradoxically, relied on the creation of a new and ultimately more deeply-anchored form of celebrity, the cult of saints.

celebrities go a long way back. It’s just that in the middle ages they were known as saints. then, as now, ordinary people felt the need for charismatic, larger-than-life characters whom they could venerate, imitate, throw a halo around, fashion a cult out of. david Beckham will no doubt prove less durable than st Benedict, and hasn’t yet had a religious order founded in his name; but both men serve as role models, paradigms, figures who are at once intimate and awe-inspiring. this, indeed, is the secret of superstardom - that the celeb is just like us yet utterly out of reach, commonplace and transcendent at the same time.³

The early medieval bedrock – from soldiers to saints

The conception of human valorisation characterizing Ancient Greece and Rome had been based on earthly achievements and capacities, a combination of ‘martial valor, public service, and fidelity to ancestral traditions and values (mos maiorum)’.⁴ The projection of one’s name and image, one’s ‘second body’ or persona beyond one’s immediate circle of direct contacts was always bound up with the projection and consolidation of power, but also the pursuit immortality,⁵ a denial of death and a rendering permanent of one’s presence in the world. With the collapse of the Roman Empire, Christian theologians sought to redirect the pursuit of ignominious earthly glory towards a particular construction of an ideal immortal identity, organized instead around different virtues, of devotion, humility, asceticism spirituality, reflection, charity, kindness, modesty, doctrinal fidelity. The shift sought by Christians was one that moved away from soldiers and statesman to monks, hermits and saints, seeking the approval of God rather than mere human mortals.

For a millennium, between 300 and 1300, the Christian Church was the dominant player in the social construction of celebrity, tussling with the non-clerical population and competing authority figures – monarchs, princes and town authorities. Christian thinkers defined the basic elements of the critical attitude to celebrity, but the Church was also a pioneer in the fundamental mechanisms of the celebrity production process, generating through the creation of saints the kind of relationship between ordinary people and exemplary, highly visible individuals that persists to this day, understood as constituting the religious dimension of celebrity. ‘Outside the Church, no salvation, but no celebrity either’.⁶

The economic dimensions of sainthood underpinned the emergence of an extensive celebrity production process – Georges Minois calls it the ‘saint factory’⁷ - as monasteries, religious orders, villages and towns competed for the creation of ‘their’ saint, and the Church authorities finding themselves driven to impose increasing controls on the canonisation process to avoid uncontrolled inflation.⁸ For most of the period up until the twelfth century, saints were martyrs, ascetics and hermits closely tied to their local communities.⁹ By the twelfth century one sees saints appearing more regularly beyond their own monasteries and localities, figures like St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1143) - ‘the unchallenged spiritual superstar of his era’¹⁰ - St. Francis of Assisi (d. 1226) and St. Anthony of Padua (1195–1231). Their celebrity was not just ‘posthumous glory’, they had devoted and enthusiastic followers during their lifetimes as well.¹¹ Undermining Boorstin’s hero/celebrity distinction, the followers of saints were not solely concerned with their achievements in performing miracles or healing the sick; indeed, their ‘performances’ as saints, alive or dead, took on a life of their own driven by their fans’ enthusiasm that there be something to celebrate. One can also see in how people thought of saints an early form of the dissolution of the boundary between public and private life, and the same fascination with private life that is meant to characterize modern celebrity.¹² A saint’s innermost thoughts were as much a part of what made them a saint as their performance of miracles, including confessing, as St. Augustine did, to admiring people simply because others did.¹³

The economic function and commodification of saints is a striking pre-figuration of the characteristic of modern celebrities. Portraits, icons and relics were manufactured and sold, they encouraged philanthropy and stimulated travel through pilgrimage as well as the overall market in symbolic and cultural goods. In addition, the subsequent critiques of the cult of the saints, from within Catholic ranks as well as from Protestants, established the basic format of more recent criticism of the shallowness of celebrity, attacking the crass commercialism of the trade in saints’ relics, icons and artefacts, and the superficiality of living in a dream world of supposed miracles, sanctification and iconography, rather than engaging with the real world in meaningful and sober reflection and action.¹⁴

Against this background, the history of celebrity from the Middle Ages onwards lay at the intersection of a number of different historical developments, with changing configurations of those distinct transformations producing differing kinds of celebrity. I will be highlighting the following four lines of historical transformation, all integral to the emergence of modern society itself, overlapping with each other and themselves the products of intersecting processes of structural change, beginning with the changing social and political construction of human beings as individuals with particular capacities, skills, talents, rights, possibilities and opportunities.

First, celebrity is a central aspect of the social production of individuality – the ceaseless generation of personality in an impersonal world, expressing particularity in the face of ever-more powerful universalising societal processes, and a particular r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: understanding celebrity society
• 1 The foundations: individualism, media, and the public sphere, theatre, court society
• 2 Celebrity's secret: the economy of attention
• 3 Celebrity as a social form: status, charisma, and power
• 4 Imagined community, self-formation, and long-distance intimacy
• 5 Celebrity politics: performance, populism, and philanthropy
• 6 CEO, firm, and worker celebrity
• 7 Celebrity in cyberspace: micro-celebrity and globalization
• Conclusion: the elusive rationality of celebrity
• Bibliography
• Index